There are many kinds of void. The most popular kind is really high up, usually filled with stars and planets, and isn’t really a void, but it’s the closest to an actual void that people come into contact with within their lifetimes. Outside of their lifetimes, however, there are many other kinds of void. There is the void before someone is born, which is hard to observe because people are usually not born enough to really appreciate it. It is filled with nothing, with the exception of the potential for a person, which is enough to fill the void while not being there at all. To perceive it is said to drive someone mad with happiness, despair, or a mix of both. 

This was not the kind of void the Hero was in. There was definitely something in this void, there just wasn’t enough of it for it to be disqualified as a void. For one, there was definitely a floor, even if it was as deep black as everything else around him. He could feel it. He jumped up and down a few times to make sure there was one. There was also, of course, the Hero himself, which was almost as important as the floor he was on. The last thing he remembered was accelerating towards the foot of a mountain in the most efficient  way possible, if not necessarily the most conducive to his health. 

The Queen had been there too. He wasn’t sure who had been the first to hit the ground and, he figured, it didn’t matter much. When you drop two cakes from high enough up, they begin to look like one very wide cake when they hit the ground. He also remembered being in quite a bit of pain. That was gone, at least. The logical conclusion presented itself, and he nodded vaguely, admitting to himself that it was finally over; The Hero’s Journey had been concluded with a satisfying arc. For some people, the resolution would probably be a little frustrating, but, all things considered, he was pretty happy with it. 

There was a bench. He hadn’t noticed that before. Did the realm of the dead, or a purgatory, or wherever he was, have benches? He wasn’t going to complain about it, of course. He walked over to it. It was a perfectly ordinary stone bench. No real frills or decorations. Simply a functional piece of furniture for sitting. He sat, and leaned on his knees, looking out into nothing. There wasn’t much else to do. He wondered if he was supposed to wait here. Was there more to it than this? Was he supposed to do anything? He spent some time ruminating on his life, wondering if maybe there were things he was supposed to let go, or some judgement he was to cast on himself. 

After a while, that proved to be mostly fruitless. He tried to work backwards through his adventures and realized that his memories got a little vague once he went a while back. He didn’t blame himself for that; he had been hit over the head a lot in the past few years. Being a Hero came with occupational hazards, and mild-to-severe concussions were some of the lighter ones. 

“Excuse me,” a voice said from behind him. It was a woman’s voice, though he didn’t recognize it. He turned around. For a moment, he considered the possibility that it was his traveling companion, who had traveled to the afterlife to come pull him back, but that seemed increasingly unlikely. For one, she seemed a little younger, in her early twenties, and she was wearing very strange clothing, out of fabrics he couldn’t identify. The girl herself was pretty, short, with shoulder-length brown hair and big glasses that framed her face. She was also holding what the Hero had no way of knowing was a plastic to-go cup of coffee. She looked at him. He looked at her. They looked. She seemed a little hesitant, now that she had his attention.

“You’re not what I was expecting,” he said. 

“So you’re gonna let me go?” she asked. He frowned. Then she frowned. She walked around the bench and sort of awkwardly stood next to him, looking at him like a puppy hoping for a treat. 

“What do you mean? I’m not… what?” He tried to find a good way to respond but his brain was coming up empty. 

“You’re not Death?” she asked, and sat down.

“No? I don’t… think so.”

“So I’m not dead! That’s so rad!” the girl said, with hopeful relief in her eyes. 

“Wait, I’m the one who’s supposed to be dead,” he said. She cocked her head. 

“But I’m not Death?”

“Who are you?” he asked. She blinked. She clearly hadn’t been expecting the question. Her plastic cup rested on her lap. It was clearly empty, but it was probably giving her sense of, well, something to hold on to. 

“My name is Sally,” she said. “I was on my way to a job interview, there was traffic, a loud horn. I remember getting shoved to the ground and then I was here.” She picked at the wrapper around the cup. “I really thought I was dead.”

“Nice to meet you, Sally. I fell off a mountain after slaying the Demon Queen,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I’m also fairly certain I’m dead.” He nodded at her. “My name is Daniel.” Sally waved a little awkwardly. In a situation like this, waving awkwardly was probably the reasonable thing to do. He certainly couldn’t think of anything more useful. What was someone supposed to do in a situation like this? Grin wildly? Hug? He was fairly certain he was still a ways away from losing his sanity. Or maybe he had lost it a while ago. Maybe this wasn’t death, and it was the infinite void of what was left behind when he had finally lost his mind from years of stress and fighting. 

“You’re for real, aren’t you?” she asked. 

“I’m real, yes,” he said.

“So you’re, like…” Sally hesitated. She had never encountered someone from another world before, and she struggled to find the right words that weren’t likely to offend what appeared, to her, as a magical medieval swordsman. She brightened up a bit when she seemed to have found the right word. “European,” she said.

“What.”

“Like, medieval. Ye-olde-bookshoppe.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” he said, hoping that the complex patterns he was weaving with his eyebrows adequately expressed his confusion. 

“You’re from another world,” she tried. Daniel nodded thoughtfully. It was certainly possible. That still didn’t explain what this place was, of course. 

“It seems so. Or at least one very far away, because I can hear and understand the words that you’re saying, but the order in which you’re saying them makes no sense to me.” She looked a little offended. That wasn’t his problem. 

“So what is this place?” Sally asked. Daniel shrugged. 

“Not sure. There are many legends in my world that talk of the afterlife, but none of them are… this.” He waved at the nothing surrounding them. Sally sighed and put her cup down, then looked at him. 

“We might be here for a while, you know? Want to tell me about them? Because the ones where I’m from suck major ass, and you look like you have legends about great warriors and stuff like that.” She looked lost. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, and he definitely appreciated the desire for stories in a time like this. 

“Well,” Daniel said as he scratched his chin, “the Lizardmen of the Red Plains believe that, after death, a great caravan of tortoises that will take you across sunbaked sands to hunt the moon until the end of time.”

“The Lizardm--” Sally said with disbelief, and then smiled, closed her eyes and shook her head. “Okay. That doesn’t sound half bad. It sounds weird, like some kind of, like, trip, but not too bad. What else?”

“There’s certain tribes of warriors in the north who believe they will swim forever in giant lakes of beer.”

“Ew.”

It’s not my favourite either.”

“It sounds so sticky.”

“It does,” he said, and they both chuckled a little bit. It was good to have a moment of connection over the inherent absurdity of… well, everything. But in this case it was specifically the absurdity of a lake of beer.

“And what about you?” Sally asked. “You don’t sound like you believe in those.” 

Daniel shook his head. He hadn’t really thought about religion and belief for some time. This wasn’t because he was particularly disillusioned with the existence of gods. He had seen too much proof to really be an atheist. Rather, he had seen too much proof of all different gods, from different and very incompatible religions. He didn’t see the point in praying exclusively to one god or another, to throw in your lot with a deity, when all of them seemed to both exist and contradict each other. But he did have a favourite. 

“There was this… witch,” he said. “She lived not far from my home where I grew up. She told me that her mother, and her mother’s mother, all went to a special place after they died, and that I could go there too if I wanted to.” He sighed at his recollections of the past. That was decades ago now, and sometimes a memory coming out of nowhere can hit hard. Sally looked at him, smiling encouragingly. “She said that, after you die, you go home.”

“Like, as a ghost?” Sally asked. 

“Hah!” Daniel scoffed. “No, thank the gods. No, it’s less… literal than that.” He took a breath as he tried to find the exact words the young witch had used so many years ago. “You go home as you… felt it. When it was its most… home. You go to your happiest memory of home, and you live out your best day, every day. For some that is summers when you were a child. For others, that could be winter by a warm fire. It could be both. But it’s always, well, home.”

“That does sound nice,” Sally said, then looked around. “Doesn’t seem to be this, though.” 

Daniel nodded. “Indeed, it doesn’t.”

“Better than Beer Lake, though.” Sally said, and they both laughed again. After they sat in silence for a while, she sighed. “Why do you think we’re here?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea,” Daniel said. “I worry this might be a mistake. Or maybe this is the afterlife.”

“Hey!”

“I mean the emptiness,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Not you specifically.”

“Oh.”

Daniel turned to her. “In any case, I am grateful I’m not entirely alone here. Thank you.” He stuck out his hand. 

Sally smiled and nodded. “The feeling is mutual, Daniel. It’s good to meet you.” She shook his hand, and then everything went sort of ‘vworp’.

When Daniel had considered where he might be, he had quickly realized that he was in a void. But there are many kinds of voids. There’s the void Above. The void Before. But this was clearly neither of those. But what Daniel -- and most people -- did and do not know, is that there is also the void Between. This is not the void between life and death, which is the void After. The void After is like a cosmic bus-stop, which takes you from who and where you were to what you’re about to be for the rest of eternity, until your universe goes Pop.

The void between places, however is what happens when one universe really likes another universe and it likes to share things, like ideas, words, languages, symbols and stories. All of these things pass through the void. And sometimes, things go a little weird and some things that should have ended up in other places end up in that void. And sometimes, when one universe goes Tick, that tick doesn’t stay within one world, and two things touching each other makes everything go ‘vworp’. 

Daniel had fought the Demon Dragon Queen, and his world had gone Tick. Then there was Sally, and he had shaken her hand. Now he was turning inside out, the universe didn’t know where to put him -- it couldn’t put him back, that would be embarrassing -- and there was the cosmic equivalent of trying to pass someone on the sidewalk and stepping sideways in the same direction in a universal dance of mild surrealism. Daniel screamed, he thought. Or someone did, at least. He was pretty sure there was screaming, definitely. 

Everything turned inside out. 

Tock.

Elamimax

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