The Pull and the Scar
Chapter 1: Province 618
He woke up in the sand, face-down and choking on air that had a taste of burnt metal. His naked flesh burned, sweaty with bloody dust that appeared to burn wherever it touched. The heat was crushing, a physical weight that made it hard to breathe, to think an effort.
When finally he pried his eyes open, flinching at the brutal light, he saw a sky that didn't make sense. Purple and gold lights—like an aurora, but wrong somehow—streamed across the sky, crackling with power that he could sense in his very marrow. The dunes themselves were red, far too red to be possible, and they seemed to ripple and glimmer in shapes sand shouldn't hold.
He was not on Earth.
His head was completely blank. No name. No memories. Just a terrible emptiness where there ought to have been a history, and the definite feeling that something was appallingly, irreparably wrong.
He pulled himself up slowly, his hands plunging into sand hot enough to scald. His muscles trembled—dehydration, probably. Cramps seized his calves and thighs when he tried to stand. His throat ached as if it had been sandpapered, his lips split and bleeding, and he could taste dust and metal in his mouth.
He knelt for an instant, swaying, black spots blurring before his eyes. His body was heavy, ungainly. Rags made up his clothes—a sweat-stained shirt clung to his chest, ragged at the shoulder where a dark bruise stretched beneath. Patched pants that hung loose on his hips. His feet were bare, blistering already from hot sand, blood oozing with every small movement.
The question came: Who am I?
But no answer came. Only that suffocating emptiness, heavier than the desert sun, as the auroras danced overhead, untroubled by his confusion.
The sun's glare was unrelenting, bleaching the horizon into a scarlet and gold mist that burned to look upon. The very air hummed with an electrical whine that resonated deep within his chest, making his teeth ache.
He reached for the frayed shirt, to wipe his face with the perspiration, but pain flashed through his battered ribs at the move. He tore the shirt off instead—it wasn't doing him any good now, anyway—and it was then that his fingers closed over something on his chest.
He stopped, thudding heart suddenly.
There was a scar up over his heart, on the left upper part of his chest. Round and puckered, the size of a coin. Old, healed-looking, except the edges were too clean, too tidy. As though something had been pierced right through him and he'd survived anyway.
As though it was a bullet wound.
He trailed the shape with trembling fingers, and a spreading dull ache appeared to emanate from it. The heat of the scar pulsed in rhythm with his heart. Had he been shot? When? Why was he alive?
He scowled at it, demanding a memory to surface. Something. A name, a face, an instant prior to when he awoke in this impossible desolation.
Nothing.
His heart pounded, sweat shining on his forehead as he was probably dangerously dehydrated. The auroras above him wove their malevolent patterns across the purple horizon, their hum indifferent to his rising hysteria.
He stood there, bare-chested, his ripped pants clinging to his hips, and took in the view. His body was lean and muscular—someone who'd been out, athletic. Sweaty, sandy hair clung to the back of his neck. But it was unfamiliar. He was staring at a stranger's body.
The horizon stretched out endlessly in every direction. Red sand dunes. Needle-thin spires flashing in the distance. Auroras twisting against that impossible purplish sky. No roads. No buildings. No sign of life anywhere.
Just the desert, vast and motionless, as if challenging him to live.
And then he felt it.
A pull. Deep in his chest, below where that circular scar lay. A tugging, sharp and insistent and impossible to ignore, pointing him out toward the horizon like an invisible compass he could feel but not see.
He didn't know where it led. Didn't know if he should go. But it was all he had. The one method in a world without beacons.
His fingers touched something in his pocket—the only intact pocket in his tattered trousers. He pulled it out and discovered that he had a chunk of metal in his hand, roughly the size of his palm. It was inscribed with a design: a circle bisected by an irregular line.
He could not remember holding it up, did not know where it was. But it was warm against his hand, pulsating steadily to the rhythm of the scarring on his chest.
So he started walking.
Sand seared his feet with every step, blood oozing from fresh blisters. But the pull dominated all the rest—the pain, the silence, even his fear. The air grew heavy as he trudged, filled with the smell of fire and something similar to burned-out circuitry.
He trudged alone in the red desert, no name, no past, and only that irresistible pull to guide him forward.
Far from the red dunes of Province 618, on a cliff next to an area called Province 1, was a castle like a monument to something terrible and old.
Its spires blended gothic stone and crystalline metal, producing an architecture that seemed to be from a number of different eras at once—or from none. Conduits descended the walls, glowing with a weak luminescence, their thrum resonating downward through the ash-gray wastes below. Everything there was gray. Dead. The fortress stood above it, its windows lit with a yellow, diseased light that bore witness to power and rule.
Inside, shadows clung to the corridors, broken only by sconces that cast dancing silhouettes against stone walls. A robed figure glided through the darkness, his movements suave and well-worn. His face was pinched, milk-white, with eyes sunken deep in his skull. His very presence seemed to chill the air.
He stopped before a black metal throne, upon which sat a charcoal suit-wearing, broad-shouldered figure who looked impossibly clean and pressed in this dimming region. The figure's eyes glowed like highly polished steel as he watched the robed figure approach, his fingers caressing the lapel of his suit with a mechanical movement.
"We've received a new arrival in Province 618," the robed man answered. His voice was a dry rasp. He fought to hide his agitation, with not much success.
The leader shifted a bit to one side, and for some reason his shadow seemed to spread, covering the robed man in darkness. "All arrivals travel through the Nexus," he told him, his tone deliberate and cold. "Every one of them. How did this one evade it?"
The lips of the robed figure curled into a thin smile, but there was no warmth in it. "He just suddenly showed up right in the sands, my lord. No record. No trace in any of our systems. It's like he just popped up out of nowhere."
The leader's eyes narrowed, a look of interest crossing his face. "Nothing at all in the Nexus?"
"Not a trace," the hooded man promised him, his voice falling with something that might have been awe—or fear. "He's an anomaly, my lord. He doesn't belong in that Province—or anywhere within our realm, as far as we've been able to find out."
A hush descended, interrupted only by the quiet hum of machinery somewhere down within the castle. The leader stood up slowly, his charcoal suit a stark contrast to the darkness that surrounded him.
"Find out about this now," he instructed, his tone not up for debate. "Find out how he came to be there. Find out what he knows. I want some answers."
The robed man bowed, and retreated into darkness, his footsteps soundless as stone.
The leader moved to face a viewport, his eyes scanning over the grey wasteland that lay below his fortress. A beacon pulsed with steady light somewhere out in the distance. His jaw set.
Anomalies did not occur. Not often.
And they were never safe.
This was a secret, and secrets had no place in his perfectly arranged realm.
The man of no name walked until his legs burned and his head swam. His bare feet cut bloody paths in the sand. The sun blazed directly overhead now, and the auroras continued their crackling dance across the heavens, their drone vibrating within his chest like a second heartbeat.
His muscles cramped with every step. His skin itched from the unending barrage of grit-blowing wind. The air was heavy with the acrid scent of charred earth and that strange metallic odor, and breathing was hard work. His lips had cracked open, blood mixed with the dust on his face.
But the draw grew stronger with every step, a feral hum in his chest that would not let him quit, would not let him rest. Time had no meaning. The desert erased past and future, leaving only the naked struggle to survive the next moment, the next breath, the next step.
He stumbled, dizziness engulfing him like an undertow, and collapsed face-first into the sand.
The heat of the sand burned his cheek. Grains stuck to his lip, sticky with blood. His pulse became far away, receding. The scar on his chest felt as though it branded itself into his skin.
Was it over? Had he survived that bullet wound—if indeed it had been a bullet—only to die here, unknown and unremembered in a foreign desert?
Darkness engulfed him.
He woke up gasping, grit in his teeth, the scar throbbing like a drum. The pull drew him back, jerking him awake when every part of him screamed to just let go.
His body was feeble. Every movement felt like trying to push through thick mud. His ribs ached with every breath. Blood seeped from a dozen wounds.
But he stood. He spat dust out of his mouth. And he walked on.
The heat still nagged him, the auroras stretching his shadow long across the red sand. The pull swept him along the dunes, and in deep within his mind, he was certain he could hear them whispering, though he could not quite catch their words.
Dizziness struck again, sudden and convulsive. He sprawled, grit grinding into skin, vision reeling. His scar hurt with an anguish that faded at once into a throbbing ache. He rubbed at the sand, gasping, as the auroras twisted above in their untranslated patterns.
The pull inside of him grew, a burst of raw need. His legs shook. Blood oozed from his damaged feet. But he was motivated by something he could not define, could not defeat, could not avoid.
He stood up again. Took one step. Then another.
And then, halfway through the step, the universe spun sickeningly.
He hit the dunes with a hard clang, all the wind knocked from his lungs. His scar pulsed with hot, fleeting pain. Something flew overhead, leaving a shadow on the sand for a moment.
Wings. He'd seen wings, metal sheen.
There was a buzzing in his bones, his heart pounding, fear filling his chest.
He forced himself to open his eyes, grit film in his lashes obscuring his vision.
The creature hovered over him for a moment. Its wings were metal feathers that mirrored the auroral light, folding in a shriek of high whine that thrummed agony in his teeth. Its form was a dreamlike fusion of flesh and wires, organic matter over machinery, all in a loosely birdlike framework. Its beak was a gleam of polished steel, its eyes.
Its eyes glowed red. Like hot coals in a burning fire.
And they were staring at him.
The creature tilted its head—such a queasily bird-like movement from something so clearly unnatural—and a blast of light lanced out of its eyes. The beam crawled along his body, lingering on the spherical scar above his heart.
The hum grew louder, resonating in his chest, causing the scar to ache with it. He gasped for breath. The pull surged through him, but he was too exhausted to stand, pinned by fatigue and that red-eyed look.
And then, with a clink of metal on its wings, the creature vanished into the heat shimmer, its shape dissolving into the sheen of air.
Silence had come back, interrupted only by the distant crackle of the auroras and the pounding of his heart.
What in the world was that thing? Why had it scanned him? What was it looking for?
The pull exploded in his chest, the scar throbbing. He wasn't alone in this wasteland. Something was out there watching. Something was following.
And somehow, he was connected to it.