New Story from the world of Caspien

It's so dark that for awhile - just how long he wasn't sure - he thought he was still asleep. The blackness was overwhelming, the silence.....deafening. He could hear heavy breathing on either side of him but could make out neither shape or size. His own limbs ached from what felt like months of unconsciousness on this hard flat surface, and as he moved and stretched them, his joints cracked, his muscles and tendons popped. Felt good.....felt alive. But why couldnt he see. Placing his hands to his eyes, he felt for any sign of injury, but he appeared to be intact. His hands returned to the floor, pushing himself up into a sitting position. His fingers remained on the floor for a few moments, trying to discern possible details about this eerie place. The floor was smooth and cold. He shivered at the feeling.

Granite or marble......must be.

He could tell from the pressure on his.......his naked body? Nothing was covering him. No clothes, no undergarments.....not even a blanket.

His eyes were starting to adjust and he was no longer chasing away unattainable streaks of light from his vision. He was shaking worse now, the edge of the unknown creeping over his already cold frame, overtaking the cold feeling and replacing it with slight manic terror. The room, as far as he could make out was small......very small. He rose to his full height now, but nothing changed. Almost dizzy, he stumbled forward towards nothingness, arms raised in hopes of finding something.....anything. Anything to give him a better grasp of his surroundings. His legs weren't working right. He must have not used them in awhile. How long was he out for.....or worse......was he actually unconscious?

Am I dead? Is this the afterverse, the space between living and dead? Limbo.....

As he felt blindly for anything, his hands at last touched the freezing wall. Another marble surface. He could tell from the touch that this was polished. He felt up and down the wall searching for anything and hit his hands on the ceiling abruptly. The room, he discovered, wasn't very big. He couldn't even stretch his hands out completely above him before flattening them on the stone surface. He began to feel to the left and right on the wall and found that, scultped as it was, there appeared to be a seam every so often, giving him a mental image of huge stone squares lining the room.

There must be a door somewhere.......find the right seam, find the way out.

Through all this struggling, the man lost track of the breathing that stopped behind him and as he moved silently along the wall, a presence unknown to him spoke.

"Finally awake, I see. I was wondering when someone else would come to."

The accent in the voice was striking. Thick but with an air of knowledge and intelligence. The voice sounded from a corner opposite of the man, who in light of this most recent development, had stopped searching. He still heard heavy breathing.
So there are at least three of us.

"Where are we and who are you? And what has happ..." blurted out the man but the stranger with the accent cut accross his questions with a quite, indifferent, simple statement.

"Calm down son, calm down."

Son? the man thought. But the instant he heard the word, it made sense. The man sounded much older than he himself did, but there was no telling without visual confirmation.

"I am sad to say that I cannot tell you anything. You know as much as I do it seems."

"So you know nothing then?" The man's head was swimming. He began his search again but it was becoming fruitless. As he rounded the second wall and headed towards the stranger, another voice called his attention away from his task.

"What the hell happened? Hello? I thought I heard voices."

This voice was much deeper than either his or the stranger's and he appeared to have the same accent as the man himself, causing the stranger to seem that much more distant, as though he didn't belong in this unknown world with the two of them.

"Its alright, my boy, " the stranger cooed again. "We are all awake now."

"And how many is all of....." The voice moved in the dark as the man stood up quickly....too quickly, and smashed into the ceiling. "Shit......this ceiling is so low. Are you having trouble too?" but already the man new this was no ordinary person. If the room was only about a head taller than he was, this other voice had to belong to a veritable giant.

"There is only three of us in here, my boy, but hopefully we won't be in here much longer. You there," he called to the man who had begun his search in earnest. "I have already searched as you are now. There are no doors.....only seams."

I need light.......I need light.......I need light, thought the man and no sooner did the thought emanate from his brain than did his arm explode into radiating, brilliant yellow. Like a miniature sun, the light illuminated the entire area, reaching even into the corners of the small room. Both men in the area threw up their arms instinctively to hide their eyes from the brightness but he was not deterred from this brilliant light. It felt right, as though this was just another part of himself, not unlike his eyes or hands. The stranger stood up abruptly, hiding one eye from the light, but the man did not miss the blank orafice on the left side of his face. He was missing an eye, and where one should have been was just an empty socket.