Chapter 01
"Damn," he groaned, lifting himself up from what definitely was not a bed.
It felt about as comfortable as the surface of a rock, which turned out to be exactly what it was.
It seemed that for some reason, he'd been lying on the floor, a dark, rock-like floor that, as he got to his feet, also made up the walls and ceiling of the place he was standing in.
His first impression of the place was that it was some sort of giant cave, its surface marred by deep scars that made it look as though they led to rifts in space itself. It was a curious sight.
Taking in his surroundings, he also noticed much closer details, starting with his own hand. "Can't see my face, but I think I'm young. How young, I can't tell, but I'm certainly not old."
Hm. This is strange.
Was it normal for someone to wake up, look down, and take note of his own appearance like this?
Common sense said it was, but the scale he left to work with wasn't. A normal person would compare what he saw now to what he'd seen yesterday, the week before, some familiar and relatively close point in time.
He had no reference points at all. Realizing how youthful he looked felt less like recognition and more like a brand-new discovery.
He couldn't find any memory to explain it. In fact, he realized in that same moment that something more than that was wrong with him. He didn't know what his face looked like. He couldn't even say who he was. One word came to mind for it: amnesia.
Wondering what could have caused it, he looked up, then down at the spot where he'd been lying. No blood. Same with his head, which he checked thoroughly. No sign of a concussion, nothing that would explain why he couldn't remember his own face, his age, or even his name.
"This is uncomfortable."
Not remembering anything was one thing, but what specifically unsettled him was what came with it. He felt uncertain about a lot regarding his own body.
Was I not taller? he wondered. No, shorter than this?
More muscular, too? It was a strange thought, since he wasn't lacking in muscle at all.
On the spectrum of fat, skinny, and muscular, he leaned heavily toward the last. Well above average, in fact, though he had no idea where that sense of average even came from.
And also, was I not a little better equipped than this?
Granted, the floor was cold, but even so, he felt his friend downstairs, whose length and girth he couldn't recall, ought to have had a little more to boast about.
Hopefully I'm a grower, because this ain't quite it.
And why am I even naked in the first place?
His gaze caught on something lying on the ground.
Drawing closer, he found a neatly collapsed pile of clothes: a travel-worn cloak that looked like it had survived one adventure too many, a waistband draped across a plain brown tunic, and a leather pouch tucked against its side.
Inside the pouch were seven rough, crimson gemstones, each about the size of a small walnut, glowing faintly from within.
Even unpolished, they looked valuable enough to fetch a small fortune.
He spent a surprisingly long moment turning them over in his hands before setting them aside and continuing his inspection.
Beneath the tunic lay an undershirt, a small blue gemstone pendant resting on top, then a pair of trousers, and at the very bottom, a single pair of hole-ridden underwear that he sincerely hoped wasn't harboring some ancient, dormant disease.
The whole arrangement looked uncannily as though whoever had worn these clothes had simply vanished, leaving everything to crumple into a heap right where they'd stood.
He measured the distance between where he'd woken up and where the clothes lay, and once he tried them on, he was fairly sure they weren't his. That only reinforced the theory that whoever owned them had just vanished, leaving them behind.
The sleeves were too long, the limbs too large. Still, his overwhelming desire to stop being naked forced him to make do. He rolled up the sleeves and adjusted the pants as best he could.
"Perfect," he said, beaming. The clothes smelled faintly of dust, but they beat being naked by a wide margin. It was at that moment that a strange breeze caressed him through a hole in the pants he'd apparently gone commando in. Yeah, he decided he'd take no chances with whatever that might carry.
Some instinct, one he couldn't place the origin of, quickly identified the source of the breeze: an exit.
After searching the chamber for anything he might have missed, he took one last look around to fix the place in memory, then headed toward it.
Reaching the exit, though, he discovered it didn't actually lead outside.
Instead, it opened into a stair-lined corridor that led to more corridors, which led to still more corridors. Before long he was thoroughly lost on where to go next. Trusting his instincts, since he had little else to trust, he picked a direction whenever the tunnels split.
The route took him through corridors whose walls were covered in sky-blue crystals clinging to the stone like moss, their glow bathing the tunnels in soft blue light that would otherwise have been total darkness.
He passed several intersecting corridors from which distinctly unsettling noises echoed. In fact, he happened to be walking past one such corridor when the sound reached him. "Are those bats?"
He hoped so, because the alternative was that it was the distorted scream of a woman.
He listened carefully for a moment, then concluded that, given the complete absence of recognizable words, it was probably bats.
Hopefully.
Speaking of obscure animals, he stumbled onto one shortly after. Passing through a corridor crossed by another running perpendicular to it, he spotted something roughly a dozen meters to his left.
A corpse.
"That is one absurdly large spider," he noted.
The creature was nearly as large as the corridor itself, leaving just enough room on either side to squeeze past. Blue blood pooled beneath it, leaking from legs mangled like bent bamboo, with more wounds hidden beneath its massive arachnid body.
He was still trying to work out what had happened to it when he caught movement, suggesting that he was not dealing with a corpse. The spider hissed and spat at him.
The spit fell short by half a dozen meters, since he'd already stepped back twice that distance and dropped into a martial stance that genuinely surprised and impressed him.
He was skeptical about how his fists would help against something this size, but judging by how naturally the stance had come, and by the complete absence of fear he felt, it seemed he had experience dealing with this kind of thing.
Fortunately, he didn't have to test that unproven experience. The creature dissolved into tiny particles of light that soon unmade it entirely, leaving him standing there, thoroughly confused by the whole thing.
Strange as that was, his long trek through the endless corridors continued.
He may have lost track of time at some point, encountering more of the same bizarre sights: giant arachnid beasts sprawled across the floor, legs mangled, undersides crushed as if they'd suffered a terrible fall. The problem was there was nowhere for them to have fallen from. The ceiling was high, but relative to their size it just wasn’t.
Some of the creatures managed to hiss and spit at him even while down.
Others simply vanished into particles of light the moment he passed.
Combined with how repetitive the place was, the whole experience took on a strange, hallucinatory quality that made him partly question whether he was making any progress at all.
Still, he kept walking, shrugging it off.
Somewhere in that endless march he found himself wondering what exactly he'd originally come to do down there, he couldn’t figure out an answer to that, so it was a relief that after a while he noticed an upward slope in his steps, confirming once again that he had indeed started somewhere lower and that he was getting somewhere.
The upper level he eventually reached, after roughly as much time as it had taken to cross the one below it, turned out to be just the lower part of yet another level. That confirmed the place was some kind of tower, or at least a structure built in floors.
Each floor seemed to host its own variety of giant insects. The first had been arachnids. The second was home to enormous green scorpions. The third held fat blue millipedes, and the one after that housed bloated, iridescent white cockroaches.
Aside from being “insectoid”, they all shared one trait: none of them seemed capable of moving properly.
It looked as though they'd grown so large and heavy their own bodies could no longer support them.
The millipedes had it worst. They squirmed desperately on their short, spindly legs, looking like they were trying to push a boulder uphill.
Before fatigue could catch up with him, boredom did. To fight the monotony, he started singing. He couldn't remember the lyrics to any real song, only vague melodies, so he improvised.
"If you want me to pay my taaaaaaaxes,
you better come with a big-ass crucifiiiiiiiiix!
you're gonna have to nail me doooooooown!"
He was mid-song when he came upon a floor full of giant golden flies.
"Again," he grimaced, growing tired of the pattern.
The corridor after that stretched on for what felt like an eternity, until, up ahead, the light began to dim.
The blue crystals lining the walls thinned out, and thinned further still, until the distance ahead turned pitch black.
"Could it be..."
He broke into a run. There, at the edge of the darkness, a staircase appeared.
Like every chamber before it, this one climbed upward too.
He took the steps two at a time with a burst of enthusiasm he hadn't expected from himself.
The higher he climbed, the brighter it got, not from the familiar blue glow this time, but from a warmer, natural light growing stronger with every step.
Finally he reached an opening. Ahead, light poured in from an unknown source, looking, for the first time since he'd entered the dungeon, like an actual way out.
Just not quite the kind he'd been picturing.
Ahead lay the outside world, though not the kind most people would imagine when they hear those words. Thinking back on the hours he'd spent climbing, it somehow made sense that instead of a green valley or a desert, he'd emerge onto what looked like the summit of a mountain.
Above him stretched a vast, dark blue sky, its lower reaches carpeted with clouds. In the distance, where sky met earth, the horizon curved visibly toward the edge of the world, a sight that would probably have given a flat-earther an aneurysm.
The view triggered an immediate sense of déjà vu. He wasn't nearly as shocked as he probably should have been, as if some hidden part of him already knew this place. And yet, despite the lack of surprise, the sheer beauty of it still took his breath away.
It really was beautiful, beautiful enough to stir a childlike sense of wonder, a pull toward throwing himself straight into the cotton-like clouds drifting below. One particularly inviting cloud passing close by was enough to draw him past the archway-like exit and out onto the snow-covered ground.
Looking back, he realized the structure behind him resembled the entrance to an exceptionally evil lair, which raised an uncomfortable question.
What had possessed the person he used to be to come here willingly?
Assuming he'd come here of his own will at all.
Still, something told him that if he'd simply stayed away from this place, he wouldn't be dealing with amnesia right now.
"Tsk. I really hope you were abducted or something, because there had to be something wrong with you to come here."
Turning away, he stepped further into the snow, and only then realized how lucky he'd been to find that bundle of clothes, which included shoes and warm socks. "Wherever the owner of these clothes got obliterated to, thanks for the blessing, man."
A couple of dozen meters into the snow, a loud sound made him glance back to find the entrance gone. The evil-coded doorway had vanished into particles of light, the same way the creatures on the lower floors had.
The sight left him confused, but some part of him, the fragment still holding onto scraps of forgotten memory, simply shrugged it off.
Whatever happened, happened. So he kept moving, descending with one goal in mind: finding civilization.
And hopefully, somewhere along the way, recovering whatever memories he'd lost.