I Lost Myself

I'm Watching the End

He woke up alone, blinded by a burning white light and a voice calling to him, rattling in his mind and scattering away any vague thoughts he might have had before waking. His mind was a muddle, dense and confused, his vision tilting and spinning as he tried to blink away the daze. Stumbling to his feet, he hardly heard the voice at all, let alone really comprehended what the girl—it was definitely a girl's voice—was trying to say to him. All he knew was his head felt stuffed with cotton, his chest was numb, and he had no idea where he was.

The final realization sent his body into full blown panic, and he looked frantically around the dimly lit room he was in. It looked like some kind of cave, too dark to make out many details. Four blurry walls, what might have been a door, and the strange blue bed...thing he had woken up in.

After a few seconds, his eyes finally landed on a glowing...something at the far corner of the room. It was a lumpy sort of thing made of the same brownish stone as the walls and floor. There was something with soft light glowing at the top, blinking gently in the otherwise dark room.

He stumbled toward it, his legs like jelly, and all but collapsed as he wrenched the smaller thing from the pedestal. The girl's voice was talking again, but the words were distant, foggy and distorted. They hardly made any sense in his ears, and if they did, he couldn't focus long enough to think through what she was saying.

A deep rumbling set off as he pulled the little glowing box close to his chest. Slats in the far wall which he hadn't noticed before began to pull upward, revealing another room, light slowly leaking through. He lurched toward it, the glowing of the object in his hands already forgotten in the desperate need for escape.

But the next room did not offer an escape. It was more a hall than a room, slightly more lit than the last, with two chests and a couple of rotten wooden crates. The light was only marginally brighter here, and the air remained stale and heavy.

Unsure what else to do, he opened the old chests with shaking hands. They held nothing but a shirt and pants. Pulling the worn clothes on stiltedly, he tried to ignore the spiderwebs of scars on his chest that he couldn't remember getting.

By the time he had forced his feet into the cracking boots, he was breathing a little easier, but his chest still felt fluttery and weak. His heart was pounding almost painfully, thumping against his ribs and making his ears throb, a drumbeat he couldn't recognize, just the same as he did not recognize anything around him, or even himself really.

The scars on his chest marked a battle he likely lost. The echoes of those wounds were set deep into his skin, but he had no memory of what nightmare had scattered starbursts across his ribs, what fire could have burned itself up his neck and over his cheek, what—what blade could have carved jagged bites into his side and swipes on his arms. He could not remember, no matter how desperately he searched his dazed thoughts. And that terrified him.

Suddenly, the strange little box in his hands hummed, and he flinched, staring down at it blearily. A strange set of symbols had appeared across its surface, glowing softly blue in the darkness. Most prominently, an eye—and across the room, the same eye, on the top of a pedestal sort of thing, though it was orange rather than blue.

Maybe if he...

He shuffled over to the pedestal slowly, the worn soles of the boots hardly making a sound on the smoothed floor. It looked almost like the thing he'd taken this smaller thing from, but it was sleeker and shorter, less ornate. Maybe it would let him out, like taking the little box had opened the other room.

He wanted out. Badly. He didn't like this room, didn't like how dark and oppressive it was, how empty and—and hollow it felt.

Cautiously, he put the little box he'd taken against the surface of the pedestal. It immediately flashed blue, and the floor thrummed again, like an old lock releasing, of gears churning.