Chapter 1: Quick Birth

I was swimming in a sea of chaos; one familiar, the constantly fracturing and reforming swirling pool of creation that formed my dreams. But I wasn't dreaming, how could I? The dead don't dream.

"Ah, that's right, I died..."

That brief thought was all it took for Jack's consciousness to wain; slowly submerging into the endless primordial black. There a seamless and ceaseless eternity passed in the emptiness. His soul drifting between nowhere and oblivion. The only anima among the void.

Until, slowly but surely, the tickings of a clock reverberated through this unknown dimension. Louder and louder before coming to a stop. And the dull-tonal chimes of a grandfather clock rang out.

And he was awake, the smouldering chaos relit, burning away the dark.

"I'm alive!" Jack tried to scream out and open his eyes. But he couldn't. His eyelids felt as heavy as lead, and his lungs stifled, filled with gelatinous fluid.

An immense pressure came and squeezed this fluid out of him, and then there was a sharp feeling of coldness that permeated his skin. It hurt, and so he screamed aloud before squinting open his new eyes and getting a murky look at a new world, a new sky.

And in it, there were two moons.

While Jack remained entranced by the sight of the twin moons, he failed to notice the surrounding peculiarities; or even the fact that he had seemingly come back from the dead, so ensnared was he.

Not too long ago, he had finally succumbed. His immunocompromised body, wracked by the intense fevers of a common cold, had given in like an alcoholic to booze. He should be dead.

And yet here he was, breathing in the bitterly chilled air of an icy tundra, floating. The only thing seemingly keeping him from disappearing like a circus balloon at the fair was the umbilical cord of his new mother.

'Ah.' Jack snapped to realization, 'what the fuck is going on!' In a frenzied fluster, he grasped at the cord with his two tiny hands, 'my... my hands!' he stared and then looked down, 'my body!' he panicked and started bawling out of sheer shock and confusion.

A gentle figure embraced him from behind, "Hush now child, I know it must come as a shock... I don't have long with you my son, and there's so much I wish I could tell you." Jack's bawling was stifled by the calm bewitching voice, "But if I stay with you too long he will find us, and I couldn't bear to see what he would do to you... So I will leave you with just these words. Understand that no matter what I will love you, my only true child. Know that I say that grasping fully what you are, and although this is a selfish request from an underserving mother, I hope you can carry my maiden name. Beolfag."

Jack's new mother didn't tarry, as a ghostly shimmering blade appeared in her hands and she quickly and cleanly sliced the cord connecting them. She then gently placed him down on the cold stone platform on which she had birthed him.

With tears dripping down her ashen white skin she warned, "Listen out for the ticks of a clock, it's your father warning you; trust me and run when it sounds." And so, she disappeared into the shadows.

Jack sat in astonishment.

And sat.

And then sat some more.

"Oh, ok" He managed to gargle out of his still developing throat. He attempted to nod his head in some form of bewildered affirmation but found his head oddly unwieldily.

"So that just happened," he said, his head now slumped into his chest.

"What's now?"