Pain came before thought.
It started as a dull throb at the back of his skull, then sharpened into something that felt like a nail being pressed slowly through bone in his head. He became aware of wetness first before warm, sticky, pooling beneath his cheek against packed dirt. Then the cold. Then the smell of rust and damp earth.
He didn't open his eyes right away to feel what is happening.
Where... am I?
He tried to piece together anything before this moment and found nothing. No name surfaced. No face of a mother or father. Just a blank, like a page that had never been written on. The only thing that felt real was the weight around his neck, it's a cold metal collar, snug enough that he could feel his own pulse against it and a strange pressure behind his eyes, like something coiled tight inside his skull that didn't belong to him.
He cracked one eye open just enough to see through his lashes.
Dirt. Grey light. And feet.
Dozens of small bare feet, planted in uneven rows across the cracked ground.
He shifted his gaze upward, slow enough that it wouldn't draw attention, and saw them properly for the first time, children. All around his age, maybe six or seven(67) by the size of them. He didn't bother counting exactly; his head throbbed too hard for arithmetic. Roughly nineteen, he guessed, scattered around him in a loose, broken circle.
Every single one of them stood perfectly straight. Backs rigid. Arms at their sides. And their eyes... every pair of eyes was closed, lids shut like they'd been sealed.
Not sleeping. Sleeping children swayed, slumped, dropped their chins. These didn't move at all. They stood like things that had been arranged.
He didn't understand it, and the not-understanding scared him more than the blood on his head did.
Something had hit him. He realized that much. Off to his side, half-buried in the dirt near his hand, sat a chunk of broken stone, dark at one edge with something that wasn't dirt. He didn't remember it falling. He didn't remember anything before he'd opened his eyes a second ago. But the throbbing at his temple and the stone lying an arm's length away told a story his mind hadn't witnessed.
Did it fall? Did someone throw it?
He didn't get to wonder long.
Footsteps.
Heavy, deliberate, the crunch of boots against gravel, coming from somewhere behind the standing children. Measured. Unhurried.
Every nerve in his small body screamed at him to move, to run, to do something but he had no idea what waited beyond that circle of frozen children, and some colder, calmer part of him whispered that whoever was coming probably already knew exactly how many children should be lying on the ground and how many should be standing.
So he made a choice.
He let his eye fall shut. He let his arm go slack where it had landed. He matched his breathing to something slow and shallow, the rhythm of someone deep in unconsciousness, and prayed whatever was inside his skull that strange cooled pressure he couldn't name yet didn't choose this exact moment to do something that would give him away.
The footsteps grew closer.
And stopped.
The footsteps stopped right beside him.
"Shit. Shit, shit-" The voice was young, maybe a teenager's, cracking with panic rather than malice. "Is it dead? Please don't be dead-"
A pause. Then, muttered lower, almost to himself: "If it's dead, I'm the one who's gonna get blamed. I'm the one who's supposed to watch them, not let them get their skulls cracked open-"
Footsteps shuffled closer, fast and clumsy now, all pretense of calm gone. He felt a hand grab his wrist rough, shaking fingers pressing hard against the inside of it, fumbling for a pulse. He understood, distantly, why the boy hadn't just checked his breathing or his chest. The collar. Whatever it was rigged to do, checking a slave's hand for a pulse was probably faster and safer than getting close to that neck.
He kept his body slack, his breathing shallow, every muscle screaming to flinch away from the stranger's grip. He didn't.
A few seconds passed like hours.
"...Okay. Okay, you're alive, thank- okay." The relief in the boy's voice was so raw it almost sounded like he might cry. The grip on his wrist loosened, dropped. "Stupid rock. Stupid place. Why do they even keep rubble lying around here-"
The footsteps moved away, rummaging through something nearby, that is, cloth, the clatter of what might have been a small box or chest. He heard muttering, half-formed curses, the sound of something being dragged across the floor. A chair, maybe, judging by the scrape of wood legs against stone.
Then the boy was back, and rougher hands tilted his head to one side. Cloth pressed against the wound at his temple, firm enough to sting even through his forced stillness. He had to fight not to react. The boy wrapped something around his head. A strip of fabric, tied with the clumsy urgency of someone who had clearly never bandaged a wound before but was too scared not to try.
"There. There, that should— that should hold until morning. Don't die." A long exhale. Then footsteps again, retreating, slower this time, the panic bleeding out of them now that the immediate crisis had passed.
A door creaked somewhere in the distance. Then silence.
He didn't move for a long time after that.
---
By the time he finally allowed himself to crack his eyes open for real, the grey light from before had drained into something deeper, heavier, true dark, broken only by the faint orange juice of candle. The other children still stood in their rows, unmoving, eyes shut, untouched by the hours that had passed. He didn't understand it. He didn't have the luxury of trying to right now.
Night, he thought. He won't come back until morning. He said so himself.
That gave him time. Not much. But something.
He sat up slowly, testing the bandage at his head, the dull ache beneath it, the stiffness in limbs that felt too small and too unfamiliar to be entirely his own. He looked around at what he could now tell was some kind of cellar or sublevel stone walls, no windows, a single staircase leading up into darkness on the far end of the room.
Okay. Think. If I want to leave, I need to know where I'm going.
He had no idea how big this place was. He didn't know how many halls stood between him and a door to the outside, how many people might be standing guard, what waited beyond those stone walls. For all he knew, this cellar was the smallest, most insignificant corner of something enormous. Planning an escape with that little information wasn't difficult.
It was impossible.
He hadn't even finished forming the thought when something inside his skull shifted.
It wasn't pain this time it was pressure, deliberate and cold, like ink spreading through water in his brain. And then, without warning, it was simply there: a layout. Walls. Doors. Window placements along the east wing, none on the west. A servant's passage behind the kitchen. Nothing about where people currently stood no shapes, no figures but something far stranger sat alongside the floor plan, threaded through it like a second skin.
Times.
The side door near the stables creaked open every morning between the same narrow window, swung shut a fixed stretch of time later. The kitchen entrance, the same. Even the cellar door above him. The one that boy had walked through carried with it some kind of imprinted rhythm, an unconscious habit worn into wood and routine over months or years, now sitting whole and complete inside his own mind as if he'd memorized it himself over a lifetime he'd never lived.
He went rigid.
What. What was that. What IS that.