Subject #295

Chapter 1 - (Day 1): Awakened.

"Wake."

The single word spoken seemingly no louder than a whisper, yet hits me like a sonic boom, echoing back and forth in my ears. My eyes eagerly snap open, yet my mind awakes with a more reluctant haze. Darkness envelopes every corner of my vision as the echoes begin to die down. A piercingly loud silence grasps me as my hearing is dampened by a powerful pressure. My skin flushes with goosebumps as my hair stands on end.

A sudden clarity reveals itself in the fog of my mind – a single word shearing through the confusion. "Aiden," I subconsciously whisper. I know it to be my name. Other thoughts begin to blare to life behind my eyes; a few vague, undeterminable sensations and memories floating into my consciousness like driftwood bobbing in the ocean current.

I tense my mind, straining to think harder. A spontaneous onrush of randomly assorted images, feelings, sounds, emotions, and thoughts suddenly slams into my mind. I gasp in pain at the sheer quantity of information being presented to me. Amid the chaotic rambling of my lower consciousness, a few distinct memories pop out. Running down large white hallways as red lights blare all around me. The memory fades, being instantaneously replaced with another. People in light-blue lab coats are crowding around me, my back forcefully pressed against an accompanying-coloured hospital bed as the shackles encompassing my body drag me down, seemingly drowning me in the folds of bloodied blue linen. A jolt of pain fires off down my spine, and I'm knocked out of my trance.

Another thought flickers to life behind my cold eyes; a detailed depiction of me. White skin lightly tanned. Dark purple eyes, and a mess of roughly cut brown hair – cut short, but not too short. I am muscled, but not overly so. The level of muscle you would get from exercising outdoors. Like tramping, hunting, or athletics. Not that which you would receive from spending hours a day at the gym. A feeling awakens inside me. A numbing, tingling sensation growing from a point on my wrist. I frown. This isn't normal. I test the muscles in my wrist but find that they are fine. As soon as I recognise it, the tingling dissipates. The numbness, too. I push it to the back of my mind, recalling the image of me. I smile. Yeah, this is me.

Bright white cracks of light begin to streak through my darkened vision, like bolts of bright lightning against the darkened canvas of the sky. The cracks spread through my vision, until all I can see is the piercingly bright light.

I blink.

In an instant, the sheet of bright white light blinks out, and a wave of sound crashes into my ears – the dampening pressure filling my eardrums relieved. Colours blend with the sound, until my mind adjusts, and the world is finally revealed to me. I gasp at the beheld sight.

I am standing on a slightly raised stone column – maybe a metre in height, and two in diameter – with heavy-duty metal bracings encompassing my feet and ankles, chaining me to the solid concrete cylinder. Large expansive stone walls extend from the ground; massive sheets of rock reaching upwards towards the sky, disappearing into the clouds above. The walls appear to be haphazardly constructed out of a couple dozen different types of stone chunks. The stone chunks have all been randomly stacked on top of each other, the different colours and shades of rock creating a strangely beautiful sight. Yet because of this construction method, the walls randomly jut out or cave in, leaving no inch of it with any semblance of a smooth texture. A mass of large cracks and crevice's spread across the extension of the walls – large chunks of the rock missing in places, allowing sight through the enormous barriers. The walls – if that's what they in fact are – appear to look more like an artificial cliff-face than walls. Even without the obvious aging of these walls, they have no right to stay standing. They should have broken away or collapsed decades ago...

Large rectangular openings are situated in the wall, creating a gap in the expansive stone structure all the way up to the sky. These openings appear to be randomly placed at points along the wall – though there appears to be one directly behind it. Casting my eyes down the opening, I observe more identical walls situated on either side of the opening, creating a sort of pathway. Down the pathway about a hundred metres, I can faintly observe a straight-cut corner turning to the right. I Along with this, gruesome red stains scatter the area around me – varying shapes and sizes of smeared blood painted across the walls and floor. This does nothing but add to the eerie aura generated by this place.