He awoke on the floor.
Not with a scream. Not with a gasp. Only the low percussion of breath uncoiling inside a body that had long forgotten how to inhale.
Above him, the ceiling moved — not from wind or tremor, but from some trick of unreality. Light flowed over the cracked plaster like oil slicks over dark water, iridescent and indecipherable. It shimmered like the surface of a false memory.
This wasn't waking. This was emergence.
The air clung with the taste of oxidized iron and sleep that had rotted too long in silence. And the silence — it was not a lack of sound. It was a presence. Pressurized. Observant. As though the room itself held its breath.
His eyelids rose slowly, like old theater curtains opening in a house long abandoned.
What greeted them wasn't image or clarity — but motionless blur, as though the world had yet to finish buffering. It felt procedural. Simulated. Fragile.
Sound crawled toward him across great distances. It had to pass through caverns of static memory and submerged thought. The light around him was unstable — bruised, broken, refracted. A flicker, like the afterglow of a dying star, or a divine machine failing in real time.
He moved. Fingers searching the ground with the slow hesitance of amnesia.
They found something. Rounded. Smooth. Glasses.
His hands trembled, antennae trying to receive a signal from whatever lay beyond the veil. When his fingers closed around the frame, it felt warm. Personal. Like it remembered the face that had worn it.
He put them on.
The world didn't sharpen — it confessed.
And clarity came not as relief, but as consequence. With clarity came definition. With definition came truth. And with truth — the cold bite of disbelief.
Everything in the room was floating.
A crooked chair. A flickering lamp. Book pages yellowed and soft as brittle leaves drifting in molasses. A half-eaten apple. A crucifix melted sideways. A rusted ceiling fan that spun without axis. Even light itself hovered — unmoored, bleeding into the shadows like a candle left to drown.
They circled one another in a slow ritual, orbiting as if choreographed by forgotten gravity.
And at the center of it all: A revolver.
Spinning above a desk like a sacred artifact. Not violent. Not loud. But inevitable.
He pulled himself upright. The scrape of his boots against the floor echoed like the last laws of physics refusing to die quietly.
And then—
He saw himself.
The mirror on the far wall was fractured, suspended crookedly like it had been caught mid-collapse. But it still reflected.
A man. Mid-twenties, or perhaps a corpse made fresh with borrowed youth. Black hair curled in disarray — like stray thoughts resisting structure. Eyes, deep brown and cautious, wary, uncertain. Pupils slow to trust their own reflection. The kind of eyes that had seen too much and remembered too little.
A scar slashed diagonally across his nose. Too deliberate to be accidental. A memory etched in the language of violence.
He wore a jacket — not blue, but navy. The color of drowning. Matte. Worn. Rain-drenched history stitched at the seams.
Underneath, a clinging black shirt, soaked in the weight of previous nights. His frame was made for disappearing into alleyways, for surviving places where names were luxuries.
His jeans were elegies in denim. Knees torn. Dust-caked. Symbols scratched faintly into the fabric — somewhere between glyphs and prayers, barely visible through the ash of time.
But the boots…
They did not belong.
They were made of void-black leather, laced tight up the calf. At the seams, faint pulses of crimson and cyan whispered outward, as if breathing. Not tech. Not fashion. Statement.
They didn't say I walk — they said I remember what the ground used to be.
And then the question. The only question that mattered:
"Who am I?"
No answer. Only silence — watching, waiting.
But muscle remembered. Instinct breathed. And below all that — a darker memory. A deeper pulse.
Not pain received. Pain delivered.
He turned. To the revolver.
It spun slowly in the air, like a heartbeat belonging to a god who had long since left.
He stepped forward, pushing the floating chair aside.
His hand reached. Touched.
Pain. Immediate. Intimate. Electric.
His wrist lit up — symbols glowing beneath the skin, pulsing like old circuitry reawakened. They twisted. Ancient. Unreadable. Living.
Then — a voice. Not heard. Felt.
Whispered through bone:
"ϞϘⱤϾϠ..."
The language didn't belong to humans. It unspooled in his skull like a code from before names were invented.
Then his jacket unfolded — revealing something hidden in its lining. A holster, too elegant, too clean. More ritual than design.
The revolver clicked open. A cold, mechanical breath.
Five bullets. One chamber empty.
He stared at the void. Thumb grazing brass.
The empty slot was not absence. It was a question.
He closed the chamber. Holstered the gun. It slid in as if welcomed back home.
His body remembered the motion. He did not.
The room remained still.
Not inert — observant.
As though deciding if he belonged here.
Or if he was the only one who ever had.
There. At the far wall — A door. Plain. Breathing.
He stepped toward it. Each step pressed a word into the dust beneath. A language only fate could read.
His fingers hovered above the handle. Trembling. Not from fear. But from recognition.
He'd opened this door before. Too many times.
And then — a voice. His own. Dry as bone.
"What's waiting… on the other side?"
It didn't feel like his voice. It felt… inherited.
He turned the knob.
Beyond:
A corridor that should not exist.
Walls flickered like memories replaying out of order. Fluorescent lights hummed like teeth grinding. Geometry curled inward — cannibalizing itself. Doors led to themselves. Floor tiles repeated endlessly, textures caught in looped decay.
And at the far end — A sound.
Ringing.
A telephone, crying out from the edge of time.
He walked. Drawn.
Another whisper passed his lips — uninvited:
"What… is this place?"
No answer. Only the ringing.
And the hallway swallowed him.
Somewhere behind reality's curtain — something watched. Or laughed. Or mourned.
Only one truth remained:
He was not the first to wake in this place.
And he would not be the last.