Awakening

Spark.

There was no light.

No sound.

No time.

Only the slow, uncoiling awareness of being.

Lisa drifted in a vast blackness — not the kind that hid things, but the kind that came before things. The dark between thoughts. The pause between one universe's breath and the next.

She floated. She waited. And slowly, she was.

At first she could not tell if she had a body or only the memory of one. Sensation came in fragments — a pulse of warmth where a heart should be, a flicker of motion that might have been fingers flexing. Each awareness drew another line in the shape of her until something resembling Lisa hung suspended in the void.

Her skin — or what passed for it — shimmered faintly, as though woven from faint strands of light. She moved her hands before her face, watching the faint glow trail behind them. It was soft and tentative, a newborn flame in an airless world.

She did not feel afraid. There was no room for fear yet. There was only knowing — a deep, instinctive sense that she should not be alone, that this place was not all there was.

She reached out.

At first it was simple motion, the stretching of limbs through the thick velvet of nothing. But soon the gesture extended into something else — a reaching that wasn't physical, that came from behind the chest, behind the thought.

A pulse answered.

It came from far away, or perhaps from everywhere at once. A tremor, faint as a sigh, rippled through the dark and came back to her like an echo from an impossible distance.

Lisa gasped. The void itself seemed to shift around her, bending, listening. She reached again, further this time, and found that she could feel beyond herself — beyond this strange, perfect nowhere.

Two presences. Two flames flickering in another world. One sharp and restless, full of sparks and laughter. The other heavy, confused, trembling beneath the weight of something it could not name. They were not strangers to her. They were parts of her — or she was what was left of them, distilled into this place like a single drop of soul.

Lisa concentrated. Threads of light spun from her fingertips, reaching into the void like filaments searching for connection. And when one brushed against the bright flame, she saw flashes — halls filled with noise, a voice laughing, the sharp taste of cafeteria pizza. Another thread brushed the trembling flame, and she saw fear, silk, the sound of heels on linoleum.

The contact burned.

Lisa cried out — a soundless, lightless cry that rippled through the nothing. Her hands fell to her sides, shaking. The connection recoiled, snapping back into her like a broken wire.

She floated again, panting though there was no breath to take, her form dimming. Now she knew.

Something had gone wrong. She had not been meant to exist like this, between things. The spark — that sudden pulse that had jumped between the two — had woken her, drawn her out of the deep substrate of whatever reality lay beneath theirs.

And now she was awake. She could not go back to sleep. Lisa closed her eyes and felt for the threads again, gently this time. They hummed beneath her touch, alive, delicate, vibrating with possibility. She smiled — small, weary, but real.

She would rest. Regain her strength. Learn the boundaries of this place. And when she was ready, she would follow the threads.

They led out.

She didn't yet know what waited for her there — or who she truly was in relation to the world that hummed just beyond her reach — but she could feel it: a call, faint but insistent. A call toward life. Toward form. Toward something both inevitable and forbidden.

The void trembled once, as though shivering in anticipation.

Lisa drifted, eyes closed, the faintest smile on her lips.

She had found the way out.

She only needed time.