Consciousness returned not as a dawn, but as a slow, suffocating tide.
K. awoke
But he was not in a hospital with its sterile hum and gentle lights. He was not on the scorched, open ground where the sky had been his only witness. He was… contained.
The first thing he felt was the pressure. An all-encompassing, uniform pressure that encased his body like a second, unyielding skin. He tried to move his fingers. Nothing. He tried to twitch a toe. A faint, useless tremor was the only reply. He was encased in a suit of armor, but it was no warrior's panoply. This was a sarcophagus of dull, grey metal, seamless and cold. It held him in a rigid, upright position, arms pinned to his sides, legs fused together. Only his head was free, and even that felt trapped in a vice-like cradle.
The second thing was the silence. It was absolute, a physical weight on his eardrums. No distant city hum, no drip of water, no rustle of air. It was the silence of a tomb, of a place forgotten by sound itself.
The third thing was the thirst. It was a raw, scraping need at the back of his throat, a desert that had taken up residence in his mouth. Beneath it, a deeper, hollow ache pulsed in his gut—a hunger so profound it had moved past pain into a constant, nauseating presence.
And then there was the wrongness inside him. Anger should have been a firestorm in his chest. Panic should have been clawing at his throat. He felt their ghosts, their distant echoes, but they were muffled, smothered under a thick, syrupy fog. It wasn't just an external sedative. It felt like the silence itself was seeping into his bones, a psychic dampener leaching the will from his marrow. Fight, a last vestige of instinct whispered. But the fog whispered back, softer, sweeter: Why? Isn't this easier?
He hung there, a statue in the dark, for what felt like an eternity. Time lost all meaning, measured only by the dry rasp of his breath and the relentless, gnawing emptiness in his core. No food. No water. They weren't trying to sustain him. They were simply… waiting. Letting the cage do its work.
Then, a noise.
It was the first sound he'd heard since awakening, and it was startlingly mundane. The soft, rhythmic shush-shush of soles on a hard floor. A bored, tired sigh echoed slightly in the corridor beyond his door. The footsteps stopped outside his cell.
A thin sliver of blinding white light speared the darkness, cutting through a small, rectangular slot at eye-level in the heavy door. It swept across the interior of the cell, illuminating for a split second the featureless grey walls, the metal suit that encased him, his own gaunt, pale face reflected in the polished interior of his helmet. The light was impersonal, clinical. It wasn't checking on a prisoner's well-being; it was verifying an object's continued presence.
The light snapped off, plunging him back into perfect black. The footsteps moved on, shush-shush, to the next cell. The routine was chilling in its indifference.
Who? K.'s mind, struggling against the creeping fog, latched onto the question. He strained every sense, trying to catch a glimpse through the slot as the guard passed other cells. Occasionally, the light would flash again, two or three cells down, a brief, staccato burst of illumination that did nothing to pierce the gloom of his own prison.
He had to see. He had to know.
Gritting his teeth, he pushed against the tide of lethargy. He focused inward, on the memory of the storm, on the golden star that had bloomed in his chest. He tried to call it forth.
A violent, sickening weakness slammed into him, a backlash that felt like his soul was being sandpapered. The suit didn't just suppress; it punished. Agony lanced through his nerves, followed immediately by a wave of the sweet, heavy fog, thicker and more inviting than before. It washed over the pain, smoothing it out, replacing it with a numb, floating detachment. For a moment, the thirst and hunger didn't matter. The confinement felt… distant. It was a relief.
No. The thought was a weak ember. Fight it.
He pushed again, not for power, but for a sliver of perception. He poured his desperation, his dwindling sense of self, into one command: Just let me see.
A searing headache exploded behind his eyes. Nausea rose in his throat. But then, a faint, electric warmth gathered in his pupils.
For a single, stolen second—before the suppressor's punishment could fully hit—his vision changed. The world through the slot became a stark, hyper-detailed etching in faint, pulsing yellow light. He saw the retreating back of the guard, now three cells down.
The man was tall, slouching. Messy, straw-blonde hair. As he half-turned, K. saw his profile. Young, but worn. Deep bags under tired hazel eyes.
And then K. saw it.
Through the man's simple tunic, a soft, steady glow emanated from his chest. A pale, blondish light, calm and constant. A perfect, five-pointed star.
A Star Glitcher. Doing guard duty in this silent tomb.
The vision lasted only that heartbeat. The backlash hit, a cold vacuum of agony that stole his breath, followed instantly by the sweet, numbing fog, rushing in to fill the void. It was a bargain: pain for peace. This time, as the peace settled over him, smothering the horrific implication of what he'd just seen, a tiny, treacherous part of him was grateful for it. The yellow clarity vanished. The world went black. Unconsciousness wasn't a fight he lost; it was a harbor he drifted into.
---
Time became a flat, featureless plain.
He hung. He drifted in and out of a consciousness that felt less like waking and more like briefly surfacing in a warm, dark sea. The thirst was a constant, the hunger a deep void. They were the only things real, the only anchors.
The light was his calendar.
Shush-shush. Stop. The blinding white slash. Shush-shush.
One.
The thirst was a knife.The hunger, a yawning pit. He tried to struggle, to twist against the metal. The suit rewarded him with a jolt of debilitating weakness, then the sweet fog. The fog was better. He stopped struggling.
Two.
A different guard.Heavier footsteps. He used the last of his will to spark his eyes again. A glimpse of a broader silhouette, a star of cool steel-blue. The backlash was worse this time. The fog that followed was deeper, sweeter. It didn't just mute the pain; it made the emptiness feel… comfortable. Like sinking into a deep, familiar bed after a long, hard day. The hunger was still there, the thirst still scraped, but they were someone else's problems, far away.
Three.
A third light.Lighter footsteps. He didn't try to see. The effort was too great. The reward of the fog afterward was too immediate, too complete. He found himself, in his drifting state, almost… anticipating the guard's rounds. The flash of light was the prelude. The aftermath was the release. The crushing silence, the agonizing deprivation—they were the price he paid for that fleeting, beautiful numbness. A price that was starting to feel worth it.
He was starving. He was dehydrating to death. His body was consuming itself. And the only solace, the only break from the relentless agony of existence, was the chemically-induced oblivion that followed any attempt to resist.
The spark of defiance wasn't just dampened; it was being systematically drowned. Each cycle of pain-and-fog rewired him a little. The fight was leaching out, replaced by a pathetic, growing dependence on the very mechanism that was killing him. He wasn't just a prisoner; he was becoming an addict, and his drug was the suppression of his own soul.
After the third light—or was it the fourth? Time was slurry—he didn't think about cages or stars or other worlds. His thoughts, when he had them, were simple, primal loops.
Thirsty.
Hurts.
Wait for the light.
Then the quiet.
He was dying. Not in a flash of lightning, but in inches and whispers, in a silent room where his only comfort was the thing that was erasing him. The glorious, chaotic star that had roared to life in the Neohaven ruins was now a guttering ember in a derelict house, and the house was slowly, sweetly, burning down.