Alan awoke to silence.
Not the gentle quiet of an empty room, but a silence so vast it pressed against his ears, heavy and suffocating, as though sound itself had long since died here. His eyes opened slowly, lids dragging as if weighed down by exhaustion he could not remember earning. Cold stone pressed against his back, and the air tasted thin, dry, and dusty.
For a brief moment, memories surged.
A road slick with rain. Blinding headlights. The scream of twisting metal. Pain, sharp, final, absolute. Death.
His chest tightened as panic threatened to bloom, his breath hitching as fragments of his former life clawed their way to the surface. Twenty-first-century Earth. His name, His face, his very being.
The feeling was not pain, nor comfort, but pressure. Like a massive hand closing around his heart and mind alike. The memories buckled, fractured, and were crushed into silence. The panic vanished, smothered before it could take root. Alan exhaled, though he did not remember choosing to do so, and the emptiness that followed felt… wrong, yet strangely calming.
He sat up.
That was when he realized the scale was wrong.
Everything around him felt both impossibly large and disturbingly small at the same time. The floor stretched out in every direction, yet felt close enough to touch. Pillars rose upward, vanishing into darkness, but seemed narrow when he focused on them, like toys seen from a great height. His own hands looked normal, yet distant, as though they belonged to someone standing several steps away.
Alan stood.
The darkness was thick, almost physical. He could barely see twenty feet in front of him, and only then because of the dim glow of lightbulbs suspended in the air. They hung without chains or supports, scattered irregularly through the vast hall, each one burning weakly, their light flickering like dying stars. They illuminated nothing fully, only hinting at shapes before surrendering them back to shadow.
The castle felt dead.
No wind. No echoes of life. Just stone and time.
He began to walk.
Each footstep should have echoed, yet the sound seemed swallowed whole, disappearing before it could travel. As he moved forward, the floor gradually narrowed, transforming into a raised platform. Alan slowed, his heart pounding as he realized there was nothing on either side of it.
An abyss.
He stepped closer to the edge and peered down. There was no bottom. No glimmer of light. Just endless darkness stretching downward forever. The same was true on the other side. The platform extended forward, a narrow walkway suspended between infinities.
Turning back crossed his mind.
Then something inside him rejected the thought outright.
Alan stepped onto the walkway.
The path stretched on far longer than it should have, and as he walked, the faint light revealed something etched into the stone beneath his feet. Lines. Shapes. Figures. He knelt, brushing dust away with trembling fingers, and his breath caught.
A story.
Carved into the floor and rising along the stairs ahead were scenes of war on a scale beyond comprehension. Vast armies clashed across continents. Creatures the size of mountains battled figures crowned in light and shadow. Cities burned. Oceans froze. The sky itself seemed to crack as weapons were unleashed that could shatter worlds.
It was not art.
It was history.
A war of impossible size, fought by beings that should never have existed, and perhaps no longer do.
Alan rose slowly and continued forward, ascending the steps at the end of the walkway. At the summit stood a throne, towering and ancient, carved from a stone darker than the surrounding hall. It radiated a quiet authority, as though the world itself expected someone to be sitting there.
Resting upon it was a single book.
Plain. Unadorned. Waiting.
When Alan reached out and touched it, the world vanished.
Darkness swallowed him whole, consciousness tearing away as if pulled into a void. There was no pain, only falling, endlessly.
When awareness returned, Alan was sitting.
He was on the throne.
The book rested in his hands, warm now, almost alive. The book flicked open by itself, showing ink-like patterns which transformed into words.
Hello, Final Ancient.
Welcome back, King of Angora.
Alan stared at the words, his heart pounding.