As Khalid sat atop the circular altar, the air thick with the incense and the droning chants of three hundred priests, his eyelids grew impossibly heavy. The exhaustion of the previous night and the hypnotic rhythm of the scriptures pulled him under. He tried to fight the slumber, but his consciousness slipped away, and the world began to warp.

  First, he saw droplets of moisture seep from his hands, his feet, and his face. They did not fall; instead, they remained suspended in the air, defiant of gravity. Before his eyes, the water shimmered, transforming into a brilliant blue light that flickered into the shape of a thousand blue butterflies. He watched them dance, convinced he was hallucinating as the hall itself began to twist and buckle around him, yet the priests never faltered in their reading.

  Then, the hallucination shattered.

  Khalid found himself submerged in deep, dark water. He thrashed, lungs burning, until he broke the surface and gasped for air. He was on a beach. The sun was bright, and the scene was one of mundane peace: beautiful, dark-skinned women with athletic figures played volleyball in the sand. He looked around and realized with a jolt of recognition that he was at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.

  The peace was short-lived. A low rumble turned into a roar. The seawater began to boil, steam rising in thick clouds, followed by the terrifying sight of lava erupting from the waves. The earth beneath the beach cracked open like a piece of glass. Khalid ran, surrounded by the screams of the dying, until a massive fissure opened beneath his feet and swallowed him whole.

  Darkness took him, only to release him into the vacuum of space. He was floating amidst the shattered remains of Earth, the planet’s crust scattered like gravel against the backdrop of a distant sun. A piece of debris struck him in the back of the head, and the void claimed him once more.

  When he woke again, someone was poking his head. He looked up to see a child—but not a human one. The boy had translucent green skin, a large head with massive black eyes, and a small, fragile body. Terrified by Khalid's movement, the creature fled toward a group of its own kind. Khalid stood and surveyed his surroundings: the land was a barren, drought-stricken waste, and the local well was bone-dry.

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  He pushed through the crowd of aliens and saw a grim ritual in progress. They had tied one of their own to a post, a stone raised to sacrifice him in hopes of mercy. Khalid did not hesitate. He moved with a sudden authority, stopping the blow and untying the prisoner. The creatures stared in confusion, but as the ropes fell, the heavens opened. Rain began to pour, and the parched land drank as the aliens broke into a desperate celebration.

  Seeking shelter, Khalid entered a nearby hut. Inside, he found a door that led not to a room, but to another world. He stepped out onto a plain covered in thin green grass that swayed under a violet sky filled with glowing, impossible stars. In the center of the field knelt an alien, so thin that his skin clung to his bones like parchment. The creature held both hands aloft. In his left was a piece of black silk adorned with gold jewelry—the shroud of the dead. In his right was a raw, beating heart, blood dripping onto the grass.

  Khalid reached out. He chose the heart.

  The world turned pitch black.

  He was now drifting in the deep cosmos, staring directly into the maw of an enormous black hole, light bending and warping around its Event Horizon. Then, a voice vibrated through the very atoms of his soul.

  "Why do you seek power?"

  Khalid knew instinctively that he was speaking to the Divine. "You already know," he replied.

  "Yes, but I want to hear it from your mouth."

  "To do justice," Lee answered, his old-world conviction bleeding into his new-world voice.

  "Take it, then," the Voice boomed. "I will test you, to see how you will do this justice."

  "But you already know the result," Lee challenged.

  "I do not test my creations so that I may know them," the God replied. "I test them so that they may know themselves. When they come to me at the end, they shall have no complaints; they will already know what they did."

  "I won't disappoint you," Lee vowed.

  "Stretch your arm toward it."

  As Khalid reached toward the singularity, the pull was immense. He felt his spirit being dragged into the crushing gravity of the black hole. "Do not get consumed by it," the Voice warned.

  Khalid gritted his teeth, his mental iron clashing against the physical laws of the universe. He resisted the pull, and slowly, the black hole began to move. It condensed, spiraling toward his palm, getting absorbed into his very being. The force was agonizing, burning through every reserve of energy he possessed. Some of the darkness remained, but the majority was now locked within him.