What the fuck?
Either he’s been living in this cave for far too long, or he’s simple. No one in 2025 doesn’t know what a phone is. No one.
Fragments of memory flash through my mind. The helicopter shaking. The instruments failing. The fire surrounding me. Then something impossible—flames that moved with intelligence, wrapping around me like a living thing. Golden light that didn’t burn.
“The fire,” I whisper, my throat suddenly tight. “In the helicopter. It was… different. Odd.”
K’s eyes sharpen.
“It moved like it was… alive. Like it was protecting me.” I swallow hard. “That’s not possible.”
“Many things thought impossible simply await understanding,” he says, the longest sentence I’ve heard from him.
My heart pounds as pieces click together. The impossible fire. The miraculous healing. This strange man with his weird clothes and burning skin.
“Did I have an NDE?” I finally ask, looking directly into his eyes. Thick dark brows pull together in confusion again. “You know: a near-death experience. Back there, in the crash. Did I actually die?”
Something shifts in his expression, subtle, but unmistakable. Recognition.
“You live,” he says simply.
Not “you lived.” Not “you survived.”You live. Present tense.
“That’s not what I asked,” I press.
He holds my gaze for a long moment, then looks away. “The fire chose,” he says cryptically.
Oh, my God. Ididdie. I actually died. And something—the fire?—brought me back.
Just wait until I sharethison the podcast!
I can already imagine the views I’ll get. It’s one thing to simply report on unexplained phenomena, but to actually experience something like this? That’s pure gold.
K moves closer, and for the first time, he intentionally touches me—one warm fingertip brushing over the fading lightning pattern on my side.
“Do you have pain?” he says.
The touch sends a strange heat spiraling through me, not painful but intenselypresent, like being aware of every cell in my body simultaneously. I gasp, pulling back.
K withdraws his hand immediately. “I apologize.”
“No,” I reply, pressing my palm where he touched. The sensation lingers, then fades.
“Good,” he says.
“How?” I say. “How does it not hurt worse than this?”
“Your body is healing,” he says, as it makes perfect sense, when it totally doesn’t.
I shake my head. “That’s not an explanation.”
“It is all I have.” He tugs the cloak up around me. “You should rest.”
“I don’t want to rest.” I shake my head. “I have to find my friends. I have to—”
“Shhh…” he says, trailing his fingertips down my forehead and over my eyes. “Sleep now.”
“But…” I want to argue—to demand real answers—but exhaustion crashes over me suddenly, intense and overwhelming. My eyelids grow so heavy, it feels like lead weights have been attached to them.
