Chapter 11: The Second Sight

Chapter 11: The Second Sight

The brand over his heart was a sleeping beast. Leo learned its rhythms, its triggers. His life in the hospital bed became a constant, exhausting exercise in mental discipline. He practiced breathing exercises, focusing on the sterile smell of antiseptic and the rough texture of the hospital-grade blanket. He forced his mind into blank, empty spaces, building walls to keep the terror at bay. He had to. Any sharp spike of fear, any lingering memory of the golden feathers and hundred eyes, would cause the mark to pulse with that gentle, treacherous warmth, and he knew, with the certainty of a prey animal, that this warmth was a signal flare.

His mother, oblivious, saw his quiet focus as a sign of healing. She thought he was meditating, finding a calm center to cope with his trauma. One afternoon, she arrived with a gift, a brand-new laptop in a sleek cardboard box.

“I thought… I know you’ve been worried about falling behind,” she said, her voice soft with hope. “You can email your professors, maybe look at some of your coursework. And talk to your friends! I’m sure they’re all dying to hear from you.”

He accepted it with a smile that felt like a gaping wound. “Thanks, Mom. This is… this is great.”

She saw a tool to reconnect him to his old life. He saw a weapon. A key. A way to finally fight back from the inside of his cage.

That night, under the pretense of catching up on schoolwork, he began his true investigation. The hum of the laptop was a quiet conspirator in the dimly lit room. He started with the logical, the rational. He typed his first queries into the search bar, his fingers clumsy on the keyboard.

Coma memories feel real Near-death experience visions Trauma-induced hallucinations

The results were a deluge of the mundane and the medical. He waded through dry psychological papers on anoxia-induced euphoric states, endless articles about the brain’s chemical responses to extreme stress, and saccharine, self-help blogs detailing beatific encounters with deceased relatives in tunnels of white light.

None of it fit. Nothing described the cold, mathematical precision of the Adjudicator. There was no mention of a forensic soul-audit, of being judged and found wanting. The internet’s version of the afterlife was a comforting fable of warmth and acceptance. His was a terrifying glimpse into a cosmic bureaucracy that had spit him out like a corrupted file. Frustration gnawed at him. He was looking in the wrong library.

He took a deep breath, steadying his frantic heart. He had to stop thinking like a patient and start thinking like a witness. What did he actually see?

His fingers hovered over the keys, trembling slightly. This was dangerous. Deliberately summoning the memories was like playing with fire next to the beacon on his chest. But he had no choice. He typed:

Angel made of eyes and fire Golden sphere kills person Feeling judged at moment of death

The search results shifted dramatically. The clean, academic links vanished, replaced by a chaotic mire of the bizarre and the fanatical. UFO forums with grainy photos of lens flares. Paranormal investigation blogs. Shrill conspiracy sites with blinking text and wild manifestos about interdimensional beings. He was no longer in the library; he was in the back-alley occult bookshop, the air thick with the dust of fringe beliefs and desperate theories.

He spent hours diving deeper, his eyes burning from the screen’s glare. He felt a strange mix of revulsion and kinship. These people, these anonymous “crackpots,” were the only ones even attempting to map the strange territory he had been forced into. The doctors saw a broken body. His mother saw a traumatized son. These strangers saw a world humming with impossible energies, a reality with cracks in its foundation.

He found a forum. It was a stark, minimalist site with a black background and thin, white text. It was called “The Veil: Discussions on the Other Side.” The banner was a simple, elegant line drawing of a cracked mirror. He scrolled through thread titles: “The Man in the Hat - A Recurring Visitor?” “Auditory Pareidolia or Voices from the Static?” “Has anyone else experienced Lost Time near power lines?”

His heart was pounding, a slow, heavy drum against his ribs. He felt the faint, familiar warmth begin to bloom on his chest and forced himself to take a slow, calming breath. Steady. Just look. Don't feel.

He navigated to the site’s search function. With a sense of fatalistic dread, he typed in the name of his city and the highway where his life had ended and then, impossibly, restarted.

Crestwood I-15

He hit enter, not expecting anything. It was a needle in a haystack the size of the internet.

A single result appeared.

The thread was only a week old, posted on June 12th, the day of his accident. The title was mundane, unassuming: Weird thing on the I-15 near Crestwood exit. It was posted by a user named “Haulin_Hank.”

Leo clicked on it. His breath caught in his throat.

Haulin_Hank:

Hey guys, long-hauler here, first time posting. On my rig from Cali to Utah and saw something today I can’t shake. Around noon, just south of Crestwood. Bad wreck up ahead, cyclist got hit by a pickup. Real nasty. Traffic was slowing to a crawl. But that’s not the weird part.

Just before everyone started hitting the brakes, I saw this… glitch. That’s the only word for it. Right above where the kid on the bike was, the air went all shimmery, like heat haze off the asphalt in August, but it was a clear day. Like the air itself just folded for a second. Anyone else ever see something like that?

But here’s the kicker. As the truck hit him, I swear on my mother’s grave, there was a flash. Not from the sun, not from a camera. It was a flash of golden lightning. But it didn't come from the sky. It shot down, a straight line of blinding gold light that hit the exact spot of the impact and vanished. It was over in a split second. By the time the paramedics got there, I was stopped and just staring. Felt a chill go right through my cab, even with the sun beating down.

Cops asked me what I saw later and I just told them about the crash. How do you tell a state trooper you think you saw God’s camera flash go off? They’d stick me with a breathalyzer for sure. Just can’t get it out of my head.

Leo stared at the words, his vision blurring. He reread the post once, twice, a third time. A glitch in the air. A flash of golden lightning. A straight line down. It was his memory, but from the outside. A second sight. It was an objective, third-party account of the impossible event that had defined his existence.

The warmth on his chest was no longer gentle. It flared, a sudden, intense heat that felt like a hot coal pressed against his skin. The heart monitor beside his bed, which had been beeping in a steady rhythm, suddenly accelerated into a frantic, high-pitched alarm.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

He ignored it. He was transfixed. He scrolled down with a shaking hand to read the replies, desperate for more validation, for another witness.

Reply from Star_Child88: Ball lightning, dude. Rare but happens. Look it up.

Reply from DebunkerDan: You were probably tired, man. The mind plays tricks on you, especially when you see something traumatic like that. Your brain filled in the gaps with something spectacular. Classic eyewitness fallibility.

Reply from GovtIsLying2U: Sounds like a directed energy weapon test. Did you see any black helicopters? They’re always around for the cover-up.

Reply from moderator The_Warden: Interesting account, Haulin_Hank. But without dashcam footage or corroborating witnesses, we have to file this under personal experience. Let’s keep the speculation grounded, people.

Grounded. Leo let out a choked, desperate sound that was half laugh, half sob. The world had seen it. A truck driver, a man just doing his job, had witnessed a tear in the fabric of reality. And the world had immediately explained it away, dismissed it, filed it under “nonsense.”

The door to his room burst open and a nurse rushed in, her eyes wide with alarm at the blaring monitor. “Mr. Martinez? Leo? Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

He looked up from the glowing screen, his face a mask of terrible, ecstatic revelation. The nurse saw a patient in distress. She couldn’t see the brand burning hot under his gown. She couldn't see the words on the screen that had just confirmed his entire insane reality.

He wasn't crazy. It had all happened.

And nobody believed it. He was utterly, completely alone with the truth. The beacon on his chest throbbed with a fiery heat, a triumphant and terrifying pulse. He had his proof. And now, he was sure, the Adjudicator knew he had it.