Ethan opened his eyes — except there were no eyes yet to open, no body at all, just a point of awareness floating in an endless, scentless white that had no up, no down, no edges to orient by. Then the white pressed inward, became presence, became weight, and he was abruptly lying on something smooth and warm-cool at once, like glass left too long in indecisive sunlight.
"Well, look who finally decided to wake up."
The voice came from everywhere at once, rich and resonant and thick with theatrical exasperation. Ethan sat up too fast, head spinning, and spun to find a man standing in the nothing — hair like a river of poured silver, robes that seemed to generate their own soft light, and eyes that held the specific weight of more centuries than a human mind was built to hold. Beautiful, in the way a loaded gun is beautiful: impressive right up until you remembered what it was for.
"Ungrateful, aren't we," the man said, shaking his head slowly, savoring the word. "Born into a stable home. Loving parents. Siblings who barely noticed you, sure, but a friend who clearly cared, despite your — perceived slights. And you throw it all away. The sheer audacity you mortals manage."
"I never asked to be born," Ethan snapped, and some distant part of him noted, with something like horror, that he was arguing with a higher being and still somehow sounded like a teenager mid-eye-roll.
"The bullies who ruined my reputation walked away clean. The one person I actually loved called me a way to kill time. And just when it looked like people cared — my parents, her — I got shoved off a bridge by an accident and drowned. Tell me that's dignified. Tell me that's fair."
The man — Deus, though Ethan didn't know the name yet — waved a hand, unbothered, and grim little visions flickered into the white around them: a starving child in some war-blasted country, an old woman dying with no one in the room, a girl who'd survived something Ethan didn't want to look at directly. "You want to talk about unfairness? I have an inventory that would make your tragedy look like a paper cut."
"Even so," Ethan said, jaw tight, refusing to fold. "I died the exact second I found out someone cared. That's still unfair, and you know it."
Deus studied him a long moment, something shifting behind those ancient eyes — not cruelty exactly. Calculation. The specific, patient attention a man gives a stone that keeps refusing to skip the way physics insists it should.
"You're not begging," he said slowly, almost to himself.
"Everyone begs, eventually. You're arguing. With me. In the middle of your own funeral." A slow, unsettling smile spread across his face.
"Fine. I'll send you somewhere else, and this time, boy, I'm going to force you to be grateful for what you're given."
"Then I'll just kill myself again," Ethan said flatly. "You can't force gratitude out of someone who ends it whenever he likes."
Deus laughed — booming, delighted, not entirely kind, the sound rattling through the featureless white like it had somewhere to bounce off.
"That's the thing. This time, you won't be able to. I've arranged a little failsafe. Suicide will simply not be an option." He leaned in, and for a second the amusement thinned into something colder, more genuinely interested.
"You have a will most mortals don't bother growing. That's rarer than you'd think. Rare enough to be useful."
"Useful for what?"
"You'll understand soon enough." The white walls of the room began to ripple, then warp, colors bleeding in where there had been none
. "Of course," Deus added, almost gently, savoring it, "I could always send you back to your old world instead. A true second chance. Same body. Same people."
Hope, sudden and blinding, cracked through Ethan's chest before he could stop it. "Wait—"
"Ah ah ah, no take back." Deus's smile went sharp and predatory.
"Ah — if only you'd been slightly more polite. Now. Be a dear, and make the most of this."
The pull came violent and total, wrenching him sideways out of the white and into a blur of light and sound and, eventually, a rhythmic thumping he'd only later understand was a heartbeat that wasn't yet his own.
Two enormous faces swam into blurry focus above him, soft with an adoration he didn't recognize and hadn't earned.
He was a baby. He had been reborn. The shock of it dragged a wail out of him that had nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with sheer, cosmic disbelief.
Behind him, in the white room he'd left, a slender shadow with eyes like distant stars stepped from the residual light.
"Deus," said Mors, Deity of Endings, her voice a low, unbothered whisper.
"Why did you truly reincarnate the boy?"
Deus's chuckle carried no warmth in it at all.
"Gratitude is the excuse, my dear. Not the reason." His grin widened, artistic in its malice, savoring the shape of the plan like a fine wine held up to light.
"He'll grow and become strong and when he is strong enough, our great game will begin." He leaned back onto nothing, utterly pleased with himself.
Mors said nothing to that. She simply watched him a moment longer, unreadable, and left as quietly as she'd arrived.