Du-dum.
Du--dum.
Du---dum.
Du--dum.
Du---dum.
You feel your heart is getting slower with each beat. Its ending, your life, long before it was meant to end. Something, or somebody, cut its natural span and now you feel the darkness slowly envelop. Accident, disease, murder, suicide? Doesn’t matter anymore. Soon you will bid farewell to this world. Already you can’t feel your limbs. At this point you can’t even see or hear anything. There’s only the sound of your heartbeat like a toll of a bell which someone swung once and then left to ring, slowly fading.
Du----dum.
Du-----dum.
Du------
Du-----dum.
Du------
Finally it stopped. There is nothing. You are left in the company of silence and darkness. There is no sense of touching the surface you are currently on, almost as if you are suspended mid-air. Alone, blind and deaf, you feel nothing- neither chill nor warmth, nor do you smell anything. In fact, you wonder if you are even breathing because you can’t sense the air entering your nostrils or your chest rising as it gets filled with oxygen. With this thought you try to gasp for air but you can’t move your jaw.
Is this death? Is this how your eternity will be? The horrifying thought sends an impulse from your brain to your vocal organs, demanding your body to shout, but you don’t budge. Madness. That’s the only thing that awaits you within this abyss
However, the creeping insanity is dispelled when a familiar sound resonates once again through your being.
-----dum.
Du----dum.
Du---dum.
Du----dum.
Du---dum.
Again the warmth returns to your body. Slowly, so you can’t move yet, but at least you feel. You never expected it to be good just to feel the existence of your body. The darkness remains, but through your sense of touch you realize you are sitting somewhere. A smell of tobacco fills your nostrils as you once again take the air into your lungs.
Then, over the drumming of your heartbeat which was now back to its normal pace, you hear something else. It is a monotone yet familiar sound. Few moments are all that it takes for you to remember where you have heard it before. The sound of rail tracks. You were in a train.
The City of Monsters
You just died and have arrived in the City. Yes, that's its name. The City. The one which eternally stands in the afterlife between the realms of Heaven and Hell. No, it is not Purgatory, it is a world spawned from greed into which your soul had a dubious fortune to end up in. This place is now your afterlife, you can't be redeemed out of it. It is a world which is Hell compared to Heaven and Heaven compared to Hell, so look back on your past life on Earth and decide if you're lucky or not.
Now that you are here, however, you need to survive. The City is inhabited by monsters, most of which were once humans as well, but it changed them and it will change you. The Game is set, souls are the currency and anyone with a week of seniority will try to devour you. Quite literally, in some cases.
You better learn the new rules fast kid because you definitely ain’t in Kansas anymore.