Chapter Text
===
He comes to in a forest.
Blades of grass tickle his fingers. Through the tears clouding his eyes, he sees that he is lying beneath a thick blanket of green.
He is also, he notes distantly, bleeding, the grass around his fingers stained ever so slightly red.
His limbs feel stiff, and when he lifts his arm he feels as if he is moving it through honey, thick and unwieldy, so he lets it drop by his side.
He raises his other arm. Much the same occurs.
So he waits.
===
Through gaps in the blanket of green, starlight slips through in thin, silver columns, painting dappled patterns on the forest floor.
Starlight.
He has never seen starlight before. There were no stars in his home.
But foreign and unfamiliar as they are, he knows them, remembers learning about them from — from who? From someone important, who was very much interested in them, and shared them with him through quiet nights in the study.
The blood from his side seep slowly into the earth, and he idly notes that the soil here is dark and rich, quite unlike the bleached, eroded soil of his homeland.
===
There's a ring on his finger.
He hadn't noticed it before, but with his hand lifted into a stream of sunlight, he can see that it is of very fine craftsmanship.
Bands of dark metal are twisted into the shape of an unending serpent, and when he stares into its eyes, the deep blue gems seem to glint with an enigmatic light.
He thinks about taking it off, to avoid sullying such fine jewelry with the blood caked on his hands.
Yet when he moves to remove it, he is hit with a profound sense of wrongness. His breath catches. It is not pain, exactly —more like the feeling of standing at the edge of something vast and being reminded, wordlessly, not to look down, or risk falling, down, down, down, into the endless abyss below.
His fingers retreat. The ring stays on.
===
He tries to stand. His limbs do not shake.
They should, probably. But he does not care enough to wonder why.
He begins to walk.
===
The forest comes alive in the day, loud with the chitter of animals he doesn't know the name of. Strange calls ring out from somewhere above him, bright and percussive, and when he looks up he catches a glimpse of something small and vivid darting between branches — gone before he could name it.
Shafts of sunlight move slowly across the undergrowth as the sun climbs, and the air smells of something green and loamy and alive, a smell so foreign that it has no word from the language that he knows.
As he walks, he carefully catalogues these observations. In some way he couldn't articulate, it felt almost proper to make such detailed notes on the character of his surroundings, to organize this miscellaneous information within his head.
He does the same for his own body: the slow trickle of something wet down his head, the pulling sensation beneath his ribs when he breathes too deeply, the way his left side has gone from burning to numb, which he understands with dim certainty is not an improvement.
===
The sky had turned a brilliant, blinding blue. He squints at the horizon.
He had never seen so much green before.
It was a sea of it, stretching out until it met a sky that had no ceiling. In his home, wherever that was, the world had edges. Defined vertices. Hard borders you could press your palm against and feel. Here, everything simply continued, indifferent and enormous and entirely too expansive, as if it had never occurred to the landscape to end.
He stands there, perhaps a little longer than he means to. It is difficult, sometimes, to remember that he is moving with some purpose, when the world above insists on being so relentlessly large.
===
He walks as the blue fades into gold into amber and the shadows stretch long and thin across the ground, then shrivel in the darkness and fade away in the golden light of dawn, and when the sky once more turns to a brilliant, blinding blue.
He walks with no particular direction. He has tried, occasionally, to reason one out, to reconstruct some sense of here and there from the stars and the sun, but every time he reached for it, the thought dissolved before he could grasp it, like trying to cup water in open hands.
He only knows that he came from somewhere. That somewhere, he was expected.
---
He doesn't know how long he has been walking
---
Once, and only once, does he stop by a stream.
He finds it by sound before he finds it by sight, through its low, constant murmur beneath the ambient noise of the forest.
He follows it until the undergrowth thins and the bank opens up before him, narrow and mossy, the water running clear over smooth stones.
He submerges his hands. The cold is immediate and sharp, and he watches with some relief as the water carries away all the grime that has accumulated there. He hopes might recover some semblance of cleanliness on his hands.
Unlike his hands, his uniform is not so recoverable. It had not been so tattered before. He is certain of that, in the way he is certain of very little else.
He also knows, in the same wordless, instinctive way, that it was not a thing given lightly. Men spent years, whole portions of their lives, in pursuit of the right to wear it, and most never did. It was the kind of garment that carried the weight of a nation's pride in its fabric, that said, without words, that the bearer was found worthy.
He looks at it now and finds it difficult to imagine.
He tries to clean what he can. It is a losing effort.
After a while he stops, sits back on his heels, and looks down at the water.
His reflection looks back.
He studies it for a moment, and finds he cannot quite reconcile what he sees with what he knows he is supposed to look like.
The person looking up at him from the water is tired. Diminished. There is blood on his collar, and his hair is wrong, and his eyes — they seem to stare past himself, possessing the particular quality of someone whose mind was not quite in their own body.
He tries to think of what the version of himself that matches the uniform's intention looks like.
Something surfaces, briefly: a corridor. Stone floors. The sound of his own footsteps, even and unhurried, and the way people moved aside as he passed, from a kind of reflexive acknowledgment, the way you hold your distance from a live blade not because you expect to be cut but because you understand its duty and its purpose and exactly what it is capable of.
He had been someone important. Someone the uniform made sense on.
He looks back at the water.
The reflection does not look very important. The reflection is of a young man sitting in the mud at the edge of a stream, squinting at himself like he's trying to place a name to a face from hundreds of galas.
He is not sure he deserves to be wearing the uniform in his state. He is not sure he would be permitted to, if anyone who knew what it meant could see him now.
===
When he becomes aware of himself again he is still walking.
His left hand is pressed against his side. He doesn't remember deciding to do that.
===
He keeps walking for a very long time.
===
The cave announced itself gradually — first as a coolness in the air, then as a shadow that didn't move the way shadows should, and finally as a low, wide mouth in the rock face, half-hidden behind a curtain of hanging moss.
He stops.
Something in him recognizes the quality of it. The dark, enclosed, pressing weight of stone on all sides, the way sound died at the threshold. He knows this. He knows the feeling of ceiling above him and walls within arm's reach, of a world that had the decency to end where you expected it to.
It was only then that his body seems to remember itself. The numbness in his side twists into an unpleasant volta and his hands, when he looks at them, tells a tale he has been neglecting to read for some time.
He sits with his back against the stone and lets out a breath he feels he has been holding for a very long time.
His thoughts come in pieces, and none of them stay. There was something he was supposed to be doing. He was certain of it. The certainty sat in his chest like a stone of its own, heavy and unmoving.
People. There were people. He could feel the shape of them even if he couldn't find their faces: a presence behind his ribs, pulling outward, insistent.
He was expected somewhere. He was needed. He was —
He was so tired.
The rock was cool through his clothes. Outside, the surface world continued without him, for once quiet and indifferent and still entirely too large.
I'll rest for just a moment.
But there is somewhere I have to be.
"Twilight Sword-"
His eyes close.
They do not open.
===
"Hey, Traveler, I think I see someone moving in there!"
===