When the door opened, no one stood in the hallway.
No caretaker watching his final steps.
No goodbye, hastily spoken or otherwise.
No bag slung over his shoulder to gather the remnants of his childhood.
Only Reis, ten years old today, stood at the threshold, caught between two worlds, holding in his right hand a crumpled piece of paper sealed with red wax, and on its back, a faded address barely legible:
"Wing A – Sixth Floor – Room 14."
His other hand was entirely empty, as though it had never been meant to carry anything at all.
In this world, reaching the age of ten wasn't a passage into childhood, but the silent, bureaucratic end of it.
The air outside was colder than he had imagined, not because winter had arrived, but because not a single person had noticed he was leaving. No one paused to check on him. No voice called his name.
He lingered at the edge of the doorway, turning his head back, not because his heart was tethered to this place, but because a hidden, wordless ache inside him wished, even foolishly, that the place might miss him now that he was gone.
But nothing stirred.
No wall exhaled.
No echo returned.
His steps down the staircase were slow and heavy.
These were the same stairs walked by hundreds, maybe thousands, before him.
Some of them had never walked back down.
Outside, the city seemed to rise from the depths of a restless sleep.
Fog hung thick in the air, horns blared in the distance, and buildings tall and indifferent, rose like towers of metal and glass, blinking with lights that had long since lost meaning.
Everything moved.
Everything breathed.
And yet… none of it belonged to him.
The soles of his shoes tapped lightly against the wet asphalt.
He wore a coat given to him that morning, its seams betraying how little thought had gone into its size, tight around the shoulders, loose at the wrists, sewn for someone who didn't exist.
He passed a food cart, the smell of something warm and vaguely bread-like drifting toward him through the mist, but he didn't stop.
He had no money.
Before him loomed a building, gray in its decay, its surface scorched black from years of smoke.
Six floors rose into the dim sky, not a single window lit, as though life had abandoned it long ago.
He climbed.
Each floor mirrored the one before it, walls shedding their paint in jagged patterns, the groan of old pipes vibrating through the air, doors marked with fading numbers half-swallowed by rust and age.
At door number 14, he halted.
He hesitated.
And then, wordlessly, he opened it.
The room he entered was narrow and cold, like a storage container discarded in the underbelly of a forgotten ship.
No bed.
No furniture.
Just a torn mat curled into a corner, as if ashamed to pretend it offered comfort.
There were no windows, only a narrow opening high on the wall, covered in rusted mesh, letting in a thin sliver of gray light, not warm or welcoming, but sterile, like the light in a morgue.
Silence weighed upon him, deep and thick, so much that even his own breath seemed foreign here, too loud, too alive.
On the wall across from him, barely visible, a phrase had been scratched with what could only have been fingernails, letters broken and crooked, a final message from someone long gone:
"Stay alone. Stay safe."
Reis sat down in the corner.
No tears came.
Just a quiet pressure gathering in his chest, like all the air in the world had been drained away, and no amount of breathing would ever fill the void inside.
It felt… like the entire world had quietly moved on without him.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out the crumpled paper, and stared at it for a long time before tearing it neatly in half.
He didn't feel fear.
He felt something else.
Emptiness.
Not around him, within him.
A kind of hollowness that had no name, but existed like a sky never seen, one you couldn't look at but could still feel, heavy and eternal, watching you from behind the clouds.
He remained still long enough that the cold seeped into his limbs, locking his joints in silence.
There was nothing in this room that belonged to him, not really, except for the silence itself.
He raised his head, slowly, and looked toward the mirror fastened to the wall opposite him.
It was corroded at the edges, its surface half-devoured by rust, and down the middle ran a long, fractured crack, as if someone had once tried to shatter it… and failed.
He saw himself.
Or rather, something that resembled him.
A small, narrow body. Sloped shoulders. Black hair hanging lazily over his brow.
But his gaze locked on the eyes.
They were black. Empty. Unfamiliar.
Not his.
And yet, he wasn't afraid, just strangely distant, as though the figure reflected in the glass was a version of him he had never met, one who had lived another life beneath the surface.
Then something shifted.
The reflection didn't move quite the way he did.
He shut his eyes quickly.
When he opened them, everything had returned to where it was.
But the feeling lingered.
He exhaled slowly and stood.
He walked toward the narrow opening, pulling aside the tattered cloth that pretended to be a curtain, it felt stiff in his fingers, like old skin left to dry.
And there it was.
The sky.
Or what was left of it.
Polluted. Gray. Spinning with dust and artificial light.
No stars. No moon.
No beginning. No end.
They used to say the sky was blue.
That rain was clean.
That light was warm.
Now, the rain stung, and the light did nothing but expose the rot beneath.
He looked up for a long time, not knowing why.
Something deep inside him pulled him upward.
An image surfaced, one he didn't know if he had seen in reality or only in dreams.
Green grass.
An open sky.
A laugh, bright and distant.
The image flickered.
Then shattered.
He closed his eyes.
He wasn't crying.
But for a moment, he wished he could.
But crying requires something he lost long ago.
The ability to forget.
---
He was ten.
And yet…
He remembered his birth.
Not in flickers.
Not in hazy, half-formed scenes.
But with surgical clarity.
He remembered the cold metal beneath his body, the white light glaring above him, and the faceless shapes that observed him through glass.
And then…
Her.
His mother.
The queen.
Ruler of the continent. One of the most powerful beings alive.
Beautiful. Rigid. Still as carved stone.
She looked at him.
She did not speak.
She did not touch him.
She simply raised her hand… and pointed.
Moments later, he was taken away.
That same day, the experiments began.
They called it: "Mana Core Injection."
He was born of noble blood.
But the other half…
Was something that had no name.
"Failed cellular stability."
"Unprogrammed consciousness."
"Premature cognitive link."
He remembered their voices.
He remembered the cold that crawled beneath his skin.
He remembered the pain…
No, not physical pain.
The true pain… was in her eyes.
She didn't weep.
But she hated him before he ever spoke a word.
That look still burned inside him, not disgust.
Not sorrow.
But something colder.
A sentence.
A silent execution.
---
Reis opened his eyes again.
The sky was still there, still gray, still lifeless.
But now…
he wasn't just looking at it.
He could feel something behind it.
A presence.
Something watching.
Waiting.
Something that belonged to him.
And only to him.
He stepped back from the window.
Returned to the wall.
Sat again, spine resting against the cold metal, his eyes fixed on the door.
They had thrown him here to vanish quietly.
To be forgotten.
But they overlooked one simple thing.
He was not made for this world alone.