This is a well overdo rewrite of my original prologue, which was... less than stellar. As is pretty much everything in this story up until chapter 20. After that, it's passable. When it gets to chapter 30, upgrades in quality again. And again at 40.

I had been meaning to post this only when I had the other chapters of my first 20 rewritten, but it's taking me a long time, and I feel it's well past time that I show where my current writing level is for those who are hopping in here for the first time. So, new potential readers, this is a display of where my writing level is right now. What you may or may not read after this might also be at this level of writing, or it may still have my old skill level present; the rewrite is a slow process.

As such, you may or may not encounter plot points (both in this and in future chapters) that don't match up. That is not an oversight on my part; I just haven't gotten around to rewriting everything so these early chapters match up with my current vision for my story.

Without further adieu, here is the prologue to Fate Calls. Enjoy.

Thanks go to Crystal Prime for beta reading.

Disclaimer: Transformers belongs to Hasbro. I only take credit for this story and my OCs.

"I am not doing it."

"Come on! You know you want to!"

"No."

"Do it!"

"No."

"Do it!"

"No."

"Right. You're using your serious tone, now. That means you're done talking."

"And here I thought you were stupid, Max."

"Hey, I resent that! I'm proud of my stupidity! I even won this award for my stupidity!" Max picked up a half-eaten apple—something he had been kind enough to leave in my car this morning—from the floor and held it proudly. He then noticed he was holding the apple from the section he had already eaten, and quickly dropped it to the floor, wiping his hand on the seat with a disgusted look on his face. "Well, I didn't say it was a good award."

I rolled my eyes at my friend's antics, used to his behavior after years of friendship. Max was a smart guy, but he had always been the craziest person I knew—and that was saying something. Puberty had only made him ten times as worse. He had been getting better in the last two years, but I suspected that he would never be considered normal by anyone who had met him.

I also suspected he didn't care.

After Max finished wiping his hand on the seat, he looked at me again. I could tell from the look in his eyes that he hadn't given up on our conversation. "Zech, if you want to make a move, now's the time! Jenny's been single for a month. That's, like—ten years in high school time! Twenty, if you count how small the town is!"

"You say that like I want to make a move," I said, checking my mirrors for any cars that may have been approaching from behind us. As usual, the snowy road was empty.

"Because you do!" Max insisted.

"Why do you think that?"

"Because she's gorgeous. And nice. And gorgeous. And funny. And did I mention gorgeous?"

"Twice. Three times, counting the question."

"Knew that word sounded familiar!"

I stopped at an intersection and, and turned the car right. "You and I are differ on views of relationships."

"Man, can you sound more like a robot? You haven't even used a contraction for, like, half an hour!"

"You didn't listen to me at all, did you?"

"A contraction! You aren't a robot after all." Max grinned, then shook his head at my lack of a response. "Or you really are a robot. But a weird one. And also freakishly large. Seriously, how did you get that tall?"

"Genetics," said Drake, another friend who I was giving a ride. He was a quiet person by nature, and only periodically commented on statements from other people. He also liked being alone, and didn't try to talk to many people, especially of the opposite sex. But his silence and isolation hid a deceptive intelligence I didn't think many people had noticed.

His personality reminded me of how I had been for a long time, and in some ways still was.

Max glared into the rearview mirror and then slumped into his chair. "I am surrounded by robots."

"We aren't robots," I said. "Simply logical human beings."

"But you're not even being logical about this! It's very simple: boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Boy and girl like each other. Boy and girl date. Literally that simple. When it comes to relationships, you both are the most illogical people I've ever met!" Max ranted.

"No we aren't," I said.

"Yes, you are. I can even prove it."

Here we go. "Okay. Try."

Max smiled. "Relationships are good for your health."

"Only if the relationship is a healthy one, with a strong connection and genuine feelings involved."

"Your point?"

"Less than ten percent of relationships starting in high school end up going to a more serious level. Of those, about five percent continue on to a permanent level; like a happy marriage. That leaves the odds of a winning relationship being struck while in high school at roughly one in two hundred. And that's just counting the relationships that are based on common likes and interests; what you've been describing is a relationship based on appearance. Those are all doomed to failure, without exception. Therefore, the chances of a lasting relationship—which is the only thing I would be interested in—with Jenny are so low it is not worth even worth a date. Does that answer your question?"

"How many studies did you read to get those numbers?" Max asked.

"I saw it in a magazine article a few years ago," I replied.

"Damn you and your photographic mind."

I just smiled and continued driving toward Drake's house.

After dropping Drake off, I drove to Max's house to drop him off as well. The road leading to his house was one of the more remote ones in the town, and as a result was snowier, icier, and was more difficult to drive on.

"Have you ever wondered what would happen if bananas could be used as Boomerangs?"

Or maybe the difficulty came from listening to Max's madness. One or the other.

"I can't say I have."

"Well, I have. Just imagine it: assassins could buy the tools of their trade at any grocery store in the country, and get a great source of Potassium; children could learn to be Ninjas; ba—"

"Ninjas didn't use Boomerangs."

"—nana farmers would be weapons dealers; and—worst of all—a girl would just have to reach into the fruit bowl to extract revenge on her boyfriend for checking out her taller, older, hotter sister. But it hadn't been his fault! Her older sister had forgotten something in her room and left the bathroom in just a towel! How was he not supposed to look?! Tell me. Tell me! How?!"

Max went silent, and the car became very quiet. I just kept driving, focusing on the road. They were going to have to plow this road again—the snow was a few inches deep.

"It would be crazy, right?" Asked Max, finally finishing his thought about bananas and Boomerangs.

Max's house was now just up the road, and I gradually applied the brakes on my car, slowly bringing us to a stop in front of Max's mailbox across the street. "You would know, Max."

My friend laughed and got out of the car, leaving the door open and leaning down to keep looking at me. "Hey, let me know how it goes with Jenny!" He laughed again and quickly made his way up the driveway, intentionally leaving the door open to irritate me, and probably to try to make me cold.

I didn't give Max the satisfaction of getting a reaction from me. Instead I remained stationary, waiting—waiting for Max to step on the patch of black ice he always forgot was at his doorstep. He would be hitting it right about…

Max, clueless of what was in front of him, was still running when he approached the door. Just as he was about to slow down and jump up the steps in front of his house, his right foot landed on the black ice. He slipped out spectacularly, landing heavily on his back with an alarmed cry.

… Now.

Max groaned and rolled onto his side, moving carefully and slowly. "Zech, help me! I've been attacked!"

"You fell on your ass due to your own stupidity," I pointed out flatly.

"Semantics! Help me get up; I think I broke something."

My eyes had always been good. Even from the car, I could see that nothing was out of place, and he wasn't instinctively grabbing at any part of his body. He was fine. "Breaking your dignity doesn't count."

"Semantics!"

"Goodbye, Max." I leaned over and closed the door he left open and drove away. In the rearview mirror, I saw Max stand up again and shake a fist at me, as if he was a villain cursing a departing hero. Then he turned to move up the stairs again.

And slipped on the ice a second time.

Uh-oh. He might have actually broken something on that one.

Turned out he did. His right radius, along with two fingers in the same hand—the index and the middle. I had gone back to help him up and get him to the hospital, but his dad had come out of the house at that point and said he'd take him, all the while with tears of mirth in his eyes; he'd seen the whole thing from inside the house. Max's face had been as red as a firetruck, despite the pain he'd been in.

Once I saw Max would get to the hospital okay, I turned around and went back up the road, toward my own house.

Like most streets in the area, the road I lived on had no official name, but I liked calling it End Street, because it literally went nowhere. At one point it was meant to go somewhere, I'm sure, but whoever built it some fifty plus years ago had, for some reason, stopped less than a hundred yards after my driveway. After that, it went straight to forest. Not even a dirt road separating them.

It was weird.

I pulled into my driveway about fifteen minutes after I left Max's house for the second time, taking the turn slow since the road hadn't been plowed. It never was.

My old Chevy found some mild relief as its tires found the driveway, still cleared from when I'd taken the snowblower out in the morning. I tapped the garage door opener attached to my rearview mirror despite my house still rounding the bend in the driveway, knowing the signal would pass through the tall trees in front of the house and start opening the garage door. Slowly, of course; the door's motor was basically dead.

I parked the car, closed the garage door behind me, then grabbed my backpack and got out of the car. I fished my keys from my pocket, then unlocked and entered the house from the interior door.

A short hallway met me. I kicked my shoes off onto the mat next to the door and moved down it, the hardwood floor cold to my sock-covered feet.

The hallway opened up to the main room of the house—a kitchen, living room, and dining room area all rolled into one. More hardwoods made up the dining area, while there was title in the kitchen and rich Wool carpeting for the living room. Together, the main room made up an area better than a thousand square feet.

The kitchen itself was about four hundred of that. Its floor was White Marble tile, with a long island in the middle and an even longer countertop at a half wall between it and the main entryway. The sink, refrigerator, oven, and dishwasher were a matching set that went with the stylish hanging lights at the kitchen ceiling. They were all digital, and not available to most of the public. Each could be activated by voice command or by touch.

The minor convenience of using your voice over your hands was not worth the stupidly high price, in my opinion.

The dining room was even more exquisite. The floor was made of hardwood, though I had never bothered to find what what kind; I only knew it wasn't cheap. The dining table was an Antique Stickley, large enough to seat ten. A custom chandelier hung above the table, made up of countless parts that refracted any light that hit it.

As with the kitchen and dining areas, the living area of the main room was also posh in nature. The furniture was all expensive and designer-made. Nice to the point I still felt bad about sitting in it. Instead of a TV, there was an Ultra-HD projector installed in the ceiling opposite a spartan wall. When activated, the projector turned the blank wall into one giant screen. A state-of-the-art surround-sound system made every scene sound like it was happening in the room with you. Like the digital appliances in the kitchen, it was all equipped to be voice-activated.

I didn't like any of it.

My dad didn't like falling behind on technology, and as the founder of a private technology company, I suppose it was logical for him to want to be ahead of the game all the time. But he took it too far. He always kept up with what was the most high-tech or valuable items to place in a house, and made sure we had them. It was like he treated our house like it was a giant smartphone, and he was thinking about buying the newest version before he'd taken the old one out of the box.

Wasteful.

I dropped my backpack on a kitchen counter and walked over to the refrigerator to get something to eat. My dad didn't like having things besides food on the counter, but he wasn't exactly there to stop me.

He rarely was.

"TV, news," I said aloud, voice no louder than it would have been had I been speaking to someone next to me. The projector in the living room had a mic sensitive enough to detect a spoken command from anywhere in the living room, but in this case my resonant voice would carry enough for it to activate from the kitchen.

The inactive projector turned on and accessed the multi-dish setup we had on the roof. Eight different news channels appeared in the crisp image the projector created, each section of the image larger than most normal televisions. The sound of eight different news anchormen and women speaking at the same time was too confusing to understand.

"Channel 8."

This time the entire image was taken up by a single news anchor who was focusing on the weather. Seemed it was going to be cold for the next week or so. What a shock for an Upstate New York winter.

I pulled out some sandwich meat and opened a cabinet to get some bread. A good sandwich would be fine. "Channel 7."

The next channel was an anchorwoman talking about the Stock Market. Hmm. Seemed Paradigm Inc. wasn't doing so well right now. Dad would probably take the opportunity to buy them up and take their assets. Probably was a good idea; Paradigm made some good software. Their product would give his own products greater reliability.

… Crap, I'm thinking like him again.

I got a plate from a cupboard for my sandwich. "Popular news story of the day."

Without looking I knew the image on the wall turned into eight different channels again, all displaying the same headline. The overlapping voices of the news anchormen and women again made it hard to hear what any one of them were saying.

I really didn't like that feature of the projector. Made your head hurt if you let it tune into so many channels at once. "Most viewed channel."

"In what is being reported as the fiercest day of combat in Afghanistan in nearly a decade, two US military bases were attacked by insurgents today. As many as fifty fatalities have already been confirmed among US servicemen. That number is expected to rise."

Tragic. Fifty more families who lost a son or daughter. Not including the families of any insurgents killed. Their sons may be extremists, but foot soldiers among the militant groups in Afghanistan tended to be young and impressionable. Easily swayed by people they respect. Perfect targets for older men looking to influence the minds of others for their own gain.

"In addition, one anonymous source has given this station an exclusive story. Among the confirmed casualties are two siblings, who had, up until today, spent most of the last decade deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Oh, that's terrible. I wonder if Jim and David knew them; they've mentioned how they're friends with a lot of pairs of siblings over there. I turned around to look at the screen, not bothering to put my plate down on the counter.

"Staff Sergeant James Donald Taylor, and his twin brother, Sergeant David Lee Taylor, were deployed to both of the bases involved in the fighting. And unfortunately, both men fell in combat this day."

Pictures of my older twin brothers appeared on screen next to the news anchor. The towering form of David riding on top of an M1 Abrams tank with his M4 held across his lap; and then the equally massive James—and two other soldiers he dwarfed—standing against a desert background in combat gear and wearing thick sunglasses along with his helmet. A promotional image the Marines had taken of him to promote Force RECON.

My plate shattered against the floor.

No.

No. No. No. No. No. This wasn't happening. This wasn't happening. My brothers weren't dead. They couldn't be. They couldn't be.

I stood there, frozen in place, as the news anchor went on to give a brief history of my brothers' service. Both fourteen-year veterans. Both Force RECON Marines for twelve of those fourteen years. Both two of the most highly-decorated servicemen still serving in Afghanistan.

Both gone.

They couldn't be dead. They can't be dead.

I pushed my emotions to the side, leaning against the counter for support. Calm down. Breathe. Think logically. If James and David were actually dead, the Marine Corps would have sent an MDN—Military Death Notification—within four hours their deaths had been confirmed. They had sent none, which meant what I was hearing on the news was unconfirmed information. False until proven otherwise. And news channels were notoriously unreliable within that four-hour window the military sent MDNs. The chances of them being correct in this case was extremely low.

Living all my life in this house meant I knew all its creaks and sounds, including those outside. That was why when I heard snow being compacted, I knew a car was in the long driveway.

My blood chilled.

"Outside Camera, front door," I said, my voice void of emotion.

The projector put the news in a small window and brought up the feed from the security camera I requested. A black sedan was rolling up the driveway, slowly and quietly. Respectfully.

I knew no one who owned a black sedan.

This wasn't happening. Not now. Not today. Not ever. I wasn't ready to be without my brothers; my best friends.

I never would be.

My body moved of its own accord. I grabbed a pair of keys from a rack near the refrigerator and moved to the back door. I barely felt my feet get cut deeply on the broken plate. Was barely paying attention as I stopped next to the door and mindlessly put heavy boots on my feet, digging the pieces of ceramic deeper into my feet.

I was outside a moment later, door left open behind me. In front of me was a large wooden shed with white double doors. I opened them.

Tools and outdoor equipment lined the shed's walls. Two ATVs and a pair of snowmobiles, along with their safety gear and spare parts, dominated most of the shed's space. All four recreation vehicles were top-of-the-line models.

I grabbed a helmet and got on my snowmobile, a red and black Polaris. I inserted the key and started it up.

Without waiting for the motor to warm up, I drove the snowmobile out of the shed and immediately made a sharp right once I was outside. Ahead of me was a mountain trail that was part of our five hundred plus acres of land. I gunned the snowmobile up the trail.

In less than a minute, I was too far up the trail to see the house or the shed.

My movements were robotic as I drove the snowmobile. I turned automatically, never once stopping to stare at the beautiful views of the surrounding mountains or the valley below. My speed stayed constant, changing only when I went up or down a hill in the trail.

Half an hour later, I stopped at the foot of another hill and got off the machine. This one wasn't too steep to climb with the snowmobile—few hills were—but I wanted to climb this one on foot; it was important that I did.

My brothers and I had found this hill years ago, way back when they were about to leave for Basic. They'd taken our old ATVs out on the trail, and brought me along with them. We went beyond the trail on that day—all the way to the edge of our property. It was their way of saying goodbye to me, since I had been too young to understand that they weren't going to be there everyday anymore.

They hadn't bothered to fill ATVs tanks that day, so they ran out of fuel right where my snowmobile was parked. I still remembered the exact conversation we had back then: the way James had gotten mad at David for not checking the fuel before we left; David's rebuttal that James could have checked them, too; my young, innocent mind immediately deciding we should continue on foot, gaining their attention as I hopped off the ATV and ran up this very hill while they argued.

Both of them ran after me at that point, David slipping in mud and ruining the shirt the girl he'd been interested in at the time, Venessa, had given him. James had stopped long enough to laugh at David before continuing on and grabbing me before I could make any further away. I remembered every detail.

I passed the point where Jim grabbed me that day and continued on. We had done the same back then, deciding to climb one more hill before calling our father for a ride back. Or rather, my pouting face had convinced my brothers that one more hill couldn't hurt.

I came to the crest of the hill and stopped in place, standing in the exact spot the three of us first saw this place.

The top of the hill was bare of trees, giving a view of the surrounding mountains and valley wherever you looked. The largest mountain in the area was directly ahead, its massive form looking like it had stood there since the beginning of time. An unnamed river ran through the valley beneath it.

I had—with great originality—been the one to name this place the Clearing, on account of the lack of trees and the view in front of me. The view amazed us back then, and never ceased to amaze me since.

But today, it just made me sad.

The Marines had indeed sent their MDN. The media had somehow gotten the news at the same time as the Marines did. My brothers really were dead. Killed in action on the same day, from the same group. My two best friends on this Earth were gone.

The bottom portion of my vision started to blur. I raised a finger to an eye, and it came back wet. Tears. They hadn't started to fall yet, but when was the last time my eyes had watered without something irritating them? It had been more than a decade.

Eleven years, three hundred and forty-four days, to be exact.

Not since…

I stopped the line of thinking before it could really start. Detail was the downside to a memory like mine—no matter how long you were given to heal, tragic events always played back in your head as clearly as the second they happened. As soon as you started thinking about something painful, you went through the experience over again.

How many times would I relive the moment I found out my brothers were dead? One was too many.

I don't know how long I stood there in the Clearing. It could have been seconds, could've been hours; my mind wasn't processing time very well. At some point I felt my eyes stop watering, the tears in them dying before they even fell.

James would have been proud of that; he always was the more stoic of the two. The more hardcore. He would have said it's good that I had control of my emotions—that when facing an opponent, you gave them nothing they could use against you. To him, crying was a sign of weakness; and in his line of work, you never knew when you were being watched.

Just thinking about how accurate that thought was to James' personality was almost made my eyes water again. He was gone. David was gone. I was alone.

Again.

A long, rolling rumble of thunder startled me. I looked up at the sky, looking west, where most weather came from in Upstate New York.

I was met by the sight of black clouds. Not grey or dark. Black. Obsidian black. Like a starless sky.

Lightning flashed within the black mass of clouds, lighting them up like a Spider's web. Another roll of thunder rumbled through the air, shaking the ground beneath me like an earthquake. The air pressure dropped as the thunder rumbled through. It felt like standing in the middle of a supercell in Oklahoma.

The hell did this monster come from? It's winter in New York. Thunderstorms don't happen in winter, let alone ones that look like that.

I turned to make my way back down the hill to my snowmobile, only to cry out when I went to move.

Now that I wasn't in robot mode, my feet felt like they'd been torn to shreds. And they had; I'd walked over a lot of broken ceramic. With how long it had been walking or standing on my feet, the shards had likely been buried deep into the soles of my feet. So deep, that I knew just from the level of pain I was in that I needed to go to the hospital when I got back.

If I could get back.

Damn it, why didn't I use my brain and walk around the broken plate?

No time to beat myself up over it; that storm looked like it was moving fast. Way too fast.

I pushed through the pain and stepped forward. My vision darkened as my weight shifted, white-hot agony shooting up my leg. That hurt. But I took another step. And kept walking until I was nearly to my snowmobile. Just a little further.

My ankle rolled on a rock hidden under the snow as thunder rolled again. The already-unbearable pain instantly became twice as worse, and I let out a another cry lost in the thunder and fell to the ground. The cold of the snow was a welcome change from the sharp stabbing in my feet, and now the throbbing pain in my ankle.

I picked myself up and pulled myself up onto the snowmobile. Pain could be ignored. That was what James and David always told me. Pain could be ignored…

Sure as hell was hard to ignore right now.

The wind had started to pick up when I put on my helmet. By the time I got the snowmobile started, I could see the virtual wall of snow and ice forming in the distance. Wherever this storm came from, it was going to be terrible when it hit. I had to be sure I was back at the house when that happened.

I pushed down the gas pedal and turned the snowmobile around so I was heading back for my house. I barely slowed down for the dips and turns in the trail. I had no time. Whenever I looked up, the storm was closer than before.

Much closer.

It looked like a manifestation of darkness itself coming to claim the day, blocking out the horizon in either direction, lightning and thunder rolling from its depths like a boiling cauldron of black death. Just how huge was this storm? No storm was this large, this tall, without it being a hurricane or something similar. But a hurricane over land, in the middle of winter? It didn't make any sense.

I needed to be back at the house now.

The lightning and thunder and wind continued to get worse as I made my way back. In turn, so too did my visibility worsen. Wind-blown snow—one of the most dangerous things about cold environments.

While snow itself could hamper travel just by blocking paths or making roads undrivable, it rarely fell hard enough to block visibility on its own; it needed the wind to do that. The wind pushed not only the snow in the air sideways, but it also would pick up the snow on the ground, effectively doubling or even tripling the visibility dampening of a snowfall.

And right now, I could barely see fifty feet in front of me. The storm was miles away, and even from this distance it was making things dangerous. The plus of having to focus so hard on where I was going that I was able to place the pain in my feet off to the side.

But that good thing was rapidly fading. The wind was picking up way too fast for my liking, and it was getting to the point where I was having to turn by memory instead of sight. No matter; my memory was perfect. As long as I got to the house, I would be ok—

The Deer jumped out of the trees not ten feet in front of me.

Time seemed to slow as I spotted the animal far too late for me to get out of the way. I could only watch as my snowmobile collided with its side, the impact jarring me and making me turn the handlebars, adjusting my path.

Right toward a steep hill just to the side of the trail.

I felt myself falling. Felt the snowmobile falling. Then I felt myself lift off the seat and into the air.

Then I saw the ground appear below. The snowmobile crashed to the ground a split second before me. Then I landed back first on top of the snowmobile.

Then everything went dark.

I felt life again. A faint sense of no longer surrounded by oppressing darkness. Instead, it was just a cold darkness.

My eyelids fluttered open.

My vision was spinning, ears ringing loudly. The air was dark, as was the ground, especially around me. Darker than they should have been, even with the clouds above. They looked black to me, and a little voice in the back of my head was saying that wasn't normal. That it meant something was very wrong with me. What that thing was didn't click into place until I saw my grey snowmobile in pieces right next to me.

My red snowmobile that shouldn't have been grey.

I was in shock. I wasn't seeing color. If I wasn't seeing color, I had no way of knowing if this patch of dark snow under me was Oil from the snowmobile or my own blood. I suppose it was probably both.

The storm had overtaken me while I was unconscious. Golfball-sized sleet—sleet, which was supposed to be smaller than hail—was falling from the sky like snow in a blizzard, blanketing the ground in ice. The sleet didn't hit my head because a piece of the snowmobile was over my head and shoulders. I knew I should have felt it impacting the rest of my body, but I didn't. I didn't feel much of anything. Everything was numb. Numb and cold.

Lightning flashed, and the ground shook. I only dimmly heard the thunder. My hearing was going, too. Somehow, that knowledge made lying on the ground, severely injured, oddly peaceful in a strange way.

This was how I died, wasn't it?

Well, at least I would be able to see trees before I expired.

The ground shook again, this time more violently and without lightning. The piece of the snowmobile above me fell and landed around my head, blocking my view.

That's just cruel.

I tried to move the debris away, but I found I couldn't move. I was stuck in place, trapped. This was an even more depressing end.

The ground shook yet again. Then again. And again. Three great rumbles, each different from the other. They repeated over and over again, shaking the ground more and more. Getting closer and closer to me.

Then they stopped just as they were beginning to feel like earthquakes.

The debris from the snowmobile was suddenly lifted off me. The light—or what little there was—blinded me; the debris over my head made everything pitch black.

My vision was slow to return, and when it did, I couldn't process what I was seeing.

Three figures were standing over me. Three massive, towering, majestic metallic figures holding staffs in their hands. Two broad and male in appearance, the third slender and female. One of them was holding a hand out, and my snowmobile was floating up towards it. Floating. Like gravity had been turned off.

Were hallucinations normal when you were dying?

The figure lifting my broken snowmobile into the air made a gesture with its hand, and my snowmobile went flying off into the storm.

Another of the figures, the female one, bent its enormous body down and looked at me. Its mechanical eyes were like two blue pools of infinite depth.

My vision faded to black for a moment, and I felt a strange tingling sensation run over me while I couldn't see. When I could see again, the female figure turned her enormous head to the other two figures and said what sounded like electronic gibberish to me. But coming from the female figure, it sounded beautiful and graceful. Strong and powerful. Complex beyond belief.

One of the other two figures answered in the same gibberish, and looked behind it.

A blue vortex appeared from thin air. It swirled and pulsed with a great light, its very nature seeming to break reality itself.

That settled it; I was dead. These figures must be representations of death, coming to take me.

That, or my mind was being really creative right before I fell into darkness and never woke up.

The two male figures made their way to the vortex. The female whispered softly in her electronic language, and picked me up in her huge hand and joined the others.

All the three figures stepped into the vortex. Immediately I felt like I was weightless, being pulled in every direction at once.

Then a great, unending voice seemed to vibrate me. Within every fiber of my being. Within my very soul. It drowned out all sound. All sense of time and existence.

It was.

"I have yet to Decree your death, Zechariah. Sleep, now, for the Morning brings Change."

And then there was nothing.

There we have it. The first rewritten chapter of Fate Calls. Fun to write, though wish I had more time to get to all of them.

I do not have a credit song for this at the moment. I will post one at some point, but I have run out of time for now.

Let me know what you think, and thanks for reading.

See you soon.