He remembers the light first—soft, blinding, impossibly gentle. It felt like every comforting story he’d ever heard about heaven was finally, beautifully true. Then came the shift. The warmth vanished, replaced by a presence that watched, measured, owned him. He wasn’t walking through pearly gates; he was dragged into a place that didn’t need walls to feel like a prison.

What he met there weren’t angels, at least not the kind painted in Sunday school books. They bound him without chains, mocked his confusion, and spoke of Earth as nothing more than a field where souls are grown, harvested, and claimed. Six minutes on a hospital monitor stretched into an eternity he can’t forget. Doctors called it a hallucination. Loved ones blamed fear and youth. Yet he insists it was real, and his story lingers like a splinter in the mind: what if the light we’re chasing isn’t what we think it is?