[ WP ] You 've always been an Atheist . You 've just died , and you were right . There is no God , Heaven , or Hell . But what comes next is something you never expected .

When i died it was n't a big deal or anything. I just fell off a ladder. I could n't even tell you what i was doing up it, but i remember the *whoosh* in my stomach as the legs slipped and my life was snuffed out. 
 
 A lot of you will be wondering what it felt like. Most of you wo n't have felt it, after all. Humans die in all kinds of ways, but most of them just sort of... go to sleep. They drift off, and all they can remember is darkness followed by this place. 
 
 When i died the lights faded out. First the colour drained, and then the light became darkness as the shadow envelopped the sky. I remember seeing a cloud float by and wonder why it was so sluggish. But instead of darkness, the world faded into a an opaque brown mist. 
 
 A dampness spread along my body, a cold clammy grasp that struck me as familiar. My mouth filled with it, and spurted out of my nose into more of the dark brown material. When something terrible is happening to us, the mind has a remarkable ability to shut itself off and pretend like it's happening to someone else. 
 
 That would've been nice. Instead of shrinking of consciousness my mind began thinking thoughts of mud. I tasted soil, smelt earth. My ears rang with the scratching of pebbles, the squelching of organic matter as it settled deeper into the rot. I did not observe these changes in myself, i simply *was*. The thought of moving my limbs was irrelevant, as i flexed a million earthworms and stretched the countless legs of countless arthropods. 
 
 In that death i became life, to a degree that i had never experienced as a human. It was awesome and terrible. The constant movement, the endless trickling as death settled onto more death and squeezed out life, was dizzying. My eyes were multiple, and all showed me a mosaic of mosaics, each tile a different part of the rot. 
 
 As you know i came here. We all have. I can hear by the drip of the water that we are in the same room as when i started this tale. I can tell by your rustling that there are more of you. More of you to remember my words, and tell them to others. 
 
 After awakening into this chamber lay there for some unknown amount of time. I drifted between wakefulness and that other state. I felt the funghi grow over my skin, felt my body begin to sink back into the mud. I felt water, pooled onto my eyes. I felt my breath, moving over my lips. Everything was moist, the smell of rot heavy in the air. 
 
 I felt around for a long time. I prodded, and cupped and tugged. In this pitch black i started hallucinating. I did n't know if i was rot, caught in the between of life and death. I felt the small messengers of decay beginning to shuttle between myself and the walls. 
 
 I knew it was terror, helping my mind move away from what my body knew i was standing in. When the first of them started moving again, i fell to my knees. It was you, listener. It was you. Or maybe someone who came before you, for i do not know how many of you there are any more. 
 
 I put my hand on your chest. We sat like that for a long time, listening to each other's rasping breaths. Remembering who we were, how to speak. 
 
 Perhaps i was the only one remembering, for i have never heard you say words different from those contained in this story. Certainly, when i spoke you did not. Your hand stayed on my chest as i started the tale of how i died. 
 
 Soon, i could hear more breathing. I knew more had come. 
 
 Ah. 
 
 There. I can hear the new arrivals. You'll want to know where you are. You're dead. This is not an afterlife, at least not in the way we were taught. 
 
 When i died it was n't a big deal or anything.
