Zeus wasn’t supposed to wake up. The physicians said his heart had stopped for eleven minutes during the accident. Eleven minutes without oxygen, without life, without anything but darkness pressing in from all sides. When he opened his eyes three weeks later, the world had changed. Or maybe he had changed. His sister told him about the coma, the machines, the vigil their mother kept. She didn’t mention the dreams. Nobody asked about those. But Zeus remembered them with perfect clarity: vast golden fields that stretched beyond sight, a sky filled with colors that had no names, and the voice that kept calling him back. Not to the hospital bed, but to somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that felt more real than the sterile room where he learned to walk again. The doctors called it a miracle. The insurance company called it a liability. Zeus called it the beginning, though he didn’t know of what. Six months of physical therapy taught his body to remember what it had forgotten.
