Chapter 1: Awakening
His eyes opened.
Pale blue light spilled from empty sockets as awareness crawled through him.
His jaw snapped open in panic.
No sound came out.
His hands scraped against the stone as he tried to breathe, tried to cough, tried to force air into lungs he no longer had.
Nothing.
Only the dry clack of bone.
He went still and looked down.
Bare fingers. Yellowed bone. A ribcage hanging open around an empty cavity where flesh and organs should have been.
No heartbeat. No breath. No warmth.
Just loose bones held together by something unseen.
“Do you have a name?”
The voice rolled through the cavern like distant thunder.
The skeleton turned toward it.
Darkness stretched beyond the faint blue flames flickering between jagged rocks. Past them stood a figure, barely visible beneath a heavy brown robe.
The skeleton tried to speak again.
Nothing.
The figure sighed.
One moment he stood across the cavern. The next, he was directly in front of him.
The skeleton jerked back.
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Pointed ears protruded through long strands of white hair. Pale eyes studied him with detached disappointment, as though examining a defective specimen.
“Another failure,” the man muttered.
His gaze sharpened.
“Can you understand me?”
The skeleton stared back.
For a moment, neither moved.
The elf clicked his tongue.
Blue fire erupted around the skeleton and swallowed him whole.
There was no pain. No heat. Not even fear.
Only emptiness.
He watched the flames consume his bones.
“It seems the soul stabilizes,” the elf murmured, “but cognition still fails to return.”
The cavern faded around him.
The last thing he saw was the elf’s pale eyes through the fire.
Then darkness claimed him.
—
Stone scraped beneath his fingers.
Blue light filled empty sockets.
Again.
This time, there was no elf.
Only darkness.
The skeleton pushed himself upright, loose joints clicking against stone. A narrow tunnel stretched ahead, sloping deeper underground until it disappeared into blackness.
He stared at his hands.
“What… what just happened?”
The words echoed through the cavern.
Except he hadn’t spoken.
The skeleton froze.
A deep, distorted voice repeated the thought inside his skull, layered over itself in unnatural echoes.
What just happened?
The words thundered through the tunnel before finally fading.
Too loud.
“What the…”
Again, the voice escaped him.
Not his real voice.
Something else.
His gaze swept the darkness. Every crack in the stone, every jagged edge and scattered fragment of rock stood out with impossible clarity beneath the dim blue glow of his empty sockets.
“I don’t remember how I got here…”
He looked around.
“Who—”
Then he looked down at himself.
“Who am I?”
Carvings covered his bones.
Symbols. Patterns. Lines cut into nearly every visible surface.
Then—
Sid.
The name surfaced from somewhere inside him and immediately announced itself to the cavern.
“Oh… My name is Sid.”
He turned his arm, examining the carvings etched along the bone.
The tunnel ahead sloped downward, and bones littered the path.
Hundreds of them.
Some lay heaped against the walls. Others had been scattered across the stone without any apparent order.
Sid stepped closer.
Empty skulls stared upward between broken ribs and detached limbs. Femurs crossed at awkward angles. Vertebrae lay scattered among finger bones, fragments of pelvis, pieces of jaw.
His gaze travelled across the mess.
Something tightened inside him.
“So uneven…”
His fingers twitched.
Then both hands flew to his skull.
He scratched furiously at the bone, filling the tunnel with a sharp scrrrk, scrrrk, scrrrk.
A thought forced its way into his mind.
Must rearrange.
Sid stared at the nearest pile.
Something about it was wrong.
Incorrect.
Unfinished.