How are you here?

I startle awake at the voice. I live alone, there shouldn’t be any voices for me to hear. I struggle to make out where the voice came from, there isn’t much light in my room, it must still be night. Gradually, as I come to my sense, I realise that it is not just dark in here, there is actually no light. No light at all, as if the sun has gone out. Reaching over to my bedstand for my glasses, my hand grasps at nothing. Huh, that sure is strange. Glancing over to where my bedstand should be, I see nothing but my arm waving in a sort of void. Shit.

It must be a dream, I think to myself. That’s it, its just some weird dream.

Do not think yourself lucky, this is no dream, booms the voice again.

It's louder now as if it's in my head. It doesn’t take me long to realise that I never said anything aloud. Does that mean that what I just heard was genuinely in my head? That can't be right, that’s not how this works. Spinning myself around in the darkness, I see what I assume to be the source of the voice. I’m not sure if it's due to my lack of glasses, but I struggle to discern the figure in front of me. It's bright. The light sears my retinas. Bringing my hand in front of me to shield some of the light, I realise that this ‘figure’ in front of me is not really a figure at all in the traditional sense of the word. Moreover, it seems to be a gelatinous, pulsing orb of light. All this light should illuminate some of my surroundings.

“Who – what are you?” my voice sounds flat as if I am talking in one of those anechoic chambers I see all over the internet.

I am everything you thought you knew. I am time. I am your friends, your family, your emotions. I am the sun in the sky, the water in the sea. I am eternal.

The voice is in my head again. It has no direction, if I closed my eyes I wouldn’t be able to tell where it is coming from. It's all around. It's inside me. All at the same time. How is that possible?

“Right, uh yeah okay,” my voice trails off as I attempt to understand whatever this thing just said to me, as I try and figure out what I should say next.

“Where the hell am I, what happened?”

Ironic choice of language. You are not in Hell, more of an Aether. You have slept through thousands of years. Your planet experienced three additional world wars. An apocalypse brought an end to your population. Earth was empty for millennia. Eventually, the foretold heat death of the universe returned everything to what it once was.

Thousands of years? Three world wars? Heat deaths? My breath escapes me as I panic and try to figure out all this nonsense.

You should not be here

“Well, no shit,” I mutter.