Maren had been dead long enough to stop counting, which — she'd decided early on — was probably the healthiest thing a person could do about it.
She'd figured out the shape of her own afterlife fast, faster than most, mostly because she refused to sit still and grieve a life that, by every account she could give herself, had been small and good and now simply over. Other silhouettes she passed spent decades folded up around themselves, replaying whatever last good afternoon they could still remember before the memories locked behind a wall none of them had chosen. Maren had tried that for about what felt like a season and gotten unbearably bored of her own sadness.
So she walked. That was the whole plan. There wasn't a destination, because the Between didn't reward you with one — it just kept going, gray and empty and enormous, exactly the way it had been described to her the day she arrived, back when a voice in her own head (not another soul's, just some baseline knowledge dropped into her like a seed of its own) had explained Missions and Contracts and told her, essentially, good luck, this is forever now.
She'd built herself a face slowly, the unglamorous way — not through some grand power display, just patient, boring effort, the same muscle she'd have called stubbornness back when she was alive. Dark hair cut short because there was no one here to keep it nice for. Brown eyes that had never learned the trick of looking politely away from something uncomfortable, because back when she was alive, looking away from uncomfortable things had never once made them stop being true.
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She was three, maybe four Missions into her whole afterlife — Exploration types, mostly, the kind where nothing threatens you, you just get pulled somewhere strange and told to notice something — when she felt the ground do something it had never done before.
It wasn't dramatic. That was the strange part. It was more like the air itself flinched, once, somewhere off to her left, the way a held breath flinches right before it breaks.
She stopped walking. She had absolutely no reason to investigate — every practical instinct the Between had taught her said whatever that was, it is not your business, and investigating strange flinches in a world this size is how souls simply stop existing.
She turned left anyway.
She'd think, much later, that this was the exact moment her whole afterlife actually started — not her arrival, not her first Mission, this. The moment she chose curiosity over caution for absolutely no reason she could defend to anyone, and started walking toward a colorless hill she had no way of knowing held, at that exact moment, something that had just torn itself free of the only ground it had ever known and had no idea, none at all, what came next.