Memories of the past passed through the boy’s eyes as sped-up footage. Visions of events that had shaped him into who he was.
It had begun with the common knowledge in his memories of another life.
Curiously, he remembered the names of countries, cities, and animals first.
People came a bit later, starting with those dear to him, and with those people came the memories of all of his social encounters and interactions.
The memories fill the gaping holes in his conscience and awareness about himself, especially his identity.
Gradually they helped bring his past life into focus.
He was born on a planet called Earth.
Born into a country called the United Federation of Imperia (UFI). The leading empire on earth in his time.
He had two parents, a mother, and a father.
He also had siblings and a pet; a brother, a sister, and a cat.
He had a happy childhood and didn’t want for anything growing up but he did learn that his father and mother were of different ethnicity and origin. His mother was Imperian and his father was Naghmian from a country called Naghma.
He had found it pretty cool that he was the product of two different cultures and races when he was young.
He did well in school, exceptionally well. Lots of memories of medals, certificates, and honorary sashes.
In school, he learned about and grew interested in his father’s home country, the Ahsanian Republic of Naghma.
His exceptional academic abilities allowed him freedom in whatever field he wished to pursue.
Eventually, after graduation, he was hand-picked by Imperia’s Intelligence Administration (IIA), the best intelligence institute on Earth, as a new recruit. A very coveted position that only the best and the brightest could achieve.
His parents were very proud of him, all his friends congratulated him, and even his university plastered posters of his face for some credit behind his success.
Joining the IIA was the biggest mistake of his life.
Exhibiting a lot of potential, he was selected and trained for the government’s elite covert intelligence unit. A unit designed to infiltrate and overthrow other nations’ governments.
Telling him these actions were necessary to support democracy in other countries and to protect Imperia herself, they had fed him a steady diet of lies and he had eaten it all up.
Eager to prove himself, he completed his training with flying colors and was the youngest operative in history to begin going on real missions.
His first missions consisted of starting insurgencies in countries ruled by corrupt autocrats that were totalitarian in nature.
He executed these missions to the best of his abilities, inciting rebellion and insurgencies, buying out their corrupt militaries, and even personally leading guerilla warfare tactics against the corrupt autocrats.
He felt he was fighting for good, he truly did.
However, he started experiencing cracks in what the IIA said to him and what they actually wished him to accomplish.
Many of the insurgency groups he had personally armed and supported, people whom he had guaranteed and promised their fight would lead to a better life were routinely abandoned by Imperia in favor of a more obedient puppet in the administrations of these countries.
In some countries, where he had successfully managed to depose their tyrannical dictators, instead of fulfilling their promise of supporting a people's democracy Imperia would just support and install another more obedient dictator.
He began to realize that his “missions” were just a negotiation tactic used by Imperia to carve out better deals or install more obedient heads of state.
Soon his missions led him to do the same in countries that were raised by their own people in the hopes of a better life for their children. He was tasked with overthrowing actual people’s representations in favor of obedient corrupt autocrats.
His work routinely bordered on the unethical side but he performed outstandingly in his role, sometimes he was even helping to overthrow many of the worst autocrats of his time, only for them to be replaced by another flavor of more manageable autocrats.
He infiltrated these countries and their governments. Ignited, armed, and supported rebellions. Created instability, whether politically through bought and blackmailed politicians or militarily through incited armed mutiny and guerilla warfare.
He excelled in all aspects of his work.
However, he had realized his actual role. He wasn’t fighting for good, there was no good in destroying the lives of millions of people.
That was his job, to destabilize other people’s nations in the name of protecting his own country.
A lot of the time these missions had led to catastrophic results that ended in multiple genocides and more often his involvement had made it worse for the local peoples and their futures.
He was at the peak of his career.
He had the respect of his peers and his society but he felt disillusioned. They called him a hero but he could only see himself and his actions as genuinely evil.
In the pursuit of Imperia’s objectives, his actions had oftentimes led to the deaths of innocent people, casualties that the Imperian state simply considered collateral damage.
He no longer felt pride or honor in his work or country.
His sleep had become plagued with nightmares.
When he looked in the mirror, he saw the shadows of all the innocents who had died because of his actions. Looking at him with their vacant dead eyes.
He could no longer lie to himself.
He had wanted to struggle to create a brighter future for others but in reality, he was only tearing their lives down. He didn’t even have an answer for why anymore.
They told him it was for Imperia’s interests but what those interests were was never truly defined.
Years passed and soon he was assigned to his father’s home country, the Ahsianan Republic of Naghma.
A corrupt country where its own military controlled the majority of its industries and ruled with an iron fist.
The military feasted on the funds of their hard-working people, depriving them of all chances at a decent life.
They starved their people and their children, purposefully kept them illiterate, and took over all areas of civil governance.
They formed rich empires, benefiting themselves and their kin while people suffered.
To maintain their control, they abducted, raped, and killed their own citizenry. Those who spoke out were routinely disappeared from public life to be beaten and tortured, never to be seen again.
For those they could not kill or abduct, they used other means.
They manipulated private media to target and malign such individuals and if that did not work, they blackmailed through illicit photos and videos of either the direct person or their loved ones.
Through control over the media, they monopolized patriotism, waving away all criticisms against them as enemy propaganda.
Their unchecked greed had been leading the country and its people toward a dark abyss and it was also in their greed that they had made an enemy out of Imperia.
His mission was to overthrow the military elite of Naghma, a purpose he took on with enthusiastic zealousness.
Determined to redeem himself, he finally had a chance to make things right for at least one country. He spent years in Naghma, gathering support and intel, developing networks, and forming rebels out of oppressed Naghmians.
It wasn’t very hard to find people who championed his cause. Most were sick and tired of all the injustices and corruption infesting their day-to-day lives.
Spending time with them and fighting toward a common cause, he developed deep ties with those people and grew to consider them as his comrades.
Amongst them, he had found his future wife Amaara, a humanitarian lawyer and activist.
The people’s chosen representative to lead them.
She had struggled against their military junta’s corrupt tyranny from her childhood.
An incorruptible person with an indomitable will she had stood tall against their aggression and intimidation.
No matter what they had thrown at her she had never backed down.
She had inspired him and countless others to never bend in the face of injustice.
With her, he felt he was finally making a difference, doing something worthwhile, something good.
With the passage of time, he no longer considered himself an Imperian but someone who belonged with Naghma.
More years passed and after tireless work, they were at the point where they were considered as a serious challenge to the Naghmian military junta as a political power.
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Amaara had won over and united all the disaffected, separated peoples of their country as a powerful force that had struck fear into the fascistic regime.
They were so close to their dream.
Everything hinged on the Naghmian national election which was fast approaching and with Imperia’s support behind them, they were protected from the junta’s direct violent wrath.
It seemed like he would finally help accomplish something worthwhile. A deed that would shape the future of countless generations toward a bright peaceful life.
Perhaps this dream had blinded him to the brutal reality of cold national interests.
The Naghmian military junta somehow managed to secure a deal with Imperia, a deal that was more lucrative with the junta staying in power.
Overnight the ground had completely shifted beneath their feet. Imperia reneged on all of her promises and took back all support.
This gave the Naghmian military the green light to go after everyone who opposed them, including amaara and her political party.
Thousands were raided and arrested, imprisoned in unmarked vans, and never seen again.
They claimed his wife, Amaara, as an enemy of the state and charged her with sedition.
He had tried to get her to run with him, to escape to Imperia.
She had refused saying she was not abandoning everyone who had supported her and her country.
She was imprisoned and scheduled for execution.
As a last-ditch effort he had attempted to expose everything, the shady dealings between the Naghmian military junta and Imperia, Imperia’s covert intelligence operations against other sovereign nations, and his own role in Imperia’s sins.
He had compiled proof of everything with classified documents that he had secretly smuggled out of IIA headquarters.
He was desperate to save her, his comrades in arms, and everything they had struggled so hard to achieve.
The night he was going to meet up with trusted journalists, he was assassinated by someone he had considered his comrade.
He should have seen it coming but his rashness in preventing Amaara’s death had blinded him.
He was struck with a single bullet in the back, puncturing his lungs.
His comrade who shot him was crying, saying his children were taken hostage.
They had given the poor guy a choice and he had chosen his children; he didn’t blame him.
As he lay dying in the street, all he could think about was Amaara, how she would be executed, and how everything they had struggled for would be burned down and blacked out of history.
He wanted to move, to get up and keep fighting but his body just failed.
He was just a single man, made of flesh and bone fighting against the interests of countries and empires.
How else could everything have ended?
As he lay there dying, he recalled the last thing Amaara had said to him when he was trying to get her to leave the country.
She had stared into his eyes and said something, he tried to recall what it was. He could picture her lips moving but he couldn’t read her words.
The boy opens his eyes and is greeted by hot air and the blazing glare of the sun.
He sits up, a little dazed from everything he has remembered.
“Amaara…..”
He speaks her name out loud, expecting a surge of emotion but feels only numbness.
“I was supposed to help Amaara and everyone else but I was shot…..how much time has passed since then?.........She was scheduled for execution...”
Sorrow grips his heart as the realization hits that everything in Naghma was probably over by now.
Including Amaara.
“I never even got to say goodbye……”
He had lost everything and everyone.
After doing so much in his life what was it all for?
In a sudden fit of anger, he punches the ground.
“Aaagh! Fuck!”
Pangs of pain shoot up his arm as his fist strikes the hard rocky surface.
“…oh god fuck that hurts.”
The physical pain dulls his anger and he brings his hand to his face to inspect, hoping he hasn’t broken anything.
His grief mixes with bafflement as he stares at his hand.
It was small and pale, the hand of a child.
“Am I hallucinating?....what’s going on?”
His voice was also childish. Its high pitch of prepubescence rang in his ears.
“How did I not notice this before!?”
Everything in his memories was telling him that he was an adult man in his late thirties but the reality in front of him was a stark contrast.
He was a child and judging from his size probably no more than eight or nine years of age.
He touches the back of his head and winces from pain, the injury was on its way to healing but still stung a little.
“Yup, that’s definitely real pain. So, this is not a hallucination….wait…”
He stands up to his feet, feeling his chest.
There was no pain at all, he could’ve sworn there were some broken ribs.
He looks over his shoulder, expecting to see a large gash but there is not a scratch. Even his suit did not have any visible signs of tear when he explicitly remembered that it was torn by the dark crab’s tail stab.
His grief fades and gives way to curiosity as he thinks how all this could be possible. Sitting back down on the ground, he uses his trained logical analysis to fit all the pieces together.
“I was shot in the back and it was a fatal shot so I should’ve died right there, but that did not happen. What happened is that I’ve turned into a child and I’m in an unfamiliar environment with an alien beast trying to kill me. That dark crab was definitely not something of earthly origins.”
He thinks back to how he was hit by the crab but some mysterious blue barrier had protected him.
“I was hit with enough force to make minced meat out of my body, I crash-landed into solid rocks with an impact that formed an inch-deep crater, and I had boulders three times my size land on me, yet I’m not dead or injured. Hell, all of my injuries from the encounter are just gone.”
The entire thing was puzzling but strangely the situation reminded him of the plot of a movie he had seen with Amaara in the past.
In the movie, an 8th-century knight had been injured in war but instead of dying, he had somehow teleported to the 23rd century.
Watching the silly knight try to make sense of the advanced science and giant mutant beasts roaming a wasted earth had been pretty funny.
Despite the sci-fi premise, it was surprisingly a romantic comedy.
“Did I get teleported like that knight?”
Normally he would think such a possibility could only happen under the influence of heavy hallucinogenic drugs but the image of the dark crab scuttling silently was too fresh in his mind to consider otherwise.
Needing more information to make an accurate judgment, he examines his bodysuit. In the bright sunlight, he can make out all of its details.
The black bodysuit did not seem like something made for casual wear.
The exterior was constructed from a lightweight yet highly durable black composite material that seemingly offered exceptional resistance to strong blunt impacts and sharp slashes.
The design was sleek, minimizing his profile. There was a balance between agility and protection.
Woven into the mesh of the suit’s external material were small square-shaped dark blue gems. They were placed strategically throughout the entire suit, on his chest, shoulders, forearms, thighs, and shins.
He lightly touches one of the embedded gems and it gives off a faint blue light.
“Holy shit, it’s a sci-fi battle suit. The blue energy barrier must have come out of these gems here…does it have self-regenerative capabilities as well? That could be how it healed me and repaired itself.”
All the evidence was clearly leading to one single possibility.
He had died and was now teleported to another world but in the body of a child.
Why this child specifically, he could not say.
His contemplation is disturbed by a faint crunching sound.
“What was that..?”
Alertness and caution push away all feelings as he stands up on his feet, searching for the source of the disturbance.
As his eyes take in the sight of the alien environment around him, it becomes obvious that he is standing on an alien planet.
There was no sight on earth that could explain this bizarre view.
He was standing in the middle of a rocky landscape with countless huge rock pillars surrounding him.
It wasn’t the pillars that were alien, but the black vines that covered all of them like a dark mesh.
The rock pillars varied in size, ranging from slender and delicate to sturdy and massive, and all of them were draped with black vines cascading down like dark waterfalls.
Even on the plains the vines swirled and twined around the smooth stone surface, forming a stark contrast against their reddish hue.
They clung to every contour, tracing the curves and crevices as if trying to cover them completely.
The sinuous jet-black vines enveloped all, barely leaving any untouched spot.
They encircled him, wrapping every exterior his eyes could discern.
He cautiously approaches a black tendril close to him, it pulses in a soft rhythm.
“…what is this creepy stuff….it looks alive.”
The black shade of the vine was eerily similar to the dark carb that had chased him.
“Speaking of creepy, where did that crab go? It was so close to me last time; I was practically gift-wrapped with a ribbon.”
Since he was obviously alive it had ignored him for some reason, after chasing him all over the place. Could it be because it was unable to locate him? Did not seem likely.
He hears the crunching sound again. Something close to him was making the noise.
Something perched behind a rock tower to his immediate west, hidden from his sight.
“Fuck I hope, it's not that dark crab coming for round two.”
He stealthily approaches the column, taking care not to step on the black vines, and leans into its side to peer around from its edge.
The crunching sound was coming from a big caterpillar-type insect, casually resting horizontally on the side of the tower and lazily munching on a tendril of black vine.
Sensing his figure peeking from its side, it quickly jerks its head toward him.
The action surprises the boy and he staggers back, balling his fists up ready to fight.
The big caterpillar blankly peers in his direction with its eyeless face and then plops its raised head back on the vine to continue munching.
Despite having no eyes, it had somehow examined the boy and had deemed him as non-threatening.
Its disinterest signals the same idea to the boy.
“It’s big but doesn’t look particularly dangerous.”
Stepping a little closer, he observes the snacking caterpillar intently, studying its features and design.
It was bigger than him in size but compared to the earlier crab it looked tiny. The outer skin was black with some bright spots running down its sides, the uppermost layer of the skin was a shade lighter than the sides.
Like a caterpillar, it had many legs supporting its weight and because of its size, he could make out the tiny hooks at the end of its legs grabbing the rocky ridges of the column.
Even the mouth parts munching on the black vines were similar to a caterpillars, or so he imagined as he didn’t exactly remember the mouth of a real caterpillar.
The black vine it was snacking on was oozing dirty black juice down the stone column.
Walking slowly so as not to spook the giant bug, the boy approaches the liquid to get a better look.
It gave off a foul smell that assaulted his senses, churning his stomach. He had thought about tasting it earlier but the stench had easily changed his mind.
Not wanting to touch it with bare skin, he uses a rock to scrape the fluid off the column.
The sound attracts the attention of the caterpillar momentarily but it quickly loses interest and goes back to munching its treat.
Bringing the fluid close to his face makes the stench unbearable but he notices something peculiar about it.
It was slowly moving toward his fingers as if it was alive.
He flings the rock away, annoying the caterpillar, and puts out his hand toward the black liquid oozing down the rock pillar, keeping a slight distance and making sure to not touch it directly.
Immediately tiny strands from the fluid rise against gravity toward his hands, straining to make contact with his skin.
“Well, isn’t that fucking creepy then. How are you finding this nasty stuff yummy?”
He asks the caterpillar which continues crunching and munching.
Watching the juices drip from its mouth makes him realize his throat is parched. It must have been hours since he had any water.
“Gotta look for water, definitely not drinking this evil-looking sludge. If it wants to crawl into my body then probably shouldn’t let it.”
Making sure there was no danger around, he walked back to the rocky wreckage of the collapsed cliff.
“So, all this time it wasn’t a cave, I was out in the open the entire time.”
He recalled the all-encompassing pitch-black dark from before.
“Was that nighttime in this place? But that’s impossible.”
If he was beneath the open sky the entire time then why wasn’t there any light? There were no twinkling stars or moons, just darkness.
It defied all of his knowledge from his past memories about space and the universe.
Sure, he wasn’t an astronomer but he knew about planets, moons, and stars. They were supposed to be visible in the night sky.
“Maybe a layer of dense clouds or something in the atmosphere covered the sky at night?”
He wonders to himself as he peers up but the clear sky shined with its familiar blue color with not a cloud in sight.
However, he does spot something strange.
Two dark lines arced across the entire sky, making a sharp disparity against the blue background.
Continuous and unbroken, they extended as far as the eye could make out, flowing right into the sun and then coming out the other side.
It was too bright to make out if they were crossing the sun from the front or the back.
“It’s gotta be from the front, right? If they’re going around the back then that Implies the ring is big enough to circle the sun and back to this planet.”
Imagining the latter case made him feel uneasy, this environment was proving to be too different from his previous one.
His survival depended on him knowing as much as possible about his environment.
The position of the sun was exactly in between the narrow space of the two arcs as if it was being propped up by them.
The lines traveled down and disappeared behind the horizon on both sides, probably encircling the whole planet.
“This just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
Lack of any light at night time, two arcs circling the sky, black vines with living dark ooze covering everything, giant overgrown bugs hunting people, and the weird flaming glows he had seen come out of the crab and himself.
They all added up to form a complex mystery but he could feel they were deeply intertwined.
“One thing is clear; this is a different world from the one in my memories. *sigh* Well, things aren’t going to clear up any time soon, might as well start searching for water and food.”
Figuring thinking on an empty stomach was useless, he decides to move.
Pretty much on a whim, he decides to walk towards the west, following the downward arc of the two lines in the sky.