Kael opened his eyes to find himself slowly floating down a gloomy, mist-filled, cobblestone pathway. To either side of the pathway was nothing but a thick gray fog that hindered vision past just a few feet. All he could see to the sides was dead grey grass and black dirt. The pathway was slate grey and although he was slowly floating above the stones, they seemed to be worn down by the passage of innumerable feet.

Looking ahead Kael could see an enormous palace. Due to the mist and distance, it was hard to tell its exact size. Seeing thousands of golden towers, built with an Arabic design, raising up from the top of the palace like flames trying to eat away the gloom. He understood, its size was not something he could comprehend. The gargantuan palace sat in the center of the gloom, designed like the middle of a wheel with pathways radiating out from it as if they were an uncountable number of spokes.

Peering around through the mists for a bit he asked himself, “where the fuck am I?” He came to the abrupt realization that he wasn’t even sure who he was. Closing his eyes and concentrating on his life, his memories started to come back, but they were jumbled up. He seemed to be missing the memories of his early childhood.

This understanding gave him quite a shock, causing a sharp intake of cold air to be drawn between his teeth. With the large inhalation, he could see swirls of mist being sucked in with his breath. As the mist entered his mouth he felt like he lost something of himself. Stopping to concentrate on his memories again, he found he could no longer remember anything before the age of 15 or 16.

Terrified by his loss of memories and suspecting the culprit was the mist, he simply decided to stop breathing. After holding his breath, he began to wildly dash towards the huge palace in the distance. A few seconds later he noticed even though his speed increased he was still just floating along. Not breathing did not seem to have a negative effect on him either. His memories were still slowly being eroded. Concluding that even contacting the mist was bad for his health, he focused on “running” faster and faster. With the chant, faster, faster, faster, in his mind, the pathway and gloom seemed to turn into a grey tunnel. He sped over the cobblestones as the palace steadily grew in size.

After a few minutes of flying forward at who knows what speeds; Kael finally arrived at the palace. Staring at the grey walls that were at least hundreds of feet high, his pathway ended with a small open archway that led into the monstrous building. The archway was lined with old tarnished gold and was almost phallic shaped. Laughing to himself he thought, wasn’t there a children's movie that got busted for this? Arabic designs are not safe for the dirty minded. The sides of the archway were coated in grime from being brushed by the hands of countless passerby's that came before.

The interior of the passage did not seem dark but was filled with an almost wall-like mist that could not be seen through. Thinking, what the hell kind of shitty, boring dream is this? Should I go in or look around, and what happens if I forgot everything? Ah fuck it, I will wake up regardless and maybe it won’t be so boring inside. Floating forward Kael passed through the misty gloom, which sent tingling cold flashes throughout his body and down his spine.

The other side of the archway was like all the gloom had been blown away. In front of him was a large room where the cobblestone pathway split into hundreds of smaller paths. At the end of each path was a small ramp to a platform. The platforms were just barely raised above the ground, and could not be more than five feet in diameter. Each of the platforms was scrawled with a number on the outside and a strange set of circular symbols on the inside. Looking back, the archway was now gone, leaving nothing but a grey wall behind him.

Floating there with hesitation he heard a deep and raspy voice in front of him, “New soul why are you not moving, enter platform 46 immediately, don’t hold up the line.” Shocked, Kael looked towards the sound and saw an indistinct humanoid shape standing off to the side of the paths. there were also almost transparent humanoid figures floating towards the left half of the platforms. While looking around the voice came out again, this time booming, “Move to platform 46 immediately or be penalized half of your karma!”

Not knowing what was going on, or what the penalty actually meant, Kael decided it was best to just go with the flow so he did not accidentally screw himself. Scanning the platforms he found number 46 and started floating towards it. Once he drifted up the ramp and stopped in the center, the weird arcane looking symbols on the ground flashed. Everything turned white and he felt his body twisting like he was a wet rag being repeatedly ringed out.

After a few seconds that felt like torture Kael’s vision finally cleared. He found himself hovering in the center of a well lit room. The walls were covered with bookshelves and the bookshelves were filled with three-ring style binders. Each of the binders was labeled with a different name on the spine.

Directly in front of him was a large wooden desk that was covered in papers. All of the papers seemed to be made of an old style of parchment and had scribbles over them. A medieval style quill pen and a large, leather-bound and well used book called, Samsara, a handguide to recreating souls were sitting prominently in the center of the desk.

Looking a bit past the desk there was a red skinned man with black fingernails. Other than his skin and nail color, however, he was a pretty generic looking 30 something. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a look of impatience on his face. He was wearing yellow robes that had an endless knot design hemming the neck and ends of the sleeves. A black turban with a golden version of the same knot upon it was meticulously wrapped upon his head. In his hands, he held an open three-ring binder that he was reading.

Not sure if he should disturb the red guy or not, Kael just stood there foolishly looking around. After a few minutes, the man finally snapped the binder closed, looked and up and said; “Welcome Kael, to the start of your next life. Kael looked at him bewilderedly and noticed the name of the binder was, Kael Fae, the life of…”

After a moment Kael looked at the guy's face and said, “uhh, this dream is kind of boring, yet also creepy, I’m just going to sit down in the corner until I wake up.” Laughing hard and loud, the red man snapped his fingers causing a chair to appear in front of Kael with a slight puff of gloom. Waving his hand toward the chair he said, “Sit, let's begin the review.”

As Kael took a seat in the generic wooden chair, The man introduced himself, “I am Azabael, a lesser demon working in the office of rebirth and Kael, this is not a dream, you died.”

Shocked, Kael stood from his chair shouting, “Bullshit, don’t give me that crap!”

Sighing, the man waved his hand, which forced Kael to suddenly sink back down again and said “Now listen here, if you did not have so much positive karma I would not even be talking to you. You died. You simply can’t remember because Old Lady Meng decided drinking her potions wasted too much time. So she spread it around as a mist in the underworld. You are in fact dead and are about to be reborn.”

Still looking at the man like he was observing an idiot, Kael asked, “If I am dead how did I die, and how do I know that you are telling the truth if you erased my memories?”

Azabael swallowed the annoyance and anger he felt cropping up, “I don’t really care if you believe me or not, it won’t change anything, you died trying to help someone out of a burning car. The car exploded and you turned into a grilled, hashed, meat patty.”

Looking Kael directly in the eye he said, “Now to move onto the review, just be quiet and this will all pass, you won’t remember it anyway. First, you helped 2,698 homeless people with random acts of kindness, not expecting any payback and not mentioning it in an attempt to make yourself seem like a good person. We will round it up to 2,700 random acts of kindness, of which we pay one-tenth of a karma per action, for a total of 270 karma points.

Now don’t be upset, it is really hard to gain positive karma and really easy to gain negative karma. For example, as a child, you committed acts of bullying, vandalism, and theft numerous times. From the age of 10 to 15, you gained a whopping 3,200 negative karma. Lucky for you we reduce the penalty to children under the age of 16 by 90%, for a total childhood negative karma of 320.

See that, helping 2,700 homeless people out over 20 years of time did not even cancel out your acting like a little shit for 5 years. You know, to burn off a point of negative karma it requires 10 years of wandering the plains of misfortune. You can also opt to burn alive for 1 year per point or be tortured for 1 day per point. Finally, you can cancel out 270 points of negative karma with your positive karma, but you won’t have that karma to carry over into your rebirth.”

Kael looked a little overwhelmed by that barrage of nonsense and a few moments later shook his head to clear it. Looking at Azabael, Kael scratched the back of his head with a bashful look on his face and asked, “What about the other good and bad things I did in my life? That can’t be all of the nice things I did. If I was willing to help out the homeless peeps, I must have helped out my friends and family too.”

“You are right Kael, let me give you a complete break down first then. 270 karma for helping homeless people. 32 karma for donations to proper charities, 28 karma for assisting your friends and family over and above what we would expect of you. For the big closing, you had the Savior status for 4 people, who you pulled out of the absolute gutters of life and assisted them massively on rebuilding themselves. For that, we pay well, 50 points each, and finally, your self-sacrifice that got you killed for a complete stranger was worth 250. All together we have 980 karma, only 20 points short of saint status, good job Kael!

Now, your childhood cost you 320, you broke two hearts for 25 each, lost 100 during your time at as a call center manager for overlooking your bosses discrimination. That is a total of negative 470 karma. Truly not bad, leaving you with a positive 510 karma, still enough to make your next life awesome, now Kael..”

At this point Kael stood back up, shooting out of his chair and leaning over the desk shouting, “Hold up, hold up A-dog! I never said I wanted to cancel out my karma. I won’t remember it anyway, so let’s use all the positive karma and you can torture me for a year and a half, I don’t give a shit.”

“Wait a moment Kael, I know you won’t remember, but I can assure you, it will be terrible, you are talking about torture that is worse than fighting for your life for 4,700 years. You may even become a demented soul, in which case you will be recycled completely, your soul will cease to exists”

“Who cares man, I’ll take that chance. Since I have such big balls and might get recycled you should give me another 20 karma so my next life I can be born with a saint status right? I mean, I’m saving you guys the energy of supervising my wanderings for 4,700 years.”

Laughing Azabael said, “It doesn’t really work that way, but I’m..”

Interrupting him, Kael started pacing back and forth in the room while he said “Now I don’t believe that, I am sure you have some wiggle room man. Look I was a shitty kid, but I mended my ways and lived life like a bored old fart with a heart of gold.”

“Kael, saint status may not even be what you want, but it would be quicker to spend 1,000 points right off the bat instead of figuring out how to spend 980, so I approve, prepare for torture and rebirth.” After saying that Azabael picked up a pen and wrote in the book of Kael, Choice, torture off negative karma. Final karma grant, 1,000. Setting down his pen he picked up a large stamp and got ready to slam it down when another form shimmered into existence in the room.

The visitor was another vaguely humanoid-shaped thing, it was so indistinct that it had no real features, just an ethereal looking outline of a person. After appearing it announced “Criminal activity in zone 67, an immortal is attempting to refine the pool of souls, all employees are to immediately go to zone 67 to stop the criminal activity”. Once it was done droning out that information it faded from existence again.

Stunned, Kael said, “Uhh, that doesn’t sound good.” Azabael gave him a, you are really stupid look, and said, “Take a seat, I’ll be back shortly” and vanished from sight in a puff of gloom.

Looking at the now empty office Kael thought to himself, Even in dreams I get dicked around and waste time. Taking a seat, Kael’s patience only lasted about 15 minutes before he got up and walked to the other side of the desk. Taking a seat at Azabael’s desk he was surprised at how nice his chair was compared to the mass-produced Swedish knock off he was given earlier.

Rubbing his hands on the cushy leather arms of the chair and wiggling his butt down onto the super soft cushion, he got comfortable after a bit of shifting. After waiting a while longer he eventually picked up and cracked open the book titled, Samsara, a Handguide to Recreating Souls and began to read it.