I awoke to a silence so vast, it felt like I had slipped beneath the surface of the world, where sound had drowned and light had forgotten its purpose. My eyes opened slowly, as if resisting the weight of consciousness itself, and all I saw was white. A boundless white, not warm like sunlight, nor soft like snow, but flat, cold, and eternal.
There was no ceiling, no floor, no walls. No reference points. Only the all consuming whiteness stretching endlessly in every direction, as if I had been dropped into the mind of a blank canvas before the first stroke of creation. It was the kind of white that makes you feel small without knowing why.
I remained motionless at first, unsure whether I had truly woken or simply drifted into another kind of dream. My body felt real, yet distant. Every breath I took echoed inside my skull, loud and sharp, but no sound met the air. It was like breathing into cotton.
I turned my head, slowly, expecting something anything to break the monotony. A figure, a shadow, even a flaw in the surface. But there was nothing. Not even the sound of my own footsteps when I rose to stand. The surface beneath me held my weight, yet I could not see it. It felt like walking on memory, uncertain and unstable.
Panic did not come. Not yet. Instead, a kind of deep unease began to settle over me, like a mist creeping through the bones. I reached for memory, but it slipped through my fingers like water. My name was there. A few fragments remained flashes of light, a distant voice, the scent of rain on pavement. But they offered no answers.
I was someone. I had lived. I had laughed. I had feared.
Now I was here.
I whispered, more to confirm that I still had a voice than to seek a reply.
Where am I?
The words hung in the air without echo, swallowed instantly by the space around me. Even my own voice felt like a trespass.
I tried to reason. I tried to place this sensation in something I knew. Was this death? Was I dreaming? Had I fallen into some fracture of the world where time and matter forgot their rules?
No. Dreams felt different. I had lived enough of them to know the rules they followed. In dreams, things shifted without warning. Time bent. Pain dulled. But here, everything was sharp. I felt the weight of my limbs, the cold in my fingertips. I could smell nothing, hear nothing, but I could feel everything. Too clearly.
And so, slowly, fear began to grow.
What kind of dream makes you feel realer than reality?
I began to walk. There was no direction, but the movement was necessary. Staying still felt like sinking into the void. Each step left no mark. The white world did not respond. No change, no sign, not even a shift in light. I might have been moving in circles, or not moving at all.
As I walked, thoughts flooded my mind. Stories I had read. Fantasies of people waking in strange worlds, pulled through rifts, portals, mirrors, books. I had laughed at those stories once, called them foolish escapism. Now I clung to them like they were lifelines.
What if that's what happened? What if I crossed? What if something someone brought me here?
The silence deepened. I stopped walking.
Something was changing.
It was subtle at first. The light around me grew less perfect, less complete. A faint sense of depth crept into the whiteness, like a distant memory trying to take shape. Then came texture. A floor beneath my feet that felt more like wood than mist. The air grew thicker. Heavier. Warmer.
And then, without transition, I was no longer in the white void.
I stood in a room. A real room.
The transformation had been silent, seamless, like slipping between breaths. The whiteness was gone, replaced by aged stone and warm timber. The floor creaked beneath me. Dust floated in the air like golden ash. The scent of old wood and something faintly metallic lingered.
The room felt medieval, like something from a forgotten age. There was a narrow bed, an unlit lantern on a small table, and a wardrobe in the corner made of rough oak. A single window filtered sunlight into soft beams, as if reluctant to disturb the stillness.
I stood there for a long moment, just breathing.
This was not my world.
The hum of electricity was gone. No screens, no machines, no distant traffic. The quiet here was deep, not just the absence of sound, but the presence of age, of time passed and left behind. It felt like I had stepped into the memory of a place, rather than the place itself.
I approached the window.
Outside, I saw rolling green hills, a winding path, and far in the distance, the outline of a forest. The sky above was a soft gray, clouded but calm. No towers, no wires, no cities.
Just earth. Air. Silence.
A strange calm settled over me. Not peace exactly, but something close. I was no longer in danger of floating away into nothing. I was somewhere now, somewhere real. Even if I didn't understand it.
I needed to know who I was in this world.
And why I had been brought here.