The paper bag was warm in his hands.
Oil slowly ran through the bag as he walked. The scent of the fried food was slowly mingling with the air around him making him droll a bit.
His steps were unhurried as he walked towards his home.
For once, nothing was pressing on him to work as the holiday stretched forward with a quiet promise of sleeping, wasting time and doing absolutely nothing of importance.
'Maybe I'll binge something when I get home, ' he thought.' Or just sleep the whole day away.'
The tranquil moment at the start of the holiday always felt inexplicably peaceful.
The street lights died on the road in an amber colour. The city played its usual sound in his ears- cars passing by, people chattering here and there, the ordinary noise of the world as usual and as it should.
But then his vision blurred.
At first, he thought that the fatigue had caught up to him.
His vision distorted the world was being snapped away like it was being broken apart, stretched or even corrupted.
He blinked. Once. Twice. Thrice.
But nothing changed; the world was still falling apart in his vision.
"…What?" he muttered.
The land beneath his feet sometimes felt fluid and other times hard as if it had not yet decided what it wanted to be.
His vision deteriorated and the sounds around him dulled turning into a distant echo.
'I just need to sit down', he told himself. 'Maybe blood isn't reaching my head fast enough...'
He let the bag in his hands fall and rubbed his eyes to clear away this blurred world and get back his vision.
But then the world he knew was already gone.
Cold iron pressed against his back.
An unfamiliar chill ran into his skin, awakening him and clearing his vision.
Darkness greeted him, not the comfortable darkness in which you get cosy and sleep but rather a heavy and suffocating blackness broken only by the dim torchlight beyond the thick metal bars.
"Bars."
His breath hitched as his hands grazed against the metal and as he saw the current state of his body.
He tried to move.
But only pain answered.
Not the sharp and not the kind that tells you that you are injured.
This was much worse as it was an all encompassing weakness like putting a whole big log of wood on his back. His limbs felt unresponsive and distant, making him feel like they didn't belong to him.
'Get up. Move.' He told himself
His body didn't listen.
Pain reached his spine, then his brain, as he pulled up his hands to his view.
They were wrong.
Not like broken or anything like that, but rather they were too thin as he was able to easily outline the bones in his arms and hands.
Like he had been malnourished over a long period of time.
They were too thin with pale skin and brittle bones that could break at any given moment.
There was no strength in them, no muscle, no warmth. Just a trembling frame of skin that looked more like a skeleton wrapped in flesh than a living body.
"…No," he whispered.
His voice came out hoarse, deeper and unfamiliar.
'This isn't real, this can't be true.'
He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing himself to breathe.
'I'm dreaming. I passed out. That's all this is. Its all a dream.'
"That's right its all a big dream."
He opened them again.
The cage remained as it was
Rusted iron bars surrounded him with symbols etched on them which he didn't recognise. The floor was made of stone stained with things which he didnt want to identify yet.
The air around his reeked of blood, of chemicals and of rotting corpses masked by the scent of perfumes and incense.
Beyond the cage, other shapes stirred.
Children.
Small bodies huddled together, curled up against each other, sharing warmth while quietly sobbing.
But they all shared a feature similar to his.
They were all too thin.
"No no no no....."
Reality pressed down on him, which was crushing and absolute in its own. His heartbeat quickened as his denial shattered and now replaced by raw terror Gnawing at him.
'I was just walking home.'
'I had food in my hands.'
'I had plans.'
He lay there for hours looking at the ceiling still trying to deny his new reality.
His breathing grew irregular, with each breath burning his lungs.
Suddenly footsteps echoed.
Not hurried and cautious one but rather Casual and almost bored.
Soon after, voices followed.
"Man…I'm telling you, if this batch doesn't produce results soon, they'll have our heads in its place."
"Good. I'm tired of babysitting these useless things, always crying and shouting."
The sound of iron dragging against the stone rang out as a door somewhere in the dark beyond the torchlight could be heard.
Slowly, light spilled on the several new figures that entered.
Some of them wore long robes, while some were wearing some medieval clothes with swords wrapped around their waist.
One of them laughed softly.
They stopped at the first cage.
"Another failure cycle," he said. "At this rate, they'll purge this wing entirely."
Another clicked his tongue. "Children break too easily."
This cycle continued as they moved forward.
The words struck him harder than the cold iron.
The trembling of his body quickened as the robed figures stopped at the front of his cage.
"…Wait." The robed man called out.
The man leaned closer, eyes narrowing.
Then he laughed.
A loud sound echoed through the chamber.
"Look at this one," he called out. "This one's still breathing."
The others gathered, peering through the bars.
"Impossible."
"I thought he died with the rest in his cage. Weren't their body supposed to be disposed of?"
"So did I."
Cold fingers wrapped around the bars as the man crouched, face level with his.
"He survived," the robed figure said gleefully. "After everything."
The words didn't register at first.
'The rest?'
Only then did he look around himself properly at the dark things which he had ignored at first.
The things in his cage beside him were the dead bodies that had been dead.
And the children who had been sobbing moments ago were still.
Too still signifying their deaths.
'Maybe they were dead to begin with and my mind was just playing tricks on me.'
Their bodies lay interwined against each other; some had open eyes looking at nothingness. Their chests are motionless. The warmth they had been sharing was gone, replaced by a chilling stillness.
His stomach twisted violently.
"No…" his lips moved, but no sound came out from his weak body.
The robed man laughed again. "Looks like you're the lucky one, no you are our lucky star."
The cage door screeched open.
Before he could react rough hands seized him by the neck. His frail body lifted with horrifying ease, feet leaving the ground as pain exploded through his spine.
He tried to claw at the arm choking him.
"Oi, be gentle. What would we do if he dies?"
His fingers barely loosened.
"Still twitching," someone remarked.
They dragged him out and threw him onto a metal trolley. His body hit the cold surface with a dull thud, every bone screaming in protest.
The impact knocked the air out of his lungs.
Darkness took over vision.
As they took him away, he caught glimpses of other cages being opened.
Two more children were pulled out.
One is barely conscious.The other was crying weakly, eyes unfocused.
Behind them, his cage remained open with one man taking out corpses as if he he throwing trash in another trolley.
Filled only with corpses.
The wheels rattled over uneven stone as his consciousness slipped further away.
*-*-*-*-*
Pain brought his consciousness back from his unconscious state.
He was strapped to a chair, no not a normal chair.
Something was wrong, something was different about it.
Its shape was unnatural, metal curved to force his body into an upright position. Restraints bit into his wrists, ankles, chest, and neck, holding him in place.
He couldn't move even an inch.
On either side of him sat the two other children, bound to identical structures. One was sobbing quietly. The other stared forward, eyes vacant.
A robed figure approached, holding a container filled with a thick, black substance.
It pulsed faintly.
"…Increase the dosage for the red eyes," one of them said.
"But the vessel—"
"He survived once," another interrupted. "His body can handle more, and if he survives, we will be close to our success and will be able to report to the Overseer."
The man did as he was asked of and put more of that dark substance in the syringe.
The needle plunged into his arm.
As the substance entered his veins it burned.
"Aaa...WWAAahhhh," he screamed, but it was muffeled by the cloth strapped in his mouth.
No—burning was too gentle of a word for this feeling.
It felt like his body was being cut open from the inside and being burned by the while being forced to heal at the same time, making his bound body convulsing violently, restraints rattling as some of his screams tore free.
The children beside him were injected as well.
But their doses were visibly much smaller.
Noticeably so.
But he didn't have the luxury to observe others
His eyes darted everywhere searching for escape from this misery.
Amid the pain, he felt things vanishing from his mind.
Names vanished at first.
Faces followed afterwards.
Voices that once mattered dissolved into meaningless noises.
He knew things, facts, knowledge and concepts, but his sense of self was being stripped away.
The terror of it surfaced only briefly before numbness swallowed it.
But slowly the mind cleared up.
The burning pain slowly dulled down.
Like it was still present, but his body just stopped responding to it.
Like a storm passing just far enough away to stop tearing things apart, leaving only the aftermath behind. His body still burned, still trembled, but his mind, his mind grew strangely clear.
Too clear in fact.
Thoughts aligned themselves unnaturally stripped of panic, stripped of warmth. The terror that should have been choking him dulled into something distant, like a memory he was no longer allowed to fully feel.
Something inside him loosened and changed.
It wasn't a memory this time.
It was feelings.
Grief lost its weight.
Fear became manageable.
Even the very instinct to scream slowly faded.
It was replaced by the cold awareness of his own suffering, but rather this time it felt like reading it through a book or watching a movie rather than feeling it.
He understood what was happening around him.
They were not just breaking his body.
They were destroying his mind, too.
As the black substance seeped deeper in the body his ragged breathing steadied and the pain while still being present no longer bothered him.
He stopped clinging to the remnants of his thoughts of self and gazed at the agonising screams of the children beside him.
'If this continues… there will be nothing left of me. But is that a bad thing?'