Tyke woke as though he had been pulled from the bottom of a black sea. His chest rose first, then his eyes opened reluctantly, glassy and slow to focus, like someone trying to catch hold of a moving lantern in fog. He did not sit up immediately. Instead, he let the world announce itself in fragments: the dim ceiling, the wooden beams intersecting like ribs overhead, the dust drifting as if time itself had grown bored and chosen idleness.
There was a softness in his muscles that startled him. He had expected—no, almost demanded—to feel bruises. His body should have been stiff from the violence he remembered. His skin should have been raw, torn, or at least lined with evidence of what he had endured. Yet when he raised his arm into the weak stream of light pouring from the window, he found nothing. Not a scratch. Not a welt. Only pale, unbroken flesh that could have belonged to someone who had slept peacefully, untouched, for days.
The first thought that rose was not relief, but suspicion.
He remembered the girl. Her presence had clung to him like smoke. Her face had come close, framed in the delirium of battle, her eyes carrying an expression he had not fully deciphered—fear, or perhaps recognition. He remembered, too, the clash of figures not entirely human, the sharpness of voices, the pulse of something greater than himself beating inside his skull. All of it vivid enough to seem true. And yet, standing as he was now in the quiet of the room, there was no echo of that struggle. No scar left to argue for reality.
Tyke flexed his hands, half-expecting pain to jolt through his knuckles. Nothing. He rolled his shoulders. Smooth. He dragged his nails across his chest and stomach, searching for hidden tenderness. But the body gave no secrets. It was intact, treacherously whole.
The thought struck him cold: Had his mind invented the ordeal?
This was not new. He had wandered in delirium before, when his head filled with such density of thought that reality buckled beneath it. Those nights left him drenched, trembling, whispering to shadows that bore no ears. Perhaps this was one of those spells again. A conjuration of his brain—nothing more.
But the memory resisted dismissal. It glared at him from the edges of thought, as if refusing to be banished. He knew—he was certain—that something had happened. It was not just fancy. He could taste it, the way the aftertaste of iron lingers on the tongue long after blood has been swallowed.
He sat up. The room swayed briefly, then steadied. His eyes darted instinctively to the corners, as if expecting to find someone waiting there. Silence. Only the tick of the wood as it cooled.
El Como.
The name brushed him, sudden, uninvited. Tyke froze. For a moment it seemed like the whisper of another presence had traveled across the marrow of his bones. But when he strained to listen—truly listen—there was nothing. No voice in his skull. No second mind leaning on his thoughts.
And then, curiously, relief folded into him. Because he realized what was missing. That voice—sarcastic, unnerving, intrusive—was gone. El Como was no longer in his head. It felt as though some heavy tenant had finally vacated the premises, leaving silence behind. The realization was sharp enough to sting: the absence was too perfect, as though crafted.
It was not an accident. El Como had done this. Used his ability, whatever it truly was, to ensure Tyke did not remember him. That absence of memory was itself a mark, even if no physical scar bore witness.
Tyke swallowed hard. He tried to think, to reconstruct. But whenever his mind veered toward those dark corridors, a fog drifted in. His thoughts met a wall that bent like glass and refused passage. He knew there had been voices, there had been fights, there had been the girl—but the threads of sequence collapsed when he reached for them.
"Delirium," he whispered aloud, as though naming it could anchor him. "Just delirium."
The word fell flat.
Still, he forced himself to decide. To accept that the missing fragments were not worth the torment of pursuit. If he prodded them too much, they would grow teeth. He had learned this from nights past: when he chased after phantoms, they only grew stronger, until they pressed against him with unbearable weight. So he chose, deliberately, to push the thoughts aside. To gather them in a bundle and fling them down some inner stairwell where they could rot unseen.
He breathed deeply, testing his ribs once more. All unbroken. Entirely himself. And yet—he was aware of a paradox: he felt most haunted when he looked most whole. His intactness was its own lie.
Tyke swung his legs off the bed. His bare feet touched the floorboards with a muted thud, as though even sound were reluctant to break the fragile stillness. The air smelled faintly of dust, wood, and the stale dampness of long-shut rooms.
He looked at his hands again. They seemed unfamiliar in their perfection, as if borrowed from another body. His skin gleamed faintly in the morning light, smooth, betraying none of the chaos his mind recalled.
Why, then, do I feel heavier?
The question pressed itself into his skull. His body bore no wounds, but his mind sagged beneath invisible bruises. He walked slowly toward the cracked mirror leaning against the wall. For a moment he hesitated—half-afraid his reflection would refuse him, or worse, greet him with a stranger's face.
The glass met him with pale honesty. His hair, tangled into small knots; his eyes, still fever-bright; his lips, parted as though to whisper to someone absent. But again—no cut, no bruise. His neck was unmarked, his shoulders clean, his chest a blank canvas. He lifted his shirt, turned his torso, even leaned close to the mirror to study the skin at his temples. All intact.
"Not possible," he muttered.
The words carried the desperate edge of someone trying to convince himself against reason. He remembered—he remembered—hands against him, blows sharp as lightning, the grinding ache of muscle stretched past its breaking point. He remembered the panic that crawled beneath his skin when the girl appeared, her eyes flashing like lanterns in a storm. He remembered El Como's intrusions, his sarcasm, his eerie laughter when danger pressed too close.
And yet—nothing.
Tyke pressed his palm flat against the mirror, as though the glass might pulse back and tell him the truth. Instead, his own reflection stared at him with the same bewilderment.
Perhaps it had been another collapse. His brain had buckled before; he had drowned in his own thinking. Perhaps what he saw, what he fought, what he touched, had been no more real than a fever dream. He remembered nights when he could not distinguish between the scratching of branches at the window and the whisper of a voice promising him things he could never name.
Yes. That was safer. That was easier. To think of it as a hallucination. A storm conjured by his delirium, by his habit of thought that twisted too far inward.
But as he let that reasoning settle, a splinter of unease pierced it. Because this time felt different. This time, the memory carried weight. Not the mist of dreams, but the density of something that had actually occurred.
And yet, how could he argue with flesh unbroken?
He stepped away from the mirror, back toward the window. Dust motes drifted through the shaft of sunlight like tiny, lazy spirits. He leaned on the sill and pushed it open. The hinges creaked with reluctance. Outside, the world carried on in perfect indifference. Birds traced arcs in the air, their wings slicing across the morning. Somewhere far, a cart rattled on a stone path. Ordinary life, seamless, as though no violence had ever passed.
Tyke's jaw tightened. If he allowed himself to sink into these memories, he feared they would claim him. The danger was not that they might be false—it was that his belief in them would summon them again, carve them back into reality.
He knew how thought could make the impossible bleed into the real. He had seen it in himself before. He had felt it.
So he made a choice. A deliberate burial. He pictured the memory as a tangled knot, and in his mind he lifted it, heavy and wet, and flung it down into some dark well. He turned away from it. He would not pull at it. He would not allow it to swell and fracture the shell of ordinary life.
When he closed his eyes, the silence in his head startled him again. El Como was gone. That mocking presence, that slanted commentary, that strange companionship he had never asked for—all of it had dissolved.
The absence was too clean.
Tyke clenched his teeth. He did not know what ability El Como had truly possessed, but he was certain of one thing: the man—if he could be called that—had taken measures to erase himself. He had chosen silence. He had plucked threads from Tyke's memory and left behind blank spaces, so neat they looked natural.
But Tyke could feel the shape of those absences. He could sense the gaps where thoughts no longer connected. Like missing pages in a book—at first the story seemed whole, but when you tried to read it closely, you stumbled on emptiness.
He dropped back onto the bed, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes until colors burst in the dark. His heartbeat thudded in his ears.
"What was it, then?" he whispered. "What was it that you took?"
The silence did not answer.
He lay there for a long time, wrestling with the twin burdens of certainty and doubt. He wanted to dismiss it as delirium, to fold it away as a hallucination—but the absence of El Como's voice felt too intentional, too crafted. It was not the silence of madness cured, but the silence of something removed.
Hours seemed to pass in thought, though the sun had hardly shifted. His room held him like a cage of boards and dust, but also like a sanctuary, a place where reality still pretended to be ordinary.
Finally, with a sigh that trembled through his ribs, Tyke stood. He washed his face in the basin, let the cold water sting him into sharper awareness, then dried himself with the edge of his sleeve. His body was his again. Whole, unmarred, as though gifted to him anew.
But as he looked once more at his reflection, he thought: Wholeness is the greatest disguise on Earth or wherever he was.