Afterlife Chronicles

The Boy Under The Wisteria Tree

The cold is the first thing I register.

Not the kind that sends you fumbling for a blanket — not the comfortable cold of an open window or a room left too long without warmth. This is different. It settles against my skin with intention, like fingers pressing softly at my temples, like the world itself is exhaling against my face.

Then come the tickles.

Soft. Featherlight. Against my cheeks, my forehead, the curve of my nose.

I open my eyes.

I am lying in flowers.

Not on a bed. Not on any surface I recognize. My back is pressed against the earth itself — cool, yielding, alive — and all around me, in every direction I can see, flowers stretch outward like a painting someone forgot to finish. Small blooms. Pale and trembling in a breeze I can barely feel. Above me, the sky burns amber and deep orange, the color of a sun that can't decide whether it's rising or setting, suspended somewhere between hello and goodbye.

I sit up slowly.

For a long moment, I just breathe.

Then — because apparently dying and waking up in strange places has become my entire personality now — I sigh.

"Again," I mutter to no one.

I push myself to my feet, smoothing my nightwear against my legs, and take in the space properly. It's a field — vast and open and impossibly quiet, the kind of quiet that doesn't feel empty but full, like the silence is made of something. The breeze moves through it in slow, deliberate waves, carrying the scent of something sweet and faintly aching, like nostalgia pressed into a flower.

And then I see it.

A wisteria tree.

It stands not far off, unhurried and enormous, its long violet blossoms drifting lazily in the wind like it has nowhere to be and all of eternity to get there. The petals fall in spirals — unhurried, weightless — scattering across the grass beneath it like something sacred being slowly given back to the earth.

I stare at it for a moment longer than I should.

Something about it pulls at me. Not fear — not exactly. More like recognition. The feeling you get when you walk into a room and know, without being told, that something important happened here once.

I shake it off.

The deeper and more pressing concern is that I have absolutely no idea where I am, and the last time I woke up somewhere unfamiliar I narrowly avoided being eaten by something that had no business existing. I make a silent, solemn promise to myself — and to Mikael, who would never let me hear the end of it — that I will find out what keeps pulling me out of my room and into these inexplicable landscapes. As soon as I figure out how to get back.

I start walking toward the tree.

That's when I see him.

A figure, sitting at the base of the wisteria, his back to me, partially obscured by the long curtain of falling blossoms. I slow my steps instinctively. He's wearing something pale — white, or close to it — and he's very still. The kind of still that suggests he's been there a long time. Like he belongs to this place the way the tree belongs to it.

I stop a few feet away.

"Hello?"

Nothing.

I clear my throat and try again, louder this time. "Hello! Excuse me—"

He tenses.

It's subtle — just the faintest shift in the line of his shoulders, a barely perceptible straightening — but I catch it. Then, slowly, he turns.

And I forget, for a moment, how to finish my sentence.

He is — there is no other word for it — beautiful. Not in the polished, deliberate way of someone who knows it. Beautiful the way a storm is beautiful, or a piece of music that makes your chest ache without warning. His face is pale and fine-boned, all sharp angles and quiet symmetry — a jaw that could cut glass, a nose that sits perfectly between dark, deep-set eyes the color of warm amber lit from behind. His hair is full and dark and curly, falling against his forehead in a way that looks completely effortless, and there is the faint shadow of a mustache, a chin beard, the soft suggestion of stubble along his jaw — like someone who last shaved a week ago and simply hadn't thought about it since.

He looks at me like I've just materialized out of thin air.

Which, fair enough — I might have.

"Hi," I try, because apparently I've lost every other word in my vocabulary. "I'm so sorry to disturb you. I don't — I'm not quite sure where I am, actually, and I was hoping—"

He moves before I finish the sentence.

In one fluid motion he's on his feet and crossing the distance between us, and then his hand is around mine — lifting it, turning it over, studying my palm with an expression I can only describe as stunned. Like he's looking at something he stopped believing existed a long time ago.

I yank my hand back.

"Hey—!" I step backward, putting space between us. "What are you — I just asked for directions, I didn't say you could touch me."

He blinks.

The daze on his face cracks, and something almost like embarrassment moves through his features — slow and clearly unfamiliar, like he doesn't wear the expression often.

"You can see me," he says.

It isn't a question. It's barely even a statement. It lands somewhere in between — suspended, fragile, like he's afraid that saying it too firmly will make it untrue.

"Yes," I say flatly, still massaging my wrist where his grip had tightened. "I can see you. I'd also appreciate it if you'd keep your hands to yourself."

"I'm sorry." He says it quickly. Genuinely. His eyes drop to my wrist and something shifts in them — something that looks almost like guilt, which is not what I expected from someone who just grabbed a stranger without warning. "Did I hurt you?"

"You think?"

A beat. Then, against what I suspect is his better judgment, the corner of his mouth twitches.

It's a small thing. Barely a smile. But something about it rearranges the entire atmosphere between us.

"You can actually see me," he says again, softer this time. Like he's saying it to himself as much as to me. His eyes — warm brown, wide, quietly disbelieving — move over my face with a kind of careful wonder, the way you'd look at something you've heard described a thousand times and are only now seeing in person.

I cross my arms. "You've said that twice now."

"I know." He exhales — a quiet, unsteady breath. "I apologize. It's just—" He stops. Looks at me again. "How did you get here?"

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," I say. "I went to sleep in my room and woke up here. In a field. In flowers." I gesture around us at the obvious. "Which, frankly, is becoming a pattern I didn't sign up for."

He tilts his head slightly, studying me the way you'd study something in a museum — with care, with distance, with the particular attention of someone trying to understand rather than simply observe.

"You're not afraid," he says.

"I've had a very eventful few days." I pause. "Are you going to tell me where I am, or are we just going to keep staring at each other?"

Something moves through his expression — something warm, fleeting, gone before I can name it.

"You're dreaming," he says.

"I'm—" I stop. Look around. The amber sky. The flowers that are a little too perfect. The wisteria petals falling just slightly too slowly, like they're subject to a different gravity than everything else. "...That would explain some things."

"This place exists between," he continues, taking a half step closer — careful, deliberate, like he's giving me time to decide whether to step back. I don't. "Between your world and—" He pauses, choosing his words with a precision that feels practiced. "Somewhere else."

"Between my world and heaven," I say.

He goes still.

"You know about heaven," he says slowly.

"I live there," I say. "Technically."

For a long moment he simply looks at me. Then he does something unexpected — he laughs. It's quiet and short and surprised, like it came out before he could stop it, and it does something to his face that makes him look, impossibly, even more disarming than before.

"Of course," he murmurs, more to himself than to me.

"Of course what?"

"Nothing." He shakes his head. "What's your name?"

"Ellora." I watch his face when I say it, out of habit more than anything else. Something moves behind his eyes — not recognition exactly. More like resonance. Like a bell struck at a frequency he's heard before but couldn't place until now. "What's yours?"

A pause. Brief. Barely there.

"Caelum."

The name settles between us in the quiet the way the wisteria petals settle on the grass — gently, without urgency, like it was always going to end up here.

"Caelum," I repeat.

"Yes."

"That means heaven."

He looks at me, and there is something in his expression that I can't fully read — something layered, like a painting with too many coats of color, each one bleeding slightly into the one beneath.

"It does," he says quietly.

We stand in the field together, and the wisteria petals fall between us, and the sky burns amber above us, and the silence is the kind that doesn't ask to be filled.

"Are you always here?" I ask eventually. "In this place?"

"Often enough." He looks out across the field, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly. "It's the only place I—" He stops. Starts again. "I come here when everything else is too loud."

I understand that in a way I don't know how to say out loud. I understand it in the part of me that still thinks about my dad every time it goes quiet.

"It's beautiful," I offer instead.

He looks back at me.

"Yes," he says. But he isn't looking at the field.

Heat crawls up the back of my neck. I look away first — down at the flowers around my feet, at the soft crush of petals beneath my shoes — and I'm aware, in a way I haven't been since I arrived in this strange in-between place, of how I must look. Nightwear. Hair loose and windblown. No context whatsoever.

"This is going to sound strange," I say, "but I feel like I've been here before. Or—" I frown, trying to catch the feeling before it dissolves. "Not here exactly. But near here. Like this place is on the edge of something I almost remember."

Caelum is quiet for a moment.

"Maybe you have," he says softly.

Before I can ask what that means—

The air changes.

It's subtle at first. A shift in pressure, like the moment before a storm when everything goes unnaturally still. The wisteria blossoms, which have been drifting in lazy spirals, suddenly freeze mid-fall — suspended, motionless, hanging in the air like time itself has caught its breath.

Then the amber of the sky begins to bleed.

Deeper. Darker. The orange pulling toward something heavier at the edges, like ink dropped into water.

"What's happening?" I ask.

Caelum's expression shifts — just slightly, but I catch it. Something tightens around his eyes. Something that looks, if I'm reading it right, like reluctance.

"You've stayed too long," he says.

"What—"

"Ellora." He steps toward me, and the urgency in his voice is quiet but unmistakable. His eyes find mine and hold them, and there is something in them now — something open and unguarded and almost desperate — that makes my breath catch. "Listen to me. You need to go."

"I don't know how to—"

"You will." He takes one more step, close enough now that I can see the exact color of his eyes — warm brown with something golden underneath, like light filtered through amber. "It will take you on its own. But before it does—" He pauses. A muscle moves in his jaw. "Don't tell anyone you were here. Don't tell anyone you saw me."

I blink. "Why?"

"Please." The word comes out differently than the others. Quieter. Like it costs him something. "Just — please, Ellora."

The sky lurches.

A deep, resonant pull begins somewhere behind my sternum — not painful, not violent, but undeniable. Like a tide going out. Like something enormous and patient reaching back to reclaim what belongs to it.

"Will I—" I start, and I'm not sure what I'm asking. Will I come back? Will I see you again? Does any of this mean what it feels like it means?

Caelum looks at me.

"I don't know," he says honestly. And somehow that's worse than a no and better than a lie.

The pull intensifies.

The last thing I see before the field dissolves entirely is his face — still watching me, expression unreadable, wisteria petals suspended motionless in the air around him like the world itself has paused to watch him let me go.

And then—

I wake up with a gasp that tears itself from my throat before I'm even fully conscious.

I sit bolt upright in bed, chest heaving, hands gripping the sheets with a force that makes my knuckles ache. The room is dim and familiar and aggressively real — the wardrobe, the shared sitting area, the soft morning light pressing through the curtains — and for a long, disoriented moment I simply stare at the wall and try to remember how to breathe normally.

"Okay, wow."

Eva's voice comes from somewhere near the floor.

I look down.

She's mid push-up, arms locked, looking up at me with one eyebrow raised. She's in a cropped athletic top and shorts, hair pulled back, and from the slight sheen on her skin she's clearly been at this for a while. She finishes the rep without breaking eye contact, drops to one knee, and tilts her head.

"Bad dream, or did heaven serve you something weird for dinner?"

"I—" I press a hand to my chest, feel my heartbeat slowly returning to something resembling its natural rhythm. "I don't know. I'm fine."

She narrows her eyes. "You don't look fine. You look like you just watched something die."

"Thank you, Eva. Very comforting."

She pushes to her feet in one easy motion, reaching for the small towel draped over the foot of her bed and tossing it around her neck. "So what happened?"

I open my mouth.

And then I stop.

His voice comes back to me, quiet and urgent against the dissolving amber of the sky.

Don't tell anyone you were here. Don't tell anyone you saw me.

I close my mouth.

"I don't remember," I say. "Just one of those dreams that feels real and then disappears the second you wake up."

Eva studies me for a moment with the calm, unhurried attention of someone who is not even slightly convinced. Then she shrugs — which I suspect is less acceptance and more strategic patience.

"Get up," she says, moving toward the wardrobe. "We need to get ready."

"For what?"

She glances over her shoulder at me, and there's something in her expression — a barely suppressed energy, the particular restlessness of someone who has been waiting for something for a long time.

"The choosing ceremony," she says.

The words land differently than I expect. Not with dread exactly — though there's some of that. More like the feeling of standing at the edge of something with no clear view of the bottom. I knew it was coming. Araceli had mentioned it. Eva had mentioned it. Everyone in this place speaks about it with the weight of something inevitable.

I just hadn't thought it would be today.

"Already?" I say.

"Already," Eva confirms, pulling out her uniform with the casual efficiency of someone who has been mentally preparing for this since arrival. She holds it up, checks it, nods once — satisfied — and then levels me with a look. "So I'd suggest you stop sitting there looking like you've seen a ghost—"

"Technically," I say, "I am one."

"—and get dressed," she finishes, ignoring me completely. But the corner of her mouth pulls upward. Just slightly.

I get up.