Revival

He wasn't sure when the pain had ended and the endless darkness had overtaken him. There was nothing but the darkness. No sound, no sights, no smells, no feeling. No thoughts. No sense of the passage of time. The void was everlasting and ever powerful. If he had even been aware enough to recognize it, he wasn't sure if it would have been a blessing or a curse after the tremendous pain that his death had been. A knife directly into his heart, twisted and torn free from his body, which collapsed to the ground. There were only a few brief moments of consciousness between that and the life draining from his body. But those moments had been excruciating.

The air rushing back into his lungs was almost as painful. Almost, but not quite. His body had forgotten what exactly to do with the air, and he choked on it, sputtering, trying to force himself to properly use the air. As he breathed heavily and awkwardly, he forced his eyes to open, but the light and the colors were so intensely different from what the darkness had been he couldn't keep them open. He tried to cover his eyes with his hands, but his limbs were heavy and unresponsive, and he felt them slamming into his face like a hard slap. That certainly wasn't helping.

The sounds around him were deafening. Even his own breath was hard to hear, so incredibly loud where once it had been indistinguishable from the rest of the world around him. And then there was the shouting. It could have been a hundred, a thousand people standing around him for all he knew, yelling at one another to do this or to do that, that they needed to know something, that they needed something. He couldn't follow the voices. They were too loud, too frantic.

And then their hands were all over him. Moving his limbs, pushing him down, trying to attach some things and detach others. He had no idea what was going on. He tried multiple times to open his eyes and look at them to see what was happening, but he it was just too much for him. He couldn't comprehend it, and it was too painful.

Was this what hell was like? Was that what awaited him in the afterlife?

"We've done it!" The first clear words. "He's back!"