"Name?" The ethereal voice boomed through the room. Unnecessarily strong as Max happened to be standing right there. The force of the uttered query pushed him back a bit, a medium sized wave caught unexpectedly while swimming. The voice was diaphanously melodic, full and lush, an entire choir distilled into a singular tone. Pleasantly heavy on the bass. As if James Earl Jones ate a glee club of angels.
Max got a hold of himself. His head was quite foggy. Like his thoughts were made of helium and he was futilely trying to grab hold of them with his hands before they floated out of his grasp.
He stopped trying to catch the wind, which Donovan had clearly warned was very difficult to do. He looked up to look at the source of the voice. It felt like he was using his eyes for the first time. A newborn ocular fawn just learning to walk. He could have sworn they had been open, but the heavy lids he rolled up, stuck Venetian Blinds he had to yank hard at, pointed to the contrary. He blinked a few times to get the optical cobwebs out.
He wanted to look at his surroundings. Gain a foothold into his situation. Or a handhold. Either would do, he wasn't leaning one way or the other. He felt a deep urge to take note of just where he was since he couldn't seem to place it. But his head remained locked in place. The face staring at him would not allow it to sway. It demanded full focus. Physically demanded. It was as if the gaze gaping back at him was a tractor beam, Max's concentration caught in its inescapable grasp.
The visage was both exactly like, and completely unlike, anything Max had ever laid eyes on. It was beautiful. Perhaps the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He couldn't pinpoint exactly why it was beautiful; he just knew it to be true. He couldn't even reliably describe it, not one feature stood out, the whole thing seemed to be ever changing, a slowly revolving door of countenance. It wasn't weird, even though the idea itself lends itself to being at the best creepy, at the worst incongruous enough to implode the mind and have it fold in on itself, a black hole overloaded with more information than it could handle. It didn't elicit any of these feelings. No fear. No unease. No questioning. It just was. And it seemed exactly right. Baby bear's porridge.
The eyes were different. The eyes were everything. They were infinite and transient. Endless and fleeting. All colours and no colours. Staring into them, you could see everything, and they in turn gave you everything.
Even though it had seemed like hours since the voice had asked their question, possibly years, decades, the face remained placid. Boundlessly patient. It took Max everything he had just to be able to conjure his name from where it lay hidden.
"Uh, Max. Max Strand."
The voice nodded. Not the face. The voice itself.
"Hi, Max Strand. Welcome to your death."
The words left the speaker's mouth, auditorily sure, as all words do, but also physically. Seeming to manifest in the surrounding atmosphere, letters, words, punctuation, solidifying, freshly cracked eggs going from liquid to scrambled. The words whirled around, searching for their target, gently encroaching on Max once locked on.
The echoic statement bounced around Max's mind. Somehow embedding itself into his actual brain. Acting as a stabilizer. A wooden spoon atop a boiled over pot. Max's thoughts stopped blowing around in their speculative hurricane. The power of the Speaker's words calmed the storm into a serene pastoral, where each idea was clearly outlined, easily accessible, ripe for the taking. Max felt more lucid than he'd ever been in his life.
Or, he guessed, life in general. Now he remembered everything. More than everything actually. He was dead. Super dead. As dead as anyone can be. And there are shades of dead, many different gradients, a veritable colour wheel of death statuses, but we don't need to get into them right now.
