It was quiet when he arrived.
No thunder.No light.No voices.
Just the sound of his own breath, like it had only just remembered to start again.
He didn't open his eyes right away. He wasn't sure they were closed.
There was no floor, not at first. No sense of where his body ended and the world began. Just weight. Not pain, not pressure—just the heaviness of being somewhere that shouldn't exist.
And then slowly, space formed around him.
Walls. Pale. Undefined.
A ceiling. Too smooth to be natural.
He was lying on something soft.
A bed?
Maybe.
He sat up. The motion was automatic, like instinct. Like reflex. Like muscle memory without a story.
There were no windows in the room.
No doors.
Just a desk.
And him.
He stood. Carefully. Legs unsure of themselves.
He didn't feel panic. Not yet.Just the quiet tension of something forgotten.
He walked to the desk. There was nothing on it.
Not yet.
He opened a drawer. Empty.
He opened another. Nothing.
Still, something tugged at the back of his mind—a shape, a word, a direction.A sentence he hadn't said yet.A question he was born to ask.
Where am I?
It came out flat. Hollow. Swallowed by the room.
No answer.
He sat down.
Hands on the desk.
Eyes on nothing.
He didn't know who he was.Didn't know how he got here.Didn't know what came before.
But he wasn't scared.
Not yet.
The loops hadn't started.
The forgetting hadn't eaten him.
This was the beginning.
He just didn't know it was after the end.