The boy lies unconscious on rocky ground, surrounded by naturally formed pillars and walls of rock.

The rugged environment has a reddish-brown shade although the color is impossible to discern at this moment. The whole place was clad in impenetrable darkness, with not a single source of light in sight.

The boy is lying on his back, labored breaths escape his cracked lips. If it was possible to peer through the dark, one would see that the boy’s expressions were contorted, not by physical pain but by the visions plaguing his young mind.

Images flash through his mind, sights that seem fantastical one second and familiar the next. The visions pass too quickly to make any sense.

Tall slabs of concrete covered with glass planes that housed people inside, big metallic ships with fast-rotating wings, men holding weirdly shaped armaments and wearing uniforms covered in green patches, bright flashes of light accompanied by flames and smoke, a beautiful woman looking straight into his eyes and saying something.

He reads her lips but cannot make out the words.

She waves at him and then turns around to walk away from him.

“Wait!” the boy shouts as he jolts awake but before any thought can register his focus is immediately pulled to the pervasive darkness around him.

“What’s going on!? Where am I!?”

He shouts, expecting someone to answer from the dark.

He receives no answer.

“…… is there anyone here?”

The boy half asks and half wonders as he tries to remember the last thing he did but it’s no use.

His memories are blank.

“I can't remember anything. Why can’t I remember anything!?” he panics and frantically tries to remember something, anything.

The strain causes an immediate sharp pain in his head.

“aaaaargh the fuck!?”

The pain hits him like a bad migraine, throbbing in his temples.

He tries to push through it and focus on his blank memories but the pain’s intensity increases in response as if trying to stop him.

The splitting headache threatens to tear his brain apart so he stops concentrating. As soon as he stops, the pain dissipates.

“It’s getting better…. Did I hit my head?”

He raises his hand towards the back of his head.

It stings.

“That feels like a nasty bump. The concussion must be responsible for my messy memory but that doesn’t explain where I am.”

He tries to make out his surroundings but this task is even harder than trying to remember something.

It was completely pitch black.

He brings his hand close to his face and waves it inches from his eyes.

All he sees is black.

Feeling nervous, he continues to voice out his thoughts.

“God damn it’s dark. It’s like my eyes are blindfolded……..no it’s even darker than that.”

Suddenly, a negative thought pops up in his mind.

“Have I been kidnapped?”

The concussion could have been caused by someone hitting him and it was dark because he was locked in a cell that had no light.

The thought drudges fear in his heart but he remains calm and thinks it over.

Suddenly a breeze blows across him, caressing his face and swaying his hair.

“How can there be a breeze in a closed cell?”

He lowers his hands to the ground, feeling the small pebbles and stones on the uneven rocky surface.

“If this is a cell then it’s a weird one. The ground doesn’t feel like it was man-made, this is natural earth. This isn’t a cell or a dungeon.”

He lowers his face to the ground, putting his ear in direct contact with the ground’s surface.

Directing all of his focus to his ears, he listens, but hears nothing.

No footsteps, no vibration from movement, and no shuffling of pebbles.

“Safe to say I might be alone here….”

Wherever he was, he was not being held prisoner by someone. A small relief in the oppressive darkness.

He still stays fixed in the same spot, just to be safe.

“So this isn’t a kidnapping…..then what is this place?”

He picks up one of the pebbles lying close to him, intending to throw it but he hesitates.

He hadn’t heard anyone being nearby but the pitch-black surrounding was making him paranoid.

“Come on now, there’s no one around me. No need to chicken out”

Rousing himself with these words, he throws the pebble with as much strength as he can muster.

He was expecting it to hit a wall some paces away but the pebble flew a good twenty paces before striking the floor with a loud clack.

As the sound reverberates through the environment he waits silently, warily listening for any movements or shuffling attracted toward the noise but hears nothing.

“It flew the entire way without any obstruction. This place might not be as small as I’m thinking.”

He picks up more pebbles and begins throwing them in different directions, trying to gauge the make and shape of whatever this place was.

A few pebbles strike some obstruction in the direction behind him. He throws more in that direction at different angles and all of them hit this wall-like structure. It was a few paces behind his current location.

He throws a few to his left and they strike something on that side as well.  It wasn’t big like the structure behind him as some pebbles flew over the thing without striking it. Something like a low wall or a raised step of some kind.

He also threw some directly up to see if there was a ceiling. If there was then it was way above his throwing capabilities.

To his right, the pebbles flew their full trajectory suggesting that it was an open plain landscape.

Overall, he might have thrown more than fifteen pebbles in every direction.

The mystery only continued to get more mysterious.

“This place ….is big.”

He says to himself, deep in thought.

“The place is too big to be an internal structure of any kind but it also cannot be outdoors because there’s no way it can be this dark outside.”

Another intrusive thought pops up in his mind.

“Am I blind?”

He felt a little ridiculous for thinking it but the dark was so ubiquitous it was giving him second thoughts.

“No that’s just stupid.”

Despite his lost memories, he was sure it couldn’t be possible. His first instinct upon waking up was to try and look around. Not the instincts of a blind person.

Of course, there was always the possibility that he had been blinded by someone but that made even less sense. Why would someone go through that much effort? Blinding seems an oddly specific and personal thing to do.

Killing would be so much easier.

Making a list in his head, he goes over everything he knows and understands.

“This place is big. The ground is natural and not man-made. Not to mention the darkness, there’s zero light in this place. The only locations that fit these descriptions are caves, especially big ones.”

At the mention of the word cave, his jumbled mess of memories somehow manages to conjure facts about different types of big caves consisting of how they’re made, possible sizes, and how to find food sources inside them.

The information perplexes him.

“I seem to know quite a bit about caves for some reason…..is this what I do? Am I a cave explorer!? Did I slip and fall while exploring this cave and that’s how I lost my memories like a dumbass?”

It was one of the stupider ways to end up in this mess.

“Wait wait wait, If I’m an explorer then where’s my equipment? I can’t be stupid enough to come here without anything.”

He searched his suit for anything useful but he wasn’t carrying anything. Oddly enough the texture of the suit he was wearing felt foreign to the touch, even though he was literally wearing it.

He ignored the sensation, there was only so much he could focus on at once.

He also felt a ring on the index finger of his right hand which feels odd to him.

He didn’t feel like he was the type of person to wear jewelry, at least that was his current perception of himself but he had no way to be certain.

Finding out he knew a lot about caves was an unexpected surprise too, so right now he was practically a complete stranger to himself.

“Waking up in the dark wearing strange clothes. This feels kind of like a sex thing.”

He jokes to himself, trying to take the edge off his current circumstances.

The boy realizes inwardly that he should be in a state of full-blown panic in this situation but he doesn’t feel any strong emotions.

Sure, he felt nervous and even a little afraid but there was a strange sense of calmness mixed with that fear. A hyper-awareness of himself and the situation he was in.

“Am I used to weird situations like this?”

He asks himself, prodding his deep-hidden memories for answers but no answer came.

“Apparently facts about caves are more important than finding out who you are, fucking excellent. *sigh* Well I’ve learned everything I could sitting here.”

He picks up a few pebbles and stands up. In the dark, it feels uncanny.

The world felt infinitely big and small at the same time.

“I should move towards the wall-like structure at the back, use it as support to move about until I get my bearings.”

The boy could be forgiven for being completely mistaken about his new environment for the truth of this world was stranger than anything he could’ve imagined.

However, there was another mistake the boy had made that would be a lot less forgiving.

That he was alone in the dark.