He woke up on concrete.
That was the first thing. Cold, gritty concrete pressing into his cheek, and the smell of something burnt nearby. He didn't know how long he'd been there. Could've been an hour.
Could've been longer. His body didn't seem to care either way — it just lay there, breathing, like it had forgotten how to do anything else.
He sat up slowly.
A narrow alley. Brick walls on both sides, tall enough that only a thin strip of grey sky showed above. Somewhere behind him, a dumpster. Somewhere ahead, the mouth of the alley opened onto a street. He could hear it — engines, footsteps, the distant sound of someone arguing. Normal sounds. Ordinary sounds.
He had no idea where he was.
He looked down at his hands. Nothing strange about them. Two hands. Dirt under the nails. A shallow cut on his left palm that had already dried. He turned them over, then back again, like he was checking for something. He didn't know what.
His name was Yelambar.
That much he had. Just that. A name sitting alone in the middle of nothing, with no history attached to it, no face, no place, no reason. He said it quietly to himself just to hear it, and it didn't feel like much. Just a word.
He stood. His legs held. He was wearing clothes — dark trousers, a shirt that was too thin for the temperature. No shoes. He noticed that last part and looked back at the alley floor, like maybe he'd find them somewhere behind him. He didn't.
He walked to the street.
It was a city. Big enough that nobody looked at him twice, which was good, because he had no idea what he would say if someone asked him anything. He stood at the edge of the pavement and watched the people pass.
They had places to go. They moved with that particular kind of certainty, the kind that came from knowing what came next. Wake up, eat, go somewhere, come back. He had none of that. He had a name and a pair of bare feet on cold ground.
He was hungry.
That surprised him somehow, that his body was still bothering with hunger. Like some part of him expected to be beyond it. He didn't know why he expected that. He just did.
He walked.
The city had a particular rhythm to it, and he followed it without deciding to. Down the main street, past shops and stalls and a group of kids kicking something back and forth. Past a woman selling food from a cart — flatbread, he thought, though he wasn't sure how he knew the word. He stopped and looked at it, and she looked back at him, and he realized he had no money. He walked on.
By the time it got dark, he'd found a place to sit — a low wall at the edge of a small square, half-hidden under a broken streetlight that flickered every few seconds.
He sat there and watched the square empty out as the night came in. Watched the shadows lengthen and pool and spread, and felt nothing. Usually — he thought that word and stopped. Usually. Like there was a before. There wasn't. He had no before. Just the alley and the concrete and now this wall.
The shadows meant nothing to him.
That was the thought that came, clean and quiet, out of nowhere. He looked at the darkness gathering at the edges of the square and he waited for something to happen, for some feeling to arrive, and nothing did. It was just dark. The absence of light. He sat in it like anyone would sit in it, cold and uncomfortable, and eventually he lay down on the wall and closed his eyes.
He slept.
He found the others three days later.
By then he'd figured out the basic shape of things. Food came from bins behind restaurants, or from the charity table outside a temple on the east side of the city where a woman with grey hair handed out bread without asking questions. Shelter was the alley, or under the overpass two streets north when it rained. People mostly ignored him. A few didn't. He'd learned to move on fast when someone looked too long.
The temple was where he noticed them.
There were four of them, sitting apart from the others in the queue, not quite together but close enough that they were clearly a group. Three men, one woman. All of them had that same look he saw in the mirror when he passed shop windows —
something behind the eyes that wasn't quite present. Like people who'd lost something specific, not just their circumstances.
He sat near them without deciding to.
Nobody spoke for a while. The bread came, and they ate, and the grey-haired woman moved on down the line.
Then one of the men — heavyset, maybe forty, with a scar running through his left eyebrow — looked at him.
"You new?"
"Yes," Yelambar said.
"Where from?"
"I don't know."
The man looked at him for a moment. "Fair enough." He tore off a piece of his bread.
"None of us really know either, when it comes down to it."
The woman — younger, sharp-faced, with her arms crossed tight over her chest — said, "Don't start."
"I'm not starting anything."
"You always start."
The man ignored her. He kept looking at Yelambar. "You feel it? That empty thing.
Like something that was supposed to be there just isn't."
Yelambar said nothing for a moment. Then:
"Yes."
The man nodded. He didn't look surprised.
He looked like a person who'd stopped being surprised a while ago and wasn't sure how he felt about that.
"We all do," he said. "Don't know what it is.
Don't know why. Just know it's gone." He broke another piece of bread. "My name's Oran."
"Yelambar."
Oran nodded again. He didn't ask anything else. That was fine. Yelambar didn't have anything else to give.
They sat there in the growing dark, four strangers and one man with no history, eating bread from a temple charity table.
The shadows stretched long across the square. Somewhere a dog barked.
Somewhere else, a child laughed.
Yelambar looked at the dark between the buildings and felt nothing.
He didn't know yet that the dark had once answered back.