Consciousness returned to him in a rush—like gasping for air after being underwater too long. His body jerked awake, desperate and disoriented, while his mind lagged behind, struggling to catch up. The scream that built within his chest collapsed under its own weight, crushed by something heavy that had taken residence behind his ribs.
He blinked, his vision swimming as his eyes struggled to focus. Each blink sent shards of pain behind his eyelids. Above him, the sky loomed like an alien presence, the color of faded bruises and dried blood, swollen with clouds that seemed to press down upon him like an invisible weight. They pulsed with an unnatural violet glow, like the slow beat of a dying heart, thumping against the sky.
His fingers dug into the damp soil beneath him as the world spun viciously around him. Blades of tall grass framed his vision like prison bars, swaying in a wind. He forced himself upright, his lean frame shuddering with the effort, muscles remembering strength his mind couldn't place.
The world around him felt wrong—not merely unfamiliar, but fundamentally violated—too still, like the breathless moment before violence erupts. The scent of decay was thick, the air cloying as though it clung to his skin. There were no familiar sounds—no birds, no creatures calling to one another. Only the wind, restless and insistent, tugging at his hair like it too was desperate to escape.
The silence pressed in, heavy and absolute. He exhaled, a breath he hadn't realized he was holding—but the sound felt foreign, disconnected, as though it belonged to someone else. Something was wrong. Not just with this place, but with him.
He reached for a memory—anything that could ground him. A place. A purpose. A single fragment of his past. His hands shook as he grasped the empty space in his mind, feeling it slip through his fingers like sand. The only thing that he found… was his name. Just his name. A single, hollow word in the void.
His name—no, his truonomis was Nero. He tried to reach beyond it, searching for his common name, but it was gone, erased from his memory. His common name, the one he should carry, the one others should call him by, was gone—lost somewhere deep in the void of his mind.
The memory of who he was, of what he should know—burned like shattered glass inside his skull, each fragment reflecting nothing but emptiness where recollection should exist. His identity was reduced to a single word: Nero. Just that. A name without context, floating in a void where his past should have been.
"Finally awake, are we? How disappointing. I was hoping you'd died." The voice slithered through his consciousness, not heard with ears but felt within the marrow of his thoughts, threading through the labyrinth of his broken mind. It was cruel, mocking, and intimate in its intrusion.
Nero's breath caught. He turned his head in every direction, searching, but the voice had no source. No echo. No weight. It simply was. His fingers twitched, instinctively he reached for a weapon that wasn't there.
"Ugh. Watching you flail is exhausting. Can we please get a move on before I lose what little patience I have left?"
Nero swallowed against the dryness in his throat. "Who are you?" His own voice felt distant, like it barely belonged to him.
He flexed his fingers again, his body tense, expecting—what? An answer? A face to match the voice?
"You know who I am," the voice sneered, as if it could taste bitterness in Nero's confusion, "Don't pretend you've forgotten."
A flicker of something dark and buried deep, stirred within the deepest parts of his fractured mind. The voice sounded familiar, a presence that wasn't just known, but woven into the very fabric of his being. His fingers clenched until his knuckles whitened, and his eyes squinted as memories began to unravel.
Sinthos.
The name cut through his mind like a blade, sharp and undeniable. He couldn't forget it, something so fundamental to his very existence. This parasite of the soul, this shadow self. His constant companion, his tormentor, his curse. The one thing that he was bound to remember even when everything else had been stripped away.
"Oh, It remembers me. How touching." Sinthos dripped with venomous contempt. "Perhaps it will remember how to be useful next."
Doing his best to ignore the voice's contempt, Nero gritted his teeth and attempted to rise from the ground, the action proving much more difficult than it should have been. Each muscle screamed in protest, as though he'd been fighting for centuries—his body a battlefield of conflicts and old wounds he couldn't recall.
"Your weakness disgusts me," Sinthos hissed. "All that power festering inside you, and you can barely stand."
"What power?" Nero managed through clenched teeth, a flicker of frustration in his voice "What happened to me? Where are we?"
"Questions, questions. Always questions, never solutions. Your memory may be gone, but your tedious nature remains intact."
Nero slowly steadied himself on his legs, the familiar strength gradually returning. The field he found himself in stretched endlessly in all directions, tall grass rippling like a golden ocean. In the distance, something that might have been a mountain range broke the horizon—jagged teeth against the bruised sky.
"Tell me what you know," Nero demanded, his voice sharp, as though cruelty were his native tongue.
"I know you're a failure," Sinthos replied, with what might have been laughter skittering across Nero's mind. "I know we're not where we were, but not where we are. Though, if I did, I wouldn't tell you. Your ignorance is one of my few remaining pleasures."
Nero realized he wasn't going to make any progress with the voice. Steeling himself, and driven by instincts that felt both foreign and intrinsic, he set his sights on the distant mountains.
"The mountains, aye? Not a bad choice," Sinthos uttered in his mind. "Though you might get caught by them, somewhere between here and there."
"Them?" Nero thought, confusion flickering through his mind.
"You feel it too, don't you? The wrongness of this place?" Sinthos paused, as if savoring the moment. "I would ask if it reminds you of that time, but I doubt you'd remember."
Nero felt it—the wrongness of this place, something unnatural that twisted the air around him. He felt as if he were being watched from every angle, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, refusing to settle.
He took a hesitant step forward, his feet dragging through the tall grass. The wind stirred, but there was no comfort in its touch. Every breath he took felt heavier, as if the air itself was suffocating him.
Sinthos gnawed relentlessly in the back of his mind. "You know it won't be that simple. It never is." It whispered, the words scratching the back of his mind.
Nero clenched his fists, silencing the voice in his mind, and pressed forward. The mountains looked distant, impossibly so. They seemed to stretch further away the more he walked, as though the landscape itself was playing tricks on him.
A strange buzzing filled the air. At first, it was faint, barely a whisper, like a far-off swarm of insects. But with each step, it grew louder, more urgent. It thrummed beneath his skin, crawling into his bones. He glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting something to leap forward from the shadows of the grass, but there was nothing. Only the endless sea of grass, swaying in the wind like the tentacles of some vast, patient entity.
"You're alone," Sinthos whispered into his thoughts, like ice water, crawling down his spine. "There's no one here but you… and me."
Nero's stomach twisted. The words were almost comforting in their malice, a sick kind of truth that settled deep in his chest. He couldn't shake the feeling that there was something out there, watching. Every step he took felt like a slow march toward something unknowable, something he couldn't grasp.
He quickened his pace, his heart pounding in his chest, each beat reverberating in his ears. The mountains were still far off, but they had to hold something. Anything.
The buzzing stopped. The wind fell silent, as if the world itself was holding its breath. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, a warning he could barely understand. Then, a sound—soft at first, like a leaf brushing against the ground, but unmistakable.
He wasn't alone.