I can't do this anymore.
In my time here, I've seen some terrible things, hell, I've DONE some terrible things.
Butl, I didn't consider myself a bad person. Do you know why? Because I told myself that it was for the greater good. The knowledge we gained would guide us into a better future - a glorious one. We broke law after law made by kings, emperors, and even gods because we thought we knew better.
I was never in the position to order these crimes, but I did as I was told, which makes me responsible, like everyone else in this godforsaken institution.
But this has gone too far. These experiments... they are too much. I still hear the screams. They follow me in my dreams, not just the screams but their faces. Every night I feared going to bed because I knew what would await me. But still, I pushed through and did my part in the organization. “Progress won’t be achieved through complacency,” to quote the Facility Lord. But then my dreams transitioned into the real world. Their faces appeared in the corner of my vision, but every time I looked, no one was there. I can't do this anymore.
If one has to sacrifice oneself to discover the truth, is it not better to stay ignorant? This project is just one of the many missteps that we have taken toward our futile goal of knowledge. Is it wrong for a Knowledge Seeker to utter those words? Perhaps, but I don’t care anymore. The Institution’s guiding philosophy is flawed at its core.
I don’t have the power to right the wrongs in my past but I do have the power to make a difference today. I know that I have forgone the gods with my ways, but I truly hope that there is one who will take pity upon my blackened heart and take me into heaven. For at least today I will do what is right.
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My first memories are of darkness. Darkness and agony. It shouldn't be possible to feel pain when your nerves haven't even been created yet, but it was there. A searing, hot pain that infested every corner of my mind.
I wanted to scream, but I had no mouth. I wanted to see, but I had no eyes. I wanted to move, but I had no body. I couldn't do anything, but be still and hope that the pain would go away. I floated in the darkness, drifting wherever it took me.
Soon voices began to fill my head. They sounded so close, yet so far away. But like all things, they were gone too soon. After some time even the pain began to disappear. How much time? I didn’t know. Time wasn’t something that existed in my current state, as everything was and would forever be the same. But that wasn’t true. The pain… it was subsiding, change was happening. I didn't dare move out of fear of it coming back.
FREEDOM. LIFE. Rebirth.
My head started to hurt again, like someone had stabbed a needle in it. What is a needle? I screamed. As quickly as the pain had come, it was gone, leaving me gasping for air. The pain was replaced by something smooth and cold pressing against my back. It took me a moment to realise what this meant. I had a body!
My eyes shot open. A dark sky with hundreds of twinkling lights was spread out above me. They beckoned me to just stare at them, trying to find patterns in the infinite glow that contrasted perfectly with the surrounding darkness. They looked so close. Maybe if I… Slowly I could feel my body working and soon something obscured the lights. A claw, as dark as the night sky, tried to grab one of the lights between its talons but it just slipped right through. My attention was drawn to the claw. My claw. It took a moment for the full extent of what I was seeing to sink in. I had a body.
Carefully I lowered my arm to the ground and tried to push myself up. With a small yelp, I fell back down. A dry gasp escaped my mouth. Pain was an intense sensation. Not a pleasant one, but one I welcomed nonetheless. I didn’t even try to hold back my laughter of joy. It hurt but that didn’t matter! I could feel! I wanted to jump up, dance, sing, and express my joy in a thousand different ways. But that was something I couldn’t do right now.
My arms were still too weak to support the rest of my body. But failure wouldn’t stop me from exploring this unexpected gift. I started by pushing myself into a seated position to get a better view of my surroundings. What I found was… unexpected.
The position in which I had awakened was in the centre of a large crater. No, large wasn't the right word to describe it. Massive was more like it. If a thousand bodies had suddenly appeared, the crater wouldn't even be half full. But there weren't any other bodies. Just me. Alone. The feeling of joy didn't go away, but it was more muted now.
For the first time, I could truly think and I found my mind swarmed with questions that begged to be answered. „ Hlo s th?"
Moving my mouth hurt, something that I was sure shouldn’t be the case. What had come out of it had been also wrong. I knew how to speak but it felt weird and uncomfortable to do so. Oh well, I would have to get used to it. Repeating my question aloud helped immensely and soon I managed to speak actual words. “Anybody there?”
No answer came. Suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, a feeling ran through me. I felt... alone. Defenseless. I felt like curling up into a ball and waiting for someone to come help me. The feeling was so intense that I had to compose myself for quite some time afterward. First the amazement of seeing the world and now the feeling of being alone.
A dichotomy of good and bad. Something I would need to think more deeply about but now was not the time. I had no idea why I suddenly had a body but I wouldn’t waste it. My legs felt wobbly as I slowly rose and took my first tentative steps. The fall that followed was unpleasant but expected. Still, I had managed a few steps. Motivated by this I rose for the second time and took another couple of steps before falling back down.
This pattern continued for some time until I finally managed to slowly walk without landing on my knees. The feeling of pride that washed over me made all the pain worth it. It was a bit tough to tear myself away from my feelings but I managed it. The next objective that I gave myself was to reach the edge of the crater. This would require some time. Soon I fell into a pattern: one foot forward, pause, the other foot follows, and repeat.
After a while, I didn’t even need to actively think about walking, which let me focus on my other senses. The cool breeze on my skin, the way the sand flowed around my toes, the fresh smell, all of it felt amazing. Even the previously oppressive silence had turned into a soft blanket with the patterns of the rhythmically crunching sand beneath my feet. It all felt so nice. And as I got accustomed to this, my eyes spotted an irregularity.
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To my left there was something floating in the air. It was too far away to make out any details but it looked like a piece of string that had become stuck midair. Curious, I changed my path and approached. As I got closer I reconsidered my initial assessment. String wasn’t an accurate description. Perhaps hole was better. A few steps away, I stopped to examine it.
Yes, it looked like a hole hovering above the ground. It was almost as big as me, but the diameter varied. At the top and bottom I could only fit my finger through, but the middle was big enough to fit my whole head. Not that I would have stuck it in. The edges were... frayed, for lack of a better term. It looked unstable, as if it could close at any moment. Walking around it, I noticed that all the sides looked the same. Strange. Perhaps floating holes were normal in the world? I certainly didn't know. But what I found even stranger was the place it led to. Nowhere. At the other end, all I could see was white. No earth, no sky, no things, just white. Like a crack in the world.
Despite this emptiness, I felt myself pulled to it. No, only a part of me was affected. I glanced down my left arm. It was twitching, the claw on its end eager to spring forward. I shuddered, an entirely new and uncomfortable motion. I wasn’t controlling the twitching. No matter what I did, it didn’t stop.
This was the first time I truly looked at my body and noticed that something did not match. I had a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs, all covered with pale white skin. Well, almost all. My left arm seemed to be the exception. It was covered in midnight black scales, each about as big as a fingernail. Attached to it was a claw. The talons were black sickle-like protrusions that were slightly longer than my normal fingers. The feeling I got from it was… weird.
While the rest of my body had - after some time - felt like a real part of me, this one didn’t. I could control it, but it was different. Like many things, it was hard to express. Furthermore, the spot where it connected with the rest of my body didn't look right. There wasn’t a smooth transition from skin to scale but rather an abrupt switch that seemed unnatural.
It almost looked like the original arm had been cut off and replaced with this one. Black veins that looked to have spread from the meeting point connected the arm to my chest. They strongly contrasted the rest of my pale skin, which in itself also seemed different from what it should look like. There were scars. A LOT of scars. They were perfect lines that made it look like my body had been methodically cut open numerous times.
I snapped away from my inspection when I noticed that my claw was moving toward the hole. Trying to stop it with my will failed and I had to take a couple of steps backward so that it wouldn’t go through. The complete lack of control over one of my body parts felt disturbing. A glance at the floating hole still showed only white. Maybe touching it wouldn’t be so bad. My body, or at least a part of it, wanted to, so what was the problem? Slowly I inched closer.
Suddenly something in the whiteness moved. I instinctively stumbled backward, which was the only thing that saved me from being impaled. My brain seemed to stop working as I stared at the claw that had just shot out of the opening and was still grasping at me. Its talons looked like sharp tentacles that were tipped by small mouths containing needle-like teeth.
They stretched in my direction, seeming to be eager to get a taste of me. I could hear the teeth gnashing together. The claw was connected to a long spindly looking arm that had come out of the hole. All of it was white, perfectly blending into the white background inside of the hole. I was almost glad that I couldn’t make out what sort of nightmarish creature the arm belonged to.
Before I could react, a loud screech filled the air. The arm fell to the ground, as the hole it had come out of suddenly closed. It wriggled on the ground before quickly dissolving, leaving nothing behind of that monstrosity. I blankly stared at the place that the hole had previously occupied.
“What… was that?” I was so in disbelief that I had asked the question out loud. That creature had tried to end my life. I had felt it, its malice directed at me. Mere moments ago I had celebrated life and now something had tried to take it away. I shuddered as I remembered the darkness. The raging darkness, all that pain, the feeling of nothin- My mind snapped back to reality. Whatever that thing was, it had failed. That was the only thing that mattered. I was ok.
Quickly standing back up I looked at my surroundings more clearly. In the distance, I could make out more floating holes, some smaller, some larger. What if that creature tried to come through one of them? I didn’t know how large it was but some of those holes were almost three times my size. The only solution was to get far away from here. Without much thought, I started sloppily running towards the edge of the crater.
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“What in the seven hells was that?!” Abnar calmly looked up from his viewing orb, as Rashyta stormed through the palace doors. The towering woman was flanked by two of her grand arbiters, whose multifaceted eyes were rapidly displaying images of the mortal realm in an attempt to understand their mistress's distress. “So you sensed it too?” Abnar asked.
“Of course, I sensed the disturbance! Everybody who has even the slightest sensitivity to reality noticed it. It felt like a reality-distorting bomb went off in the mortal realm.” Rashyta shuddered. “The worst thing is that I can’t find what caused it! Someone else has to have found it before us! We need to-”
“First off, calm down,” Abnar interrupted his panicking daughter. His commanding tone made her finally snap out of it. With a deep breath, she composed herself and dismissed the grand arbiters. He frowned at the unnecessary motion but let it pass. Breathing was a characteristic of the mortal races and something completely unnecessary to them. When Rashyta was calm he continued.
“You can’t find anything because I cloaked it.” She let out a breath of relief but stopped when she saw her fathers frown. It was obvious that she was spending too much time around her chosen but this was something that could be corrected later. Instead, he showed her his viewing orb. Her face went through several emotions before settling on disgust.
"You should destroy it," Rashyta stated coldly while looking at the orb. Abnar sighed and stood up from his throne. "It's sad to see that your only opinion on this matter is destruction. Where is your creativity? Where is your forethought? I'm disappointed in you." Rashyta clenched her hand in frustration and answered through gritted teeth, "With all due respect father, there is no need for creativity in justice. This disgusting…thing is an amalgamation of our worst enemies. How was it even created in the first place? Was it the institution?” At her father’s nod, she continued her raving. “Who do they think they are, gods? Messing with the natural order like that, their mortal bodies should be tortured and their soul send to the deepest layer of hell! They-”
“Compose yourself!” She stopped at her father's admonishment. Abnar clicked his tongue and looked out the window where the Golden City was unfolded in all its glory.
“You are correct on many fronts. But you lack imagination.” Rashyta wanted to interrupt but Abnar’s glare stopped her. “Yes, I could send one of my chosen to kill this abomination and that would be it. But does that solve our main problem? No! They will keep creating chaos until they die or one of their experiments causes the seal to break. And I do not have to tell you that we don’t want that to happen, right? Our interactions with the mortal realm are limited. We can't directly interfere with the many problems popping up and you want to destroy something that could help us with that?"
She opened her mouth to retort, but he held up a finger. "Think before you speak. This is a unique opportunity for us to deal with the institution. Their people avoid our chosen like the blight, but this! They won’t ignore one of their creation roaming freely around the world. They will come to collect and then,” Abnar couldn’t stop his chuckling.
“Well, let's just say that I believe that they bit off more than they can chew. Now go.” With that, he turned back to his viewing orb to watch the chaos that was bound to unfold. Rashyta stared at the god of light, not fully understanding what he meant. She also knew that asking for clarifications would result in nothing. So, the goddess of justice turned around and left the palace very unhappy.