I woke to darkness,
not the kind shaped by night or shadow, but something deeper and almost physical. For several moments I did not move, listening and feeling for pain that never fully returned. Only a dull ache remained behind my eyes where the pressure had once been unbearable, pulsing faintly like an echo of something that had already passed through me and left its imprint behind.
The silence was wrong, too complete, and with it came the second realization: time had passed. I could not measure it, yet something in me knew it had not been minutes.
The stillness carried weight, as if I had been left here long enough for the space itself to forget movement. I pushed myself up slowly, my limbs responding with a sluggish delay, dust—or something finer than dust—shifting beneath my palms with a coldness that did not belong to sand. As I steadied my breathing, fragments of memory returned in sequence: the corridor, the darkness, the man splitting in half, the scream, the impact.
After that, nothing.
When I lifted my head, the space around me had changed, or I had. The corridor was gone, replaced by a wider expanse where the walls sat farther apart, their surfaces smoother and darker, less like stone and more like something that refused clear definition.
My lamp, a basic electric thing, lay a few steps away, its faint glow barely touching the ground, and when I picked it up, the light spread outward only to stop abruptly, as if the darkness itself refused to yield.
This time it did not feel empty; it felt occupied. Something lingered at the edge of perception—not movement, not sound, but awareness. I turned sharply, sweeping the beam across the space, and found nothing.
Then the voice came.
It did not come from any direction.
It existed everywhere at once, layered and incomprehensible at first, as if multiple speakers spoke in overlapping rhythms that refused alignment.
The pressure in my head sharpened as the noise began to separate into patterns, not meaning at first, but structure. Then clarity forced its way through.
"Identity: unknown.
Species: human.
Aptitude: 0.2%.
Psionics: nil.
Physical state: weak… feeble.
Evaluation: possible candidate."
The words were not spoken; they were processed, delivered without tone or intention, and yet they carried weight like a judgment already passed. The voice continued, accelerating into fragments I could not follow—threshold, adaptation, failure probability—before collapsing back into silence as abruptly as it had begun.
The silence did not leave me empty.
It left direction.
The pull that followed was not physical, yet it pressed against my thoughts with enough insistence to feel like resistance when ignored. I hesitated, thinking through what I had just heard, the strange evaluation, the unfamiliar word—psionics—and the sense that all of it belonged to something older than anything I understood. Remaining still felt worse than moving, so I stepped forward.
The pull eased slightly, guiding rather than forcing, and with each step the space responded in ways that defied logic. Distance stretched and compressed, the ground remained solid yet unreliable in perception, and the darkness shifted not in shape but in presence.
My thoughts tracked alongside the movement: whatever had killed the others had been fast, impossibly fast, and close enough to strike without warning. The darkness was not emptiness; it was cover. I tightened my grip on the lamp and listened, each step sounding louder than it should, each breath carrying farther, yet nothing answered.
Only the pull remained.
Time lost meaning as I walked. Gradually the air began to change, losing some of its oppressive weight, and the pressure in my head eased though it never fully disappeared. Then the space opened, and I stepped forward into something that made no sense. Shelves stretched in ordered rows beyond the reach of my light, rising higher than I could see, their construction precise and untouched by decay. Objects filled them—uniform in arrangement, varied in detail—and it took a moment before my mind settled on the truth.
Books.
The realization did not fit. Not here, not on Skorrag, not buried beneath a mine.
I moved closer, the beam tracing across the nearest shelf, revealing surfaces marked with the same symbols I had seen carved into the walls. The same language, or something close enough, repeating with deliberate intent.
An old memory i had surfaced then, faint but persistent—my father's voice speaking of the Old Empire, of a civilization that had once stretched across systems and then vanished without war or invasion, leaving behind only fragments and stories that never aligned. Some said they had mastered energy beyond understanding; others claimed they had turned inward, pursuing something within the mind itself. Psionics.
The word returned, heavier now, anchored by context I barely understood. I looked around again at the endless rows, at the impossible order hidden beneath a dead world, and understood one thing clearly: this had never been a mine.
I approached the nearest shelf with care, half-expecting some reaction that never came.
When I reached out, my fingers met a surface that was cold and smooth, neither paper nor leather but something else entirely.
I pulled one of the books free and felt its unexpected weight, denser than it should have been. Turning it toward the light, I found the markings resisted focus, not changing but refusing to resolve into anything I could recognize.
Unreadable.
I exhaled slowly as another realization settled in, quiet and absolute. I had never learned to read. On Skorrag, reading did not feed you, did not buy you time, did not keep you alive, so I never needed it.
Now I stood in a place built entirely on something I could not understand, surrounded by knowledge I could not access.
I lowered the book slightly and looked out across the shelves stretching into darkness, and for the first time since I woke, I felt something worse than fear—I felt small.