Excerpt: Reborn

The first thing was light.
It came after an age of darkness, an age of formless grey and cold shadows. He was nothing, a shadow himself: he was a scattered thought drifting through a broken memory. He could feel the blood, and taste the deepness of the red shadows around his face, but there was no substance to it. There was no life. It was as if he had died, and been trapped, unfeeling, unthinking, in his grave.
But then there was the light.
It came suddenly, a bright white orb in the distance. It seemed to burn away the shadows, and he reached toward it like a vine to the sun. And for a moment, it seemed to warm him.
Then there was pain. The warmth became fire, crawling across his skin, melting through his muscles and taking root in his lungs. The scattered thought became a scream, and then, where there had been nothing, there was everything.

His body was real again; it was naked and strapped down at the wrist and ankles and waist. He could feel the hundreds of needles in his skin, anchoring him to the web of tubes and wires that attached him to the machines. There was the cold tile floor, and the smooth, metallic ceiling. There were people, panicky, warm-blooded things that scurried around. But as he became aware of them, he became aware of everything: he could see the blood pumping through them, the veins and the bones and the fragile webs of skin binding them together.
All this rushed his mind through the agony, and each time he breathed, the air was like acid. He tried to shut out the images, the feelings, the knowledge of the world flooding in on him. He thrashed against the straps that held him, and felt them cutting into his skin, but he kept kicking, kept crying and screaming. Things seemed to shake around him, crashing and careening through an imaginary storm.
People around him ran and shouted at one another. The pain grew so intense everything else became a whirling storm of noise and color, with no shape or reason. He tasted blood and salt. Someone took his head in his hand and spoke to him. A sharp pain stuck him in the neck, and seethed into his blood and his brain. There was darkness in it, and it stole over him like a calmness, taking away the sound and the sight and the deep, pulsing colors.
Things went on around him, but he no longer heard them.