Our story starts with a man whose eyes fluttered open slowly.
The world returned to him in shards of torment. Agony clawed through his flesh, a relentless beast gnawing at muscle and bone. He groaned, the sound escaping his lips like a wounded animal's cry, raw and unbidden.
His body was a furnace of suffering, each breath stoking the flames higher, and beneath him, the floor pressed against his skin, cold, unyielding, a slab of stone that drank the warmth from his bones.
It was a cruel contrast, the heat of his pain against the icy indifference of the ground.
He forced his eyes open, lids peeling apart as though weighed by chains. The first thing he saw was bars. Iron, rusted at the edges, standing like silent sentinels in the dim light. The sight jolted him, a shock of clarity cutting through the haze of misery.
He sat up sharply, a ragged gasp tearing from his throat as the movement sent fresh waves of torment crashing through him. His limbs trembled, weak and rebellious, but he ignored them, driven by a sudden, desperate need to understand.
His gaze swept the surroundings, taking in the grim tableau. Walls of rough-hewn stone, stained with damp and shadow, rose around him. A single flickering bulb hung from the ceiling, its weak glow casting jagged patterns across the cell.
The bars stretched from floor to roof, their gaps too narrow for even a child to slip through. A cell. There was no mistaking it now. The realization settled into his gut like a stone, heavy and cold. He was a prisoner.
Instinctively, he drew his knees to his chest, curling into himself as though he could shield his mind from the truth. He shuffled back, pressing into the corner where two walls met, the stone biting into his spine. The chill seeped deeper, but he welcomed it, a distraction from the fire in his nerves. He tried to think, to summon something, anything, from the void of his memory. A name. A face. A reason.
But the depths of his mind were a black abyss, swallowing every attempt to grasp at meaning. Who was he? Why was he here? The questions echoed unanswered, mocking him with their silence.
His eyes drifted downward, drawn by a faint itch against his chest. There, stitched into the coarse fabric of the tattered prison uniform clinging to his frame, was a tag. Faded thread spelled out a designation: Subject 24238.
He stared at it, the numbers and word blurring briefly as his vision swam. That was all he had. No name, no past, just a cold, clinical label. Subject 24238. The title sank into him, a bitter seed taking root. He was no one. Nameless. Faceless. A shadow trapped in a cage.
He exhaled, a shaky breath that fogged faintly in the dim air. Acceptance crept in, slow and reluctant. He was Subject 24238, a prisoner in a cell, stripped of identity and purpose. But what kind of prison was this?
The thought gnawed at him, persistent and sharp. The cell was sparse, devoid of the usual trappings he vaguely associated with confinement, no cot, no sink, nothing but the bare stone and the bars.
The air carried a faint metallic tang, and somewhere beyond his sight, water dripped in a slow, maddening rhythm. This wasn't a place for common thieves or petty transgressors. It felt… different. Older. Crueler.
He shifted, wincing as his body protested, and pressed a hand to the floor. The cold bit into his palm, grounding him as he strained to piece together the fragments of his situation. Was this a dungeon? A laboratory? A tomb?
The uncertainty clawed at him, but no answers came. His mind remained a locked vault, its contents sealed beyond reach. He was a blank slate, scoured clean by forces he couldn't name, and the weight of that emptiness pressed down harder than the stone beneath him.
As he sat there, lost in the spiral of his thoughts, a sound shattered the stillness. A blaring alarm, loud and piercing, erupted through the cell. It was a mechanical scream, reverberating off the walls, drilling into his skull.
He flinched, hands flying to his ears, but the noise burrowed deeper, relentless. His heart thudded against his ribs, a frantic rhythm that matched the chaos of the sound. The light overhead flickered wildly, casting the cell into strobing shadows, and for a moment, he thought the bars themselves trembled.
Subject 24238 scrambled to his feet, ignoring the searing protest of his muscles. His breath came in short, ragged bursts as he staggered toward the bars, gripping them with trembling hands.
The metal was frigid, biting into his skin, but he clung to it, peering into the darkness beyond. The alarm wailed on, a harbinger of something unseen, and his pulse raced with a mix of dread and anticipation.
What was coming?