Origins Stories

Free - Cal

It felt weird. Unnatural, even.

Cal had been pacing in the Corridor of Time for hours. Maybe it was days. Or weeks. Maybe months. Anything he did felt like it took longer or was done quicker than it should have.

He could blink in half a second. But that half second could be a minute in the real world. Cal didn't know. How could he know?

It wasn't like the Corridor of Time had any windows. It existed outside of the timeline or something. Khonsu never really told him.

All Cal knew was that the Corridor of Time was endless. Even though it looked like a box, it had no real walls. Most of the time at least. The space was infinite. It went on forever. The area filled with floating hourglasses.

That all changed pretty quickly. Within a month or two of Cal being here, (though he couldn't actually tell) half of the hourglasses in the box he was contained in either disappeared or started breaking. Then they fell to the nonexistent floor and made a loud noise.

It disturbed Cal more than it should have. Probably because that noise was one of the only sources of sound Cal could have.

Just the sounds of glass breaking and hitting the floor, his own footsteps echoing off the walls when they hit the fake floor. Cal's own breathing. The sound of his own voice talking to himself to keep him occupied.

He couldn't do anything. He couldn't eat or drink in the Corridor. He couldn't sleep in the Corridor. At least not well enough to call it sleep. He didn't even need to sleep. Whether he felt tired or not. He couldn't even die in the Corridor. Only feel pain.

All Cal felt was pain. He was sure his voice had left him a few days ago. He couldn't speak without sounding hoarse. The aching in his body had only worsened the longer he remained in the Corridor.

And then he wasn't.

He blinked and he wasn't there anymore.

Cal didn't know what to do.

He should've been happy about it. But all he felt was shock.

So he ended up sitting on the ground in the Egyptian pantheon. It wasn't like he could move much anyways.

He felt too sore to move. That and the fact he was still in shock from all the sudden colors, bright light, and the fact he wasn't in the Corridor anymore.

He was wearing different clothing too. He had more bandages around his arms too. They were a brownish color, and felt a little tighter than the others.

There was a sort of jacket on him too. It wasn't a very thick one though. The lavender fabric cascaded behind him, as it was pretty long. But it had short sleeves. Guess it wasn't much of a jacket then.

It all felt too real to be fake. So it was really happening. The hallucinations Cal had in the Corridor were never this real. He couldn't feel anything either. So he knew they were fake.

This was real. This was real because he felt a slight breeze. He felt solid ground beneath him.

He may have been gone for a while, but this place hasn't changed much.

Camp Oasis was still the same place it had been when he disappeared.

Cal wondered if the same people were here. Maybe there were new people too. Surely there were.

It was sunrise. Cal never thought much of the sun. But he only now realized how much he missed it.

Cal never realized how much he missed Camp Oasis.

But he also didn't realize how much Camp Oasis missed him.

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Words: 582