Jamars had forgotten what silence sounded like.
For thousands upon thousands of years, the only things he knew were metal restraints, scalpels humming with heat, and the wet sound of his own flesh stitching itself back together. Immortality—something ancient alchemists once worshipped—had been nothing but a curse given to the wrong man. He didn't remember the faces of the first scientists who discovered he couldn't die; he only remembered their voices cracking with excitement when they realized he would live through anything.
That excitement became the sound of doors closing. Then the sound of locks. Then centuries of footsteps and whispers as one generation of tormentors replaced another.
Jamars escaped seven times.
On the third attempt, he got as far as the surface before they dragged him back down.
On the fifth, he made them bleed—really bleed—for the first time.
On the seventh, he spent a full year outside the facility before a new team caught him.
After that, they made sure escape was impossible.
Eventually, even escape lost meaning. Even time lost meaning. The only thing he could feel anymore was the weight of years he no longer bothered to count—years that piled like stones, crushing hope molecule by molecule.
So when he finally gave up—truly gave up—it felt like letting go of gravity.
He lay flat on the cold metal floor, shackles biting into wrists that had grown calloused beyond recognition, and whispered for the first time in millennia:
"…I'm done."
He expected the usual response: more restraints, more notes scribbled on clipboards, more pain delivered with clinical precision.
Instead, the air folded.
It was like every atom in the room exhaled at once. The metal beneath him dissolved into light. His body stretched, crushed, expanded, and shattered all at the same time, and for a moment he wondered if death had finally found a loophole to reach him.
Then he hit dirt.
Hard.
He groaned and pushed himself up, rubbing his wrists out of habit even though the shackles were gone. The scent hit him first: pine trees, wet grass, and something sharp like burning stone. A sky stretched above him—purple at the horizon, gold directly overhead, with two moons melting into each other like dripping wax.
He blinked.
This wasn't Earth.
This wasn't the lab.
This wasn't anywhere he had ever escaped to.
Jamars stood slowly. His body felt… strange. Not weak—he had endured more than any human should—but lighter. Stronger, even. Pain had been his only companion for so long that a body without it felt unreal.
He tested a breath.
His lungs expanded without stabbing.
His spine didn't ache from the restraints.
His hands weren't trembling for the first time in a thousand years.
So this is what normal feels like, he thought. Or… what almost normal feels like.
The forest around him wasn't natural. The trees were enormous—some with glowing veins, some with bark like metal. Off in the distance, mountains floated above each other like stacked islands, while rivers of crimson lava cut through fields of crystal grass. The world looked like the gods had taken every fantasy region from a hundred different legends and stitched them onto one planet with no explanation.
A branch snapped behind him.
Jamars turned.
A creature crawled from the bushes—something wolf-shaped but wrong. Too many teeth. Eyes that glowed like embers. Fur shifting color as if reacting to his heartbeat.
Instinct told him to run.
Experience told him running wouldn't matter.
And something else—something sharpened by millions of years of surviving torture—told him exactly what the creature would do next.
It lunged.
Jamars sidestepped, grabbed the base of its jaw, and twisted. His movements were slow, rusty from lack of real combat, but precise. The creature slammed into the ground with a dull thud, twitching once before going still.
He stared at his hands.
Not shaking.
Not bleeding.
Not breaking.
"Above average," he muttered. "Guess that's a start."
A wind swept through the clearing, carrying distant roars, metallic clangs, and something like chanting. Civilization. Or something pretending to be civilization.
Jamars looked around the impossible landscape and felt a sensation he hadn't felt since before the first experiment began—before the first century of pain.
Possibility.
Not hope. He wasn't ready for that word yet.
But the possibility of something new.
And if this world was as dangerous as it looked…
good.
After what he'd survived, danger felt like a familiar old friend.
Jamars wiped the blood of the creature from his fingers and started walking toward the sound of distant battles.
Whatever this place was, it seemed like a place where strength mattered.
And strength?
Strength was something he could gain easily. Painfully, slowly—but easily.