Records of Immortality-Volume 1—Chapter 2: Dialogue with the Damned Self
The hospital door didn’t open into a room.
It gave way to something wrong—a flickering darkness, a space between spaces, like the world hadn’t finished loading.
And immediately, the images began to change.
Like a broken projector.
A living room snapped into place. Dim. Familiar. A half-empty whisky bottle sat on the table. My hands—older, rougher—fumbled with the cork.
The clone’s voice came from nowhere, flat and precise.
“Next entry. You abandoned yoga and karate.”
The scene blurred and warped.
His voice continued, quieter now. Sharper.
“Indulgence in sex and alcohol.”
It should have been absurd—counting sins like groceries.
But the weight was real.
Each word landed against my ribs and stayed there.
I watched myself at thirty-three, sprawled on the couch, blackout drunk. I popped the cork and drank like it was water.
Then the coughing started.
Violent. Wet.
Blood splashed across the upholstery. My lungs failed. I died alone, choking, with no one left to argue over who I’d been.
The reel clicked.
Another scene slid into place.
I was a child again. Small. Scrappy. Sitting in a narrow alley, chewing a thin sliver of fish like it was treasure.
A boy in a patched blue tunic stepped into the light. Greasy black hair. A mouth full of teeth sharp as gossip.
He wanted the fish.
He wanted everything I had that day—food, space, dignity.
“Hey, red-haired bastard,” he sneered. “Give me that.”
I looked up. Hunger twisted his face into something cruel.
“You dare ignore me?”
He grabbed my collar and slammed me into the wall. Stone scraped my back. Spit hit my cheek.
I could have walked away. Kept the fish. Taken the bruise.
But that bruise wouldn’t have been just his.
It would’ve belonged to every night I slept empty and cold.
So I hit back.
A punch to the eye.
Then a rock to the forehead.
Blood burst out—hot, immediate.
He fell.
And didn’t move again.
My hands trembled even watching it. I remembered sitting on his chest, the slick warmth of blood under my fingers.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting NovelFire for this novel and more.
“I’ll have to wash my clothes,” I’d said later. Calm. Practical. Like a butcher weighing meat.
Twelve years in this body—longer, if I counted the life that ended choking on blood.
The clone’s voice struck like a gavel.
“One hundred eight sins include taking the life of another human.”
One hundred eight.
The number tasted like rust.
I didn’t know how it was calculated. The projection offered no receipts. No explanations.
Only the tally.
The darkness collapsed.
I was back in the cave—the real one. Stone. Torches. Cold.
The clone sat across from me, waiting. He always was.
Torchlight slid along the walls. His face—my face—showed no surprise.
“You live a pitiful life,” he said. “You hurt people. You cause deaths.”
He leaned forward slightly.
“Why keep breathing?”
I met his eyes. Hazel, rimmed in gold. Mine—but colder. Like someone who’d counted everything and never once looked away.
“Who the hell are you to ask?” I said. My voice sounded steadier than I felt.
“Call me what you like,” he replied. “An echo. A tally. A mirror.”
“I don’t show you what you forgot,” he said. “I show you what you refused to carry.”
He smiled, thin and joyless.
“You accept the sins. Don’t you?”
I could have lied.
I could have broken down and begged for absolution.
Why should I? The world never offered me mercy when I needed it.
“Yes,” I said. “I accept them.”
He studied me. Maybe he expected collapse. Confession. Screaming.
Instead, something loosened inside me.
Relief—thin, painful. Like cleaning a wound that had been rotting for years.
“So be it.”
He vanished.
Only the faint smell of old laundry lingered, and the dying echo of torchlight.
I blinked.
I told myself it was a hallucination.
Arguing philosophy with your own reflection is a new low—even for me.
Then stone shifted in the dark.
A hiss.
Light exploded.
I cursed, dragging my palms over my eyes. When my vision cleared, the cave had changed.
Torches burned in sconces now—two of them, steady and orange.
Between them stood a heavy door.
From beyond it came sound.
Whispers. Shuffling. The low hum of many tired breaths.
Maybe freedom waited past it.
Maybe another trap.
Logic said we weren’t here for mercy. Instinct—the simpler voice—said move.
I stepped closer.
Stopped.
Children’s voices whispered together in a ragged chorus.
I pushed the door open.
The silence beyond was worse than noise.
A long hall stretched away, candles guttering against damp stone. Hundreds of small faces turned toward me.
Hollow cheeks. Dull eyes. Clothes fused to skin with grime.
They looked like they’d been dragged from every forgotten corner of the world and stitched into a single, miserable army.
And the smell—
Sickly sweet. Rotting.
My chest tightened.
Tarpaulins lay along the corridor. From beneath them, small shoes protruded—like the figureheads of wrecked ships.
“Dead children…”
A boy knelt nearby, rocking, snot drying in the cracks of his lips.
“There are dead children,” he whispered. “Someone save me…”
Cold crawled into my bones.
The tally spun again in my head—sins, numbers, the weight of what I’d done, and what I’d failed to stop.
I should have turned away.
I should have run.
But I didn’t.
Because even sinners have to keep moving when the darkness comes.
And standing still—
That’s how you die inside first.
So I stepped among them.
The children watched me with flint-hard eyes.
My palms smelled of moss. Of blood. Of whiskey.
I kept my head down.
Kept my mouth shut.
The cave breathed around us.
The clone’s numbers ticked on somewhere inside me, measuring how much of a man was left.
I had my sins.
I had this place.
And I had—stupidly—the habit of surviving.
That would have to be enough.
For now.
.
!
Volume 1—Chapter 2: Dialogue with the Damned Self
Comments