As minutes trickled by, he realized that the blue glow of his tattoos which had led him into the maw of danger had not subsided, and that its illumination continued to grow. The whitish filter of the blue light plunged the room into an ethereal atmosphere like the color spectrum opposite end of the orange glare of the alligator’s malevolent eyes, and Richie rolled up his sleeves reflexively to look at the dragon heads at his wrists. They were animate, and snarling, as though they sensed an unwelcome presence in the room.

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

Richie jumped and looked to the corner of the room. A cobalt-cloaked figure, face shadowed under a hood that darkened the face into a bottomless well that swallowed all light, slouched against the wall with its arms folded. The voice was simultaneously masculine and feminine, echoey, and low. It sounded like it was all around Richie.

“Wh-who the hell-?” Richie stuttered.

He had meant to demand “Who the hell are you?!” in a self-assured, confrontational tone that gave an air of immovable authority. Instead, he gave only the whimpers of a terrified, helpless child, backed into a corner by a frightening stranger. He half-heartedly raised his fists at a sloppy guard position.

“You mean to fight me?” the figure asked, not really sounding interested.

“What’s going on here?” Richie asked tonelessly, voice dry. He had spent all of his screaming volume in the sewer tunnel.

“You shouldn’t be here.” the figure said, not clarifying by tone or syntax if this was in answer to Richie’s question or not. “The door has been opened once again. Few can peek behind it yet, but even if you are counted among them, actually going inside is a fool’s venture. Was it whim that compelled you, or just a death wish?”

Richie set his jaw. “Instinct. These guys wanted in, not me.” Richie gestured to his azure dragons, now coiling about his arms and hissing like snakes. “My tattoos-”

“Not tattoos. Runes. I see. It was not your desire that opened the door to you, but the memory encoded in those runes adorning your body. They wish again to look upon their creator.” the figure said.

Richie twitched. “What are you talking about?” he asked despite himself.

“You don’t remember, do you? What came before your monotonous days of misery? Those brighter days are partitioned behind a great barrier in your psyche. Intriguing. Let’s knock down that barrier, shall we?”

Before Richie could speak another word, the figure flashed across the room, and he was staring into the yawning dark pit of its empty hood where a face should have been. Richie felt himself fall into that darkness, swallowed up by the eyeless gaze.

Everything came flooding back in that instant. Richie had been homeschooled in isolation by his mother for the first eleven years of his life. Life was quaint and his mother was loving, but things always seemed so strange, as if there was some terrible secret being kept from him, or like he was constantly on the edge of doing something he could get into a lot of trouble for. He never went outside, all of their groceries were delivered to them by another, and he always had to cover up his tattoos - no, they weren’t tattoos, he had somehow been born with those azure dragons wrapped around him, like bestial guardians from the heavens bound in flesh and blood to watch over a child of destiny. But they were a double-edged sword, one that would invite unwanted attention, and so they had.

His mother shoved him out the window, to hide him in the bushes, and what followed was the thunderfall of shredding gunfire. Someone - or several someones - had broken into their home. They had gunned down Richie’s mother in cold blood.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

He had to put as much distance between himself and home as possible, to flee somewhere far away and never look back no matter what. At age twelve, the failure to do that clutched him, when he was rushed down by a tall man in a trenchcoat, having dropped his guard while foraging through garbage cans for scraps of food.

He crouched, huddled for warmth in a dingy cold cell, a spacier but even more frightening cage than the trunk of the man’s car in which he had been smuggled, and one of many in the jail-like basement of some accursed place. The moans and screams of pleading children were all around him, and across from him, through the bars of his pen, he could see many other cells like it, and in each of them a child, few much older than he was, and many far younger, all bearing birthmarks like Richie’s own.

They were in a human kennel, marked for sacrifice by the brands of their shared birthmark.

Underneath the terror of looming death, the preteen Richie awakened something till-then dormant that day, and a thing that had remained dormant long after.

Not like this, he thought. I’m not dying here.

His dragons glowed a brilliant, radiant blue, and with a surge of their strength, he ripped those iron bars apart. The glow consumed his senses, and when he woke again, he was free. He never learned what happened to the others, their prison, or the cult who had orchestrated it all. And since there was nothing for it to cling to the nightmare, he promptly forgot it.

Until now, when this new menacing being plunged its claws into the soil of Richie’s mind, and brought the buried trauma screaming back to the surface.

Richie, seventeen again now instead of twelve, and back in the apartment bedroom, stumbled and fell backward, out of the cloaked figure’s shrouded black hole.

“What did you do?!” Richie found the strength to scream again, flying spittle at the figure.

“I simply gave you a little gift - the gift of memory.” the figure answered.

Richie clutched at his searing temples again, falling on his knees, eyes screwed shut in mixed physical and mental agony as his skull felt ready to split. “No, I don’t want to think about all this again! Take it back! Make it go away!”

The figure stood to its full height, and Richie realized, even through his blinding pain, that the entity stood easily ten feet. “I do not bow to the demands of children. Besides, that’s not what you really want, is it, Richie?”

“How do you know my name?! Are you-”

“Calm yourself, I am not the man in your memories.” the figure dismissed. “You stand at the threshold of many worlds. The answers to all of your questions lie in one of them, hidden amongst countless others. The runes you were gifted by your father sense their home world, and seek to answer its call. I wonder If you can find it?”

“My father?” Richie asked, pulling himself into a crouch, struggling to stand again.

The figure gave a low, humorless chuckle. “Almost let it slip. You’ll know what you need when you need to know.”

“Why are you doing this?” Richie asked the figure.

The robed being tilted its head quizzically. “An experiment.” it answered finally. “I wish to see the next stage of evolution, and have a hand in its dawning. You are in competition with others who have found the door. I believe you’ve met one of them already.”

“Others?”

Richie had a flash of those long steel claws striking forward.

“Yes. If you survive the separation of the wheat from the chaff, you may prove to warrant my interest. Farewell until then, boy.” the figure nodded, then turned away in a flutter of trailing fabric.

“You son of a bitch, come back here! Come b-”

Richie fell unconscious.

…

Richie awoke in the junked car upon the scrapheap.

“What the- again?”

If it was just a dream, then which parts were real - and which ones were just the dream?