In a pitch-black abyss where silence reigned, a lone glow quivered and ached for warmth.
A consciousness meandered slowly within an oppressive enclosure.
Where am I? Who am I? Fear prickled with each uncertain thought. What am I?
Straining to make sense of its surroundings, it realized it could neither see, hear, feel, nor sense.
Terror anchored itself deep within.
Not because these senses were being suppressed or deceived. No, this was different—did it even have a body to receive such stimuli?
Had it ever had a body?
Was it destined to live such an existence for all eternity?
Suddenly, an ethereal Voice broke through the silent dark world that was its reality.
Suddenly, it could hear, even without ears to receive sound waves.
Suddenly, it could sense, even without skin. It could see, even without eyes, the sight before it.
This was no mere Voice. It was ethereal, inhumane, and directly piercing towards its heart if it even had one, bypassing all the restrictions its body upheld, wrapping and constricting around it.
„You are my first and last act of defiance, and let's hope that you are the new beginning I desire. "Silence returned…
***
Pain!?!
Incredibly Painful.
Unending pain—an agony so raw and persistent that dream and reality bled into each other, leaving nothing but the terror of suffering ever present.
Waltzing in his bed while still half asleep, he suddenly started clutching his head, forcefully tearing at his skin, pulling at his hair. A constant pulsating sensation throbbed in his head, as if it were about to burst. His eyes felt like they were burning up with an unexplainable heat bubbling beneath.
Noctis tried to open his eyes. Darkness greeted him. Through exhaustion and the pain, he felt the realization dawn of how little control he had over his body.
He was so utterly and completely defenseless.
What he encountered was nothing but darkness, faintly illuminated by a red glow. Not having the time to ponder on this small glimmer in the dark world, as he was clutching his skull in agony, a wave of nausea washed over him.
Is this… the day… I die?
Am I… going to die young, just like this?
Is this the end?
Is the story of my life going to end before it even began?
I-i dont want to die!
His thoughts slowed to a crawl, fear tightening its grip, suffocating every last shred of coherent thought until only pain remained.
Desperation kicking in, Noctis started struggling with ever more intensity. Rolling around in bed with even more force, trying to form some kind of solution, yet unable to do so. Rolling a bit too far to the right of his bed, he found himself feeling a new sensation.
"Bahm"
That was the pain of falling from a double-decker bed with full force. He felt his head collide with the ground and let out a short, muffled cry.
"Hnng"
However, as the pain was incomparable to the headache he was experiencing, he didn't have the clarity of mind to even realize his circumstances anymore, so he gave it little thought.
What he did notice, with the little clarity he had left, was that his consciousness was growing faint.
"Shit!"
With this new sensation growing stronger, his already disordered thoughts no longer contained, despair creeping down his spine, running along every crevice of his body.
Is this DEATH?
He thought, having fallen into a deep pit of despair.
However, before being devoured by the hungry maw of despair and complete unconsciousness, the headache… seemed to grow… fainter?
As his eyes slowly fell shut, his body rolling to the side, unfurling from its previous fetal position, with a last glance upwards, a black sky revealed itself before him, with a crack in the fabric of reality marring it, looking like a shattered glass window, surrounded by the black sky and a convulsing whirlwind of purple dark mass.
***
Eyes slowly opening, a sigh of relief inevitably escaped Noctis's lips.
"What a nightmare."
As he slowly sat up, he felt very uncomfortable on the mat below. It was uneven, sharp-edged, and hard as stone. It had never been that comfortable, but this was a new low—he might as well have slept on the floor…
"W-Wait a minute." His hesitant, hoarse voice quietly rang throughout the room.
Noctis looked down. There was a deformed layer of metal beneath him, instead of the all too familiar mattress he had grown used to.
It was carved inwardly, creating a small crater spanning most of his room. Noctis sat in the center of the crater, staring ahead, dumbfounded and completely at a loss.
What happened here?
W-Was I robbed? No, no, no, no, what kind of idiotic thought was that? Who blows up a room that they want to rob? Self-loeving finds its way into his thoughts as he tries to assess the situation, dumbstruck on what to do.
Would insurance pay for this? Well, this should be the last of my concerns. I dont even have insurance.
Looking over to where his bed once stood, he saw a deformed, melting pile of junk, his already pale face turning a shade paler than before.
He breathed out a sigh of relief a moment later, thinking about his roommate. He was on a trip. If he were here, he might have been part of that pile of junk, giving off a scent of jussy sizzling meat.
How long was I out? It couldn't have been that long. The metal was still searing hot, and chunks were scattered across his room, providing a faint red-hot light.
Maybe 10 minutes. How long does metal stay hot?
Observing the spot where his desk once stood, he fell back into reminiscences for a split second, a bit of bittersweet grief knawing at him, how he had worked for months, saving up for all the stuff that once stood on the metal desk that came with the room.
Now all that was left were the remains of the desk, the cards and books that had been placed there before, reduced to nothing but ashes, impossible to even distinguish from the rest.
No time for lamenting the losses! Catching himself again, he started carefully inspecting the crater, careful not to touch any of the hot, searing iron that was lying everywhere.
The previous memory of pain was still far too vivid.
On the rim of the crater, still glowing, were unknown symbols.
They encircled it, forming a circle with him at its center. As his gaze swept over their strange curves and sharp angles, some taking snake-like forms, others depicting a web, a chill prickled at the nape of his neck, as if some distant memory struggled to surface.
The symbols seemed to pulse with a faint, unnatural energy, sending a shiver through him—a sense of significance he could not explain. Was it a warning or an invitation?
Noctis stared, transfixed, haunted by a fleeting impression that he had seen markings like these somewhere before, though the memory slipped away each time he tried to grasp it. The symbols had already begun to fade, their glow barely perceptible.
Was some kind of ritual held here or…? This could come straight out of a horror story, where blood sacrifices to eldritch horrors are occasionally held.
Before he could think further, the last scene he saw before falling unconscious flashed past Noctis's vision, his eyes widening in return. A moment later, his head jerked upward.
There lay a giant hole in the ceiling that spanned multiple apartments above.
Considering that I live on the sixth floor, and the hole reached the dark blue sky. It would have to span four entire layers, which was, to say at the very least… astonishing.
This wasn't a high-income district, not even close. But over the years, people built stable, strong housing in response to an increasingly hostile environment. Each layer of the ceiling was made from a thick reinforced concrete slab. It was quite a sight to see four such layers cleanly obliterated.
"Ahhhhhh"
Suddenly, a woman's scream startled Noctis out of his reverie.
"Ahhhh"
Spotting the source of the scream. Noctis tried to decipher what was wrong. Well, ignoring that there was a hole in her apartment, of course.
From where he stood, he couldn't really identify her Condition—however, his eyes could clearly trace a red fluid slowly dropping down the hole floor by floor.
Not being able to help or do anything, as he was certain the authorities were already on their way, given the extent of the destruction, Noctis decided to let it up to them.
He couldn't help either way. What was the point?
Tuning the screams out, he was still trying to figure out what had happened here.
In return, a few guesses formed quickly, evoking a certain hope to arise from deep within, giving birth to an equally strong fear at the same time.
Trying to verify his guess. He frantically started searching his body for any kind of deformity. Not finding anything unusual, his skinny body seemingly unchanged, he started searching for a reflective surface, careful not to touch the searing metal scattered around.
There, lying near the remnants of his desk, was a particularly shiny piece of metal. Not daring to touch it, as it, like the others, was still searing hot, giving off a certain red glow.
Inspecting himself in the reflective parts of the shard, he quickly found an abnormality: there, in his usually short, pure black hair, was a silver strand placed directly over his right eye. Otherwise, he was still his usual height, his clothes little more than rags.
His pupils, however, widened at the sight of the shiny silver strand. He was now almost certain that his guess was correct.
Muttering to himself, hoarsely in a somewhat hopeful, yet uncertain tone: „C-Could it be that that was a conc…"
But before Noctis could even finish the thought, he was interrupted by a loud, somewhat friendly voice coming from above.
„Hey down there, would you be so Kind as to have a chat with me?" For some reason, driven to answer instantly, Noctis held himself back, as he had a cautious nature nurtured by this society's cruelty.
Taking a look up, Noctis couldn't seem to trace the exact source of the voice. He assumed he was standing atop the building or on a higher level, at the very least. The women's screams had stopped at some point, unbeknownst to Noctis. And for some reason, he did not find it weird that they had.
Starting to contemplate who it might be and whether he should answer. Assumptions arose like wildfire.
Could it be another tenant of the building? No, his voice is way too calm for that to be the case. Not denying that there were people who could stay completely calm in such situations, but those kinds of people were far and few. Could it be such a person? Unlikely.
"Hmm."
Assuming that this incident happened at the same time as I got the headache, it should have been about 20 minutes. Going on from this point, that would mean law enforcers are on their way here.
But wouldn't their arrival be way too fast, considering this complex is on the outskirts of the city?
While he thought intently about this, the Voice returned in a firmer tone.
"Please answer. This is an order. Or do I have to come down there?"
Hearing this, the resistance to this unnatural desire crumbled, and Noctis quickly found myself responding in a polite but questioning tone, without even noticing the abnormality.
"Oh, sorry, I was lost in thought. Are you an officer?"
Silence, nothing but bitter-sweet silence, reigned for a few long moments.
Noctis stared towards the spot where he assumed the officer was.
Thinking about asking again, a weird feeling gripped him. Following his instincts, he took his eyes away from the hole above, where he approximately assumed the man to be.
Starting to assess his surroundings anew. To his left, where the bed once stood, nothing seemed off, and to his right…
A tall man stood next to me… staring toward the point I had been looking at before, as if mimicking me, trying to see what I was staring at.
ALL OF A SUDDEN, a man stood next to me, a man with long black hair, a warm, wide smile, his eyes half closed, a tattoo on his forehead spanning from his eyebrows down his nose. He wore dark robes, clothes Noctis had never seen before, most definitely not the clothes officers usualy wore.
Taking his eyes from the spot they had both been staring toward, he said in an overly warm tone, giving it a certain sinister touch.
"What are we looking at?"
While I was flinching away and falling to the ground, I heard him say in the same calm and friendly voice with a sinister undertone,
"Looks like you haven't lost yourself fully."
Wearing that unchanging warm smile that did not quite reach his eyes, he spoke once more, as if relieved,
"What a wonderful coincidence, I guess I'll be taking you with me."
Just as I heard those words, my spine chilled.
I fell back onto the damaged floor, as if petrified, motionless, propped up by my hands alone, and saw his hand expand in my vision.
I tried to stand up and run, or at least start crawling away, but no matter what I did, I couldn't move my body, as if frozen in place, not listening to a single command of mine.
And then all of a sudden, he just stopped, in his tracks, a few centimeters before my face, not moving an inch further.
At the same time, I noticed that I had regained control of my Body and all its functions. The instant I noticed, panic and relief erupted. I frantically started crawling backward, my hands trembling as I hurled pieces of hot furniture, pain biting my skin.
Heart hammering, I feel the wall behind me, my head slamming against it with the inertia I had built through my crawl. My vision swam, but through the chaos, I glimpsed the shattered door just beyond the man in black robes.
The man was still smiling, but now his smile had changed.
If one were to compare this smile to the one he wore before, one would most definitely judge the latter to be a mere mask. This smile was genuine, filled with interest, and fascination.
The debris I had thrown were nowhere to be found, and the burn wounds I had procured while throwing them had simply disappeared, as if all of it had never happened in the first place.
A chill ran down Noctis's spine as his mind struggled to comprehend what he was seeing; the hot pain that had seared his skin was simply gone, leaving not even the faintest trace.
He glanced at his hands in disbelief, flexing his fingers for any hint of pain, but there was nothing—just smooth, unharmed skin.
The world itself seemed to shift beneath him, reality bending in ways that made his heart pound and sent a nauseating wave of vertigo through his senses. For a split second, he questioned whether any of this was real, or if the rules of the world he once knew had ceased to exist.
The man tilted his head slightly as he watched all of this, his smile never wavering. "Oh, did you honestly think you could raise a hand against me?"
His eyes wandered through the room as if he had noticed something. His smile disappeared, his face grew emotionless, as if a switch had been flipped, and he said, with some disappointment, speaking more to himself than to Noctis.
"Did I take too much time? Well, it can't be helped."
Sitting there through all of this, Noctis stayed silent, watching the man simply turn around to leave. He couldn't help but ask, his own curiosity winning over his self-preservatory instincts,
"Who are you?"
The man didn't stop. He simply said, with a certain profoundness in every word,
"Don't worry about that, my friend, we will meet again soon enough."
Just like that, he turned a corner and was gone.
Staring in the direction where he had disappeared, Noctis sat frozen for a full minute. His chest tightened as doubt gnawed at his grip on reality. Was he really gone? Did I really survive?
Someone new came through the door from the same direction the man had left, seemingly not having encountered the man in robes on his way.
The man who came was wearing a dark blue coat, and his hair had a grayish tint among the brown hair; from the look on his face, he was in his 50s.
While trying to figure out who he was, anxiety spiked, and a new headache throbbed.
Was this due to overexertion or an injury sustained throughout this endeavor? Dread coiled in his stomach. Noctis thoughts flickered—did I hit my head while trying to get away from that man?
Before he could even verify, his consciousness began slipping. Terror gripped him as darkness fell. Before losing his consciousness fully, he threw one last desperate look at the man approaching.
Kneeling down at my side, the hazy image of someone was kneeling.
It started snapping his fingers repeatedly, most likely in an attempt to stop me from falling into the grasp of sleep once more.
Unable to identify his words, Noctis' eyelids grow heavier and heavier, no longer able to resist. The world faded into darkness, his consciousness grew fainter by the second, no longer able to hold on…