There were no sirens the day Elias Vale awoke—
only silence, and the kind of stillness that feels like it's watching you.
It was not the silence of hospitals or churches.
It was the silence of forgotten dreams, of memories buried so deep that even time refused to excavate them.
His eyes opened to a sky that wasn't a sky — just a pale ceiling cracked like old porcelain. Fractures spidered across it like constellations sketched by a blind god. The light filtering down was not white, not warm, not anything the body could name. It pulsed faintly, like a distant heartbeat just out of sync with his own.
He didn't sit up. Not yet. Not because he couldn't, but because something in his bones whispered: wait.
He remembered nothing.
Not his name.
Not how he got here.
Only this: a metallic taste in his mouth — like rust and static —
and a single word echoing faintly in the back of his mind:
> Refractorium.
What it meant, he couldn't say. But it felt heavier than the silence, older than the cracks in the ceiling.
---
His body moved slowly, uncertainly — as if it had been taken apart and reassembled by a surgeon who wasn't quite sure where each piece belonged. Joints popped. Muscles ached. His breath tasted borrowed.
The room was too clean to be real. Six beds. Five empty. One occupied — his. Monitors blinked, but there was no sound. No nurses. No voices. No questions.
He noticed, with sudden certainty, that nothing here was recording data.
This was not a hospital.
This was a stage.
Outside the window, the city loomed like a photograph left in the rain. Skyscrapers slumped, streetlamps bent like wilted flowers, and shadows flickered across the pavement even though there was no sun.
Was this a dream?
Or worse — was this someone else's memory?
He stood. His bare feet met the floor. Cold. But not real.
It was cold the way a memory of snow is cold.
Not sensation — just simulation.
---
He left the room. The hallway pulsed to life with him, as though he were being tracked by the building itself. Overhead lights flickered on one by one, like blinking eyes.
Signs were scraped clean. Only faded letters remained:
"Intensive..."
"Neuro..."
"Contain..."
He passed a mirror, casually at first — then stopped.
The reflection didn't match.
Not completely.
The man in the glass looked like him — same sharp jawline, same disheveled hair — but his eyes were darker, hollowed by something Elias couldn't name. And worse… the reflection was smiling.
He wasn't.
He stepped back. The reflection leaned closer.
Not delayed.
Not mirrored.
Independent.
> "You're late," it mouthed.
His stomach dropped. Something primal and ancient inside him tried to retreat, to deny it — but he couldn't look away. The mirror shimmered. The reflection flickered.
And for a heartbeat…
he felt watched.
Not by the image.
But by something behind it.
---
He ran.
Not out of fear — not yet — but because the corridors were changing.
Walls shifted where they shouldn't. Doors appeared where they hadn't been. He turned corners only to find himself back at the same intersection. The signs were changing, too, words scrambling themselves:
RECOVERY
REMEMBER
RENDERED
And then: REFLECTION ROOM — SUBJECT: ELIAS VALE
He stopped breathing.
The door opened without his touch. Inside was a single bed. A chair. A mirror.
He stepped in.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, a soft voice echoed from nowhere, cold and electronic:
> "Loop 10 detected. Memory deviation stabilizing.
Welcome back, Subject 0187."
---
He turned to the mirror.
But this time, there was no reflection.
Only a window.
And something on the other side had just opened its eyes.
---
End of Chapter One