It took just thirty seconds for my fair Berwyn, New England to be reduced to a smoking crater. One amongst countless other such craters across the globe.

It took two hundred years of rain, wind and snow to gradually erode and fill that crater till it became something like a lake.

It took three hundred more years for the nearest fast flowing river to shift according to the whims of the rampaging climate, feeding into that lake.

It took an additional fifty years for that lake to be absorbed as a part of the river, thusly becoming included with its connection to the sea.

It took an hour and a single seconds of bad luck for certain post-nuclear otter knock over some shifting rubble and trigger a dead bomb that had been lying at the bottom of the lake.

The resulting explosion further widening the new addition to the river and loosing up the surrounding soil, making it more vulnerable to erosion.

One hundred and fifty years later the whole area was overtaken by the sea. The aggressive flow of the river and the encroachment of the ever rising tides, slowly shrinking the nearby coasts till everything was submerged in the calm black waters.

It was near of the end of all this that I arose. Bursting back into consciousness, like I’d been there all along and only resting my eyes for a few seconds.

*****

A small little fun fact, about the effects of the magic on Agartha that was often shared by this world’s scholarly types, was that one in every one thousand people, was secretly immortal. Or at least tenably so.

According to the internet it had something to do with Mana nodes, the collective unconscious, possible evidence of Agartha having been artificially created by either Angels or Demons or Aliens, and quantum resonance of the human soul.

All things that I held only a very cursory knowledge of if only because I was under the impression that they were at least partly made up.

Like most kids, I was wowed when I first heard this. Then when I was older and learned that this “so-called” immortality was only triggered under certain highly improbable circumstances, and that in some cases this immortality was only partial, the wow started to fade.

I mean, to prove this theory, one would have to try to die, and considering that there was a ninety-nine point nine, nine, percent chance that one might really die even if one “was” an immortal, if the circumstances weren’t just right, it was only expected that realism would step in.

By the time I was a proper adult I already understood it to be one of those scientific in jokes like schrodinger's cat, or maxwell's demon. A statement that was either meant to disprove itself, or point out an odd, little understood, concept, in a more substantial line of scientific thought, but was otherwise not meant to be taken seriously.

However, seven hundred years after my death, it seemed that I and everybody else were wrong. Spectacularly wrong.

I was alive, and I was immortal. As to how I knew I was immortal and not just inexplicably alive, let’s just say my return trip from the other side had left me, a very changed man.