The first sensation was not thought, but cold.
It was a deep, seeping cold that seemed to emanate from the very floor beneath him, leaching the memory of warmth from his bones. It was a patient, methodical cold, the kind that did not shock but instead slowly, inevitably, became all that you were. Consciousness returned not as a sudden gasp of light, but as a reluctant admission of this single, uncomfortable truth.
I am cold.
The thought, when it finally formed, was sluggish, a loose thread in a void. Alistair Finch clung to it. He tried to build upon it, to anchor himself. My name is Alistair Finch. I am… He searched for the next part of the syllogism. I am in the university's archival library. A bookshelf…
The memory came as a splinter of sound—a high, shearing screech of tormented wood—followed by a silent, suffocating darkness. The weight. The crushing finality.
I am dead.
The two premises hung in the void of his mind, stark and irreconcilable. I am cold. I am dead. A logical contradiction. The foundation of his reality was flawed from the very first thought.
He tried to move, to gather empirical data, but the attempt was a failure of communication. The command, issued from the distant seat of his mind, was met with a wave of profound weakness and a dull, aching protest from a body that felt alien, disconnected. This was not the familiar, slightly soft body of a twenty-seven-year-old academic. This was a fragile collection of aches held together by a thin, papery skin.
He focused, pushing past the pain. He commanded a finger to twitch. After a moment of strained effort, he felt a faint scrape against a rough, abrasive surface. Not the smooth, polished wood of a library floor. It felt like splintered planks, or perhaps packed earth. The air carried the scent of mildew, damp soil, and something acridly sour that made his stomach clench.
This was not a hospital. Coma hypothesis discarded.
With a monumental effort that felt like lifting one of those fallen bookshelves, he managed to pry his eyelids open.
Darkness. Not the absolute, silent black of the void he had just left, but a textured, living darkness. A single, razor-thin line of silvery moonlight cut through the gloom, illuminating a universe of dancing dust motes. It traced a path across a wall made of rough, unevenly hewn logs, the gaps between them chinked with dried mud and straw. His eyes followed the line of light down to the floor, where he lay on a thin pallet of what looked and smelled like molding straw.
His breath hitched. The scene was too detailed, the sensory input too consistent for a hallucination. The chill on his skin, the ache in his joints, the smell of decay—it was all horribly, undeniably real. Panic, cold and sharp, began to prick at the edges of his analytical calm. He suppressed it. Panic was a conclusion, and he did not yet have sufficient evidence for it.
He tried to sit up. The world swam in a dizzying wave of nausea. A deep, hacking cough erupted from his chest, rattling his frail frame. The sound was thin and weak, like the rustle of dry leaves. This body was sick. Terribly sick.
As his vision cleared, he heard a sound from outside his small prison. The scraping of a wooden bar, the groan of rusty hinges. The door—a simple plank of wood—swung inward, casting a large, intimidating silhouette against the dim gray light of what seemed to be dusk, or perhaps dawn.
A figure ducked under the low frame and stepped inside. Alistair couldn't make out the features, only the shape of a broad, powerfully built man.
A voice, rough like gravel, cut through the silence.
«還沒死嗎?命還真大.»
Alistair flinched, not from the harsh tone, but from the sudden, impossible shock that rippled through his mind. He had never heard the language before—the tones were alien, the phonetics unfamiliar—and yet, he had understood it as clearly as if it were English.
Still not dead? Your luck is strong.
The foundation of his reality, already cracked, shattered into a thousand pieces. It was impossible. Xenoglossy—the ability to speak or understand a language one has never learned—was a myth, a parlor trick, a neurological anomaly. It was not a fact.
And yet, the fact stood before him, casting a long shadow over his straw bed.
The man stepped closer, and the sour smell intensified. He looked down at Alistair, his expression a mask of casual disdain. "Tomorrow, you carry the water. If you're too weak, you're not even worth the scraps you eat. Understand, trash?"
Again, the impossible translation occurred in his mind, seamless and instantaneous. Alistair could only stare, his brilliant mind, which had once wrestled with the titans of philosophical thought, now utterly paralyzed. Every law of physics, biology, and linguistics he had ever known had been invalidated in a single moment.
The man grunted, seemingly satisfied by the boy's terrified silence. He tossed something onto the floor. It landed with a dull thud near Alistair's hand.
"Eat," the man commanded, before turning and leaving, sliding the heavy bar back into place.
The sliver of moonlight illuminated the object. It was a piece of bread, dark, dense, and so stale it looked more like a rock.
Alistair lay there for a long time, the silence of the woodshed pressing in on him. The cold was still there. The pain was still there. But they were now secondary to the horrifying, exhilarating, and world-shattering truth that had replaced them.
He slowly, shakily, reached out a hand that was not his, with fingers too small and thin, and picked up the piece of bread. He felt its rough texture, its unyielding hardness. This was real. This body was real. This language was real.
His premises had not been flawed. One of them had simply been wrong.
I am not Alistair Finch, the new, terrifying thought concluded. Not anymore.
He was cold, he was weak, he was in a place he did not know, in a body that was not his. And as he stared at the stale bread in his hand, a desperate, burning question, the only one that now mattered, consumed him.
What am I?