[Memory: 0.0182% recovered]
[Memory: 0.0621% recovered]
[Memory: 0.0999% recovered]
The runes did not arrive in sequence, nor in any rhythm he could predict. They came like faint echoes through an endless void—long pauses between each flare, gaps that could have been seconds or centuries.
Time no longer had edges.
He wasn't conscious. He couldn't be. And yet… something lingered. A fragile thread of awareness woven through the black. Not enough to wake him, but enough to let him know he still was.
And if he could still think, he reasoned, he must still be alive.
But thought itself was treacherous—because every time he questioned his existence, he felt the question bite back.
Then—light.
Not the warm gold of dawn. Not the silver bleed of moonlight. This was red: insistent, pulsing, slicing through the perfect black behind his sealed eyes.
Sound followed. The first intrusion in an eternity of silence—an alarm, shrill and mechanical, reverberating through the abyss of his mind.
His eyelids fought against a heaviness that didn't feel like sleep. Shapes loomed, warped by liquid and glass.
He was floating.
No—suspended.
The green fluid surrounding him began to drain, slithering away in slow spirals. The instant it fell below his neck, air failed him—
—and the dark claimed him again.
---
Lucian awoke.
This time, light came in a blade-sharp stripe, splitting the room in two. His eyes watered at the intrusion, but he forced them open.
The chamber was neither large nor small, yet it carried a weight that pressed in from every wall. The ceiling rose into shadow, unreachable. The air tasted of metal, ozone, and something sterile, almost surgical.
At the heart of the room stood a monolith—an inverted pyramid forged from black metal so lightless it seemed to drink the glow around it. Veins of dull red and faint blue light traced its surface, alive but patient, like something waiting to wake.
Raised platforms encircled it, each crowned with machines of unnerving design—bladed limbs, glass cylinders, coils that hummed faintly in the bones.
To one side, a panoramic window overlooked a dead world. The sky hung low and sickly gray, the earth fractured into jagged scars. In the distance, a solitary pillar rose from the horizon, impossibly tall, as though it had been placed there to challenge the heavens.
The silence here was not absence—it was presence. A gaze without eyes.
"Where am I?" Lucian muttered, voice rasping as though it had been years since he'd spoken.
"The Black Keep Research Center," a voice answered from the far side of the room.
A woman entered.
She moved like a blade unsheathed—elegant, balanced, and ready to cut. Tall, with the lithe frame of someone who had survived more than training could prepare for. Hair the color of midnight framed a face of sculpted precision, her eyes glacial blue and sharp enough to pierce the armor of any lie.
Lucian stared. Too long. It had been too long since he had seen another living face, and something in him—something he didn't want to name—hesitated.
"What's your name?" she asked, her tone quiet but unblinking.
"Why?" Lucian shot back, then immediately frowned at himself. The reflex for defiance was still there, but without conviction.
"It's Lucian," he said after a beat.
The corner of her mouth curved—not kindness, not mockery, but something in between. She stepped to a section of wall and placed her palm against it. Metal shimmered into glass, revealing another chamber beyond. Inside stood a man in a sterile white cell, watching without expression.
"This is Hareth," she said. "An agent of the Black Keep. Like me."
Lucian's eyes narrowed. "Why am I here? What do you want?"
"Good. Straight to it." She paced slowly toward him, every step deliberate. "But if you want to understand why, you'll need to know where 'here' truly is."
"I asked why, not for a lecture," Lucian interrupted. "The last thing I remember was Namek. I need to know how long it's been since then."
Her expression cooled. "Impatient," she murmured. "Fine. No preamble, then."
She turned toward the black pyramid, fingertips gliding over its surface. Lucian felt something shift beneath him, only now realizing he was strapped into a chair that hadn't been there in his memory before.
"It's been four years since you were brought to the Black Keep," she said, her voice gaining a surgical precision. Then she came close—too close—her eyes locking onto his.
"And as for why…"
Her smile was gone now, replaced by the kind of stillness that precedes catastrophe.
"You, Lucian—" she said, each word deliberate—
"—might be the most dangerous thing in the entire mortal universe."