Chapter 1: The Death of a Fanboy
It smelled like hand sanitizer and refrigerated air. Not the kind of sterile you got used to, just the kind that clung to your nose and told you things were wrong.
He was scrolling Reddit on his phone, thumb tapping absently, when the door opened. He didn't look up right away—he was mid-thread, something about how Kang might not be the real villain of Secret Wars.
"Mr. Vaylen," the doctor said.
He glanced up, blinking. "Yeah, that's me."
The doctor was holding a tablet like it was made of glass. Young, maybe late thirties, white coat too stiff, smile too practiced. He sat down across from him with the sigh of someone who hated this part of the job.
"I won't waste your time."
Vaylen locked his phone and slid it into his hoodie pocket. He gave the doctor his full attention. Eyes steady. Jaw set. Like he was at a shareholders' meeting.
"You have glioblastoma. Grade IV. Advanced. It's… aggressive."
The words didn't hit. They floated. Like part of a bad script read in monotone.
Vaylen blinked. "That's brain cancer, right?"
"Yes. It's already affecting parts of your parietal lobe. We noticed some minor irregularities in your motor cortex too."
"That why I keep forgetting words?" he asked, half-smiling.
The doctor nodded, compassion thin but real. "Yes. Headaches, disorientation, maybe some vision distortion soon. You've had it for a while—just didn't know."
Vaylen leaned back. Not shaking. Not angry. Just… rewinding the last few weeks in his head. That time he called a wrench a 'twisty hammer.' The flicker of light in his left eye when coding. The one time he blacked out for ten seconds and blamed low blood sugar.
"How long?" he asked quietly.
"Three months, give or take. We can discuss options, but—"
"No," Vaylen interrupted. "I don't want the fake menu. Just the clock."
The doctor sighed again and nodded. "Three. Maybe four. If you're lucky."
Vaylen stood slowly. His legs felt distant. Like the floor had moved two inches without warning. He stared out the hospital window. It was raining, of course. The kind that fell soft and vertical, like background static in a Marvel montage scene.
"I had tickets to the next Avengers premiere," he said after a while, voice barely audible. "Was supposed to come out next summer."
The doctor stayed silent.
He turned back, smiling like someone trying not to cry at their own funeral. "Guess I'll have to wait for the Disney+ version wherever I end up, huh?"
The doctor chuckled politely. He didn't know what else to do.
Vaylen walked out before the doctor could offer pamphlets or counselors or medication. He didn't need morphine.
Not yet.
The elevator chimed, sleek and silent as always, as it opened into the heart of Vaylen's penthouse—fifty-seven floors above the city. The rain still whispered down the windows, casting ripples of gray across the skyline. The room was sharp steel, dark wood, minimalist. All form, no warmth.
A holographic display hovered in the air over his desk. News tickers, financial graphs, global networks blinking like stars.
He stepped out of his soaked hoodie and let it fall. His reflection in the glass looked... fine. Too fine. Still tall, lean, expensive jawline. But he could feel it under the surface now. The tremor in his left hand. The warmth behind his right eye. The pressure like a cork screwed into the center of his brain.
He walked past the conference table, past the display cases where others might keep art—but his held replicas: a full-scale Iron Man gauntlet, Mjolnir, a Captain America shield with battle scratches he had forged himself. And front and center, a one-of-a-kind chessboard made entirely from carved vibranium and obsidian, each piece shaped after a Marvel hero or villain.
He touched the Iron Man helmet lightly.
"They made it look easy," he whispered.
No response. Just silence and rain.
Vaylen sat at the central desk. The interface recognized him and came to life.
> VAYLEN SYSTEMS – AUTHORIZED ACCESS GRANTED.
ASSETS: $14.8 BILLION – LIQUID.
INQUIRY: ACTION?
He hesitated. Not from doubt. Just from the weight of the moment—like he was about to press the detonate button on something sacred.
"Transfer holdings."
> To where?
He exhaled. "Break it apart. One billion to every one of these foundations."
He swiped a list onto the screen: children's cancer wards, orphanages in war zones, refugee shelters, clean water initiatives, burn units. He'd made the list weeks ago, before the diagnosis. Just in case.
> Confirm destruction of Vaylen Group?
The words hung like a knife.
He tapped: Yes.
The screen blinked red. Then green. Then black.
> TRANSFER COMPLETE. VAYLEN GROUP HAS CEASED TO EXIST.
He leaned back. For the first time in a decade, no emails, no meetings, no notifications. Just silence. Silence and rain.
His phone buzzed.
A message from his legal rep:
> "Are you sure about this? No heirs? No trusts?"
He typed back:
> "Let the world inherit it. I was just borrowing it anyway."
He tossed the phone aside. For the first time in years, he didn't feel important.
He just felt… free.
After some time,he went to visit the childrens.The children lit up when they saw him.
He didn't wear a suit or a mask—just a T-shirt with an arc reactor printed on it and a red hoodie.
Every Friday, he visited the pediatric cancer ward with comics, snacks, and action figures tucked under one arm. He sat cross-legged on the tile floor like one of them, told stories in voices, acted out whole fight scenes with plastic Thors and Thanoses.
He never told them who he was.
They didn't know the man reading Spider-Man to them was the reason their MRI machine still worked, or why their meds arrived on time every week.
It didn't matter.
The kids laughed and leaned on him, and that was more real than anything he'd ever built.
Later that week, he visited a quiet orphanage outside the city.
There was a boy there who never spoke and always drew monsters.
Vaylen gave him a blank sketchbook and said, "You can make your own universe now."
The boy smiled without saying a word.
At night, he went home to silence.
No assistants. No press. No distractions.
He rewatched Endgame three times in one week.
Each time, he paused right before the final snap.
He whispered it with him every time.
"I am Iron Man."
Then the light.
He packed his things slowly over the next week.
He kept only one item when everything else was donated, boxed, or erased from memory.
It sat on his shelf, alone.
The helmet.
It was scratched, cracked from age, and had fallen once when he was nineteen during a storm.
But he'd kept it.
Tony's eyes stared back at him. Empty, but familiar.
A reminder of what it meant to be a man with a mission—and a deadline.
He didn't cry.
There was no one to see if he did.
Great—continuing now.
The day finally came,The ceiling was beige, cracked in the corners, humming with dim fluorescent light. It was the last thing he saw before his eyes stopped bothering to focus.
The nurses had come and gone. Tubes out. Meds maxed. No more beeping machines, just a pulse monitor and a soft chair in the corner. The kind they let family use.
No one sat in it.
He didn't expect anyone.
His breath was shallow now. Not painful—just quiet. Like his lungs had accepted the ending before he did.
And then—
Time paused.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The shadows froze on the walls. The ticking clock stopped mid-click. The air went still in his throat.
And the light—
The light changed.
It wasn't the overhead fluorescents anymore. It was gold, soft, wide. Not warm. Not cold. Just... beyond.
He blinked.
He was no longer lying in a bed.
He stood barefoot on something that felt like polished stone, surrounded by open sky. White clouds without sun. No sound but his breath, and even that felt optional.
Something shifted behind him.
A figure approached—tall, robed, and faceless. Not human. Not hostile. Just present.
"Where am I?" Vaylen asked.
The figure tilted its head, though it had no features.
"You have died," it said. The voice was not spoken aloud. It simply was.
Vaylen looked at his hands. They looked... fine. Whole. His hoodie was gone. He wore something smooth, silver-gray. Weightless.
"Okay," he said slowly. "This doesn't look like hell. Or heaven. Or... anything."
"It is not."
"Then what are you?"
"I am judgment," the voice said. "But not punishment. Not reward. I am... observation."
"Observation," Vaylen repeated. "So you're watching the movie?"
"In a sense."
They stood in silence a while. There was no wind, no passing time. Just that glowing space, endless.
"You gave everything away," the being finally said. "Without asking. Without expecting. Few do that."
Vaylen shrugged. "I didn't think it was a big deal."
"It was."
"Okay."
The figure walked in slow, soundless steps. "Would you like to begin again?"
He hesitated. "In this world?"
"No. A different one. It is not yet born. But it will be."
"Another Earth?"
"No. A realm older than stars. Where chaos has not yet been named. Where power is not given—it is taken."
Vaylen narrowed his eyes. "And what am I supposed to be in this... realm?"
"You will be what you shape yourself to be."
"And if I say no?"
"Then you return to silence."
The silence behind that word felt very permanent.
Vaylen thought of the boy with the sketchbook. Of the little girl who'd given him her last peanut butter cup after storytime. Of the helmet on his shelf.
He thought of all the stories he never got to see end.
And he smiled.
"Alright," he said. "Let's start over."
The Arbiter raised a hand.
The golden-white sky shattered like glass—
And Vaylen fell into darkness.
There was no sound.
Not even the kind you hear underwater or in dreams. Just pure, perfect absence.
And cold. Not the temperature kind. Something colder. Something old. Something that remembered what it was like to not exist.
He couldn't see. He couldn't move. His body had no outline. His breath had no rhythm. He was only... there.
Was this what being reborn felt like?
Vaylen tried to speak, but there was no mouth.
He tried to scream, and something cracked—space, maybe, or his memory of space.
Then something responded.
Not a voice. Not a god.
The darkness itself.
It bent toward him.
Not violently. Just… aware.
And then it began to change.
Colors bled into black. Light leaked into shape. Stars formed, then broke apart. Reality struggled to take hold, and failed again and again.
He could feel something expanding from within him—pressure without pain. Power with no source.
His thoughts had weight here. His mind pulsed, and the darkness obeyed.
A floating structure formed around him—jagged, fluid, impossible. Geometry that shouldn't exist. Space that folded into itself. He couldn't name it.
But he knew what it was.
A realm.
His realm.
The Dark Dimension.
He didn't build it. It formed because he existed. And it reflected what was inside him—memories, regret, anger, hope twisted into something more raw.
He floated in the center of it. No body, yet full of presence. The darkness pulsed with his heartbeat. He realized:
> This place bends to me.
And in that moment of terrifying wonder—
He felt it.
A flicker. Not inside. Outside.
Something… watching.
Something vast.
Older than this place. Older than him.
It whispered—not in words, but in a hunger so ancient it didn't know how to speak anymore.
And it moved.
Through the edge of the void, far beyond what should be reachable, a shadow was drifting closer. A shape formed of blade and hunger, godhood and silence.
Knull.
He had seen the tear in the void—the fracture Vaylen's arrival had caused—and now he was coming to erase it.
Vaylen didn't know the name. Not yet.
But he knew exactly what he was looking at.
An enemy.
A predator.
A god who believed he was the only one allowed to rule the dark.
And he was heading straight for him.
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End of Chapter 1