Elias knelt, fiddling with the knot keeping the makeshift bandage on his leg. The early morning sun danced in patches around him as an ocean breeze rustled the leaves overhead.

  It was too tight. In his panicked haste to bind the wound, he had neglected to leave some slack in the knot. Now the rough fabric held tight, crusted blood adding an extra layer of friction. He thought of the knife in his pocket, but he felt uneasy about cutting so close to his leg. He did not want to ever feel the pain of punctured flesh again. Maybe he could slide the bandage down?

  Taking in a hesitant breath, he pressed lightly at the wound through the fabric. All he felt was the gentle pressure of his fingers. There was no pain, not even a faint ache. Emboldened, he pushed down on the bandage until it finally gave way and slipped around his ankle.

  He felt a sudden rush of relief as the flesh below had a chance to breathe. The tightness had left a red imprint in his skin, circling around the calf and shin. Beside this artifact of the bandage, there was no evidence of the bite. There was no scab, no scar, no cut. He ran his fingers over the place that just yesterday had burned with hot pain. The skin was totally smooth.

  He spent a moment pondering what this might mean. Something about the speed with which it healed unsettled him. Skin grew fast, but not that fast. He remembered the raw, open flesh from the day before. That kind of wound didn’t just vanish. The bite hadn’t been deep enough to cause permanent damage nor affect muscle, but it had at least penetrated well into the dermis based on the volume of blood.

  Dermis. He turned the word over in his mind and chuckled as he got to his feet. He shook the bandage off his leg, leaving it where it fell. Briefly he lamented the waste, but he knew he could not bring himself to touch it. The bite was in the past. Clearly his body had moved on, and fast. He wanted nothing more to do with it.

  Dermis. The word stuck as he grabbed his walking stick and prepared to set off. Der-mis. Derrrrmis. Dermisss. His tongue reacted to the thoughts, forming hills and valleys, shaping sounds in silence.

  He pulled out the notebook. His instincts told him that the sun was to the east, so he aligned his back with the morning light and turned the map so that the arrow pointing east on the compass rose was directed behind him. Ahead, he saw the faint outline of the old concrete paths leading between buildings. He picked the path that led west, stowed the notebook in his pocket, and set off.

  ---

  As he walked through the trees, detouring around the occasional bush or boulder, his mind retreated back to the word. Dermis. Why did he know it? It was so specific.

  A phantom image played at the edges of his perception. A cube? Wavy markings separated it into three sections. And, what was that at the top? Small lines, spikes?

  Dermis, skin. They were related. The wound had penetrated deep into the dermis. But what was dermis? He knew, he could picture it. He understood the thought.

  Then define it. The command came from that part of his mind that was gaining strength to fight the mental spirals.

  His eyes had drifted down to the path ahead of him. Looking up, he realized that he had lost slight track of where he was going, but it did not matter. He had reached the building on the far side of the courtyard.

  He turned to his right, following the ancient path’s memory around the building. As he did, the ground began to slope down. The trees thinned, and suddenly he could see out across the treetops.

  Away in the distance he saw the glittering light of the bay. He took a moment to drink in the majesty. Before, atop the roof, he had been impressed, but now that he had a moment to dwell on it he found it beautiful. A swelling emotion stirred inside him, one he could not place. The occasional patch of ruined cityscape poking through the canopy contrasted with the deep serenity of nature’s embrace.

  The awe was replaced by a sudden unease. These buildings, this city, it had once held people, hadn’t it? What had happened? Where were they?

  The silence, once peaceful, began to weigh on him. Somehow, something deep within him felt wholly out of place.

  He remembered the skeletons in the room where he first woke up and shuddered. This was not right. The beauty was hiding something, something dreadful.

  These thoughts proved the most dangerous. What once was serene woodland now felt like a trap. He looked behind him, half expecting to see some hulking beast, jaws wide with jagged teeth, but there was nothing.

  Keep going. Another command. His feet obeyed. Fear and dissonance welled up in his mind, threatening another spiral. Elias tightened his grip on his walking stick and pushed himself forward through the haze.

  The fear died back to a low uneasiness as his steps picked up in tempo. He was grateful that his leg was healed, as now he could move freely.

  As more thoughts and questions came, he deliberately pushed them aside. He had to make it to the place marked on his map. He focused on that. Answers would come, but not if he did not move.

  Mustering as much courage as possible, he ventured back through the brush toward that far-off shore.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  ---

  About two hours later, Elias stood at the edge of the ancient city, peering out over a tidal marsh.

  After he made it down the hill at whose top was the old facility with the cast-aside bones, he had been surprised to find that the trees thinned. What from a distance he had thought to be a dense forest turned out to be overgrown roads littered with bushes and moss. Crumbled buildings, overtaken by years of vegetable growth and humid winds, outlined long, straight corridors. He could tell that somewhere below the brush there was concrete and asphalt, cracked and worn. It heaved up in patches, particularly in places where some of the larger buildings had collapsed.

  Traversing this terrain had been both easier and harder than he had anticipated. The old roads, forgotten but not gone, managed to keep large paths open. Only occasionally had he needed to detour around masses of rubble impassable obstacles. The general unevenness, though, was wearing at his legs. They strained from the exertion, and the only thing keeping him moving forward had been his will to not spend another night in this eerie wilderness.

  As the dry land became wetter and marshier, Elias had decided to even out his pant legs to avoid dirtying the longer leg further. His shoes were already wet, and he feared that if too much of his clothes were soaked, he could contract some sort of illness.

  At the edge of the city, he finally stopped to rest. The path had widened until it was a large highway, suspended on columns above the marsh. Time had exacted its toll in places, but the structure seemed sturdy enough, and there were no places where it was completely collapsed.

  The sun was high, but not at its zenith. He suspected another hour before noon, and then likely another six or so hours of daylight. Consulting his map, he estimated that he had gone about a fifth of the distance to the marked location. That meant at least another eight hours, which would be cutting it close if he wanted to arrive before nightfall.

  The water’s edge was still a few hundred meters ahead. Here, the salty brine of the ocean breeze was orders of magnitude stronger than it had been when he first woke. So was the ever-present smell of metallic decay.

  Herons picked through the mud further inland, and a large flock of gulls swooped across the surf. Here and there pools of water housed the vibrant motion of crabs, sea stars, and anemones. The buildings here at the city’s borders were much worse for wear than those further inland, and the piles of rubble and rusting metal had become secure bastions for the coastal denizens.

  Peering over the edge of the highway, he saw that the columns facing the sea were covered in barnacles. It must have been low tide. He was fortunate that he had made it this far before the sea swallowed up his path.

  He turned back to look behind him, hoping to better gauge the distance from the facility’s hill. As he turned, he scanned the fallen buildings, still on edge from his earlier revelation. As was the case for the last two hours, he saw nothing but shadows, small woodland creatures, and a human head peeking back at him from behind some rubble about ten meters away.

  He froze. His mind caught up with his sight. Two eyes and a forehead. As soon as they locked eyes, the person vanished behind the stone.

  Elias’s mind raced. He could not tell what he was thinking. There were no words, no images, only thoughts. He felt the urge to run, but his legs disobeyed him. His mind wanted to collapse into nothingness, drop unconscious, but the adrenaline coursing through his veins forbade it.

  His mouth hung open as his tongue tried to form words, but no sound came out. Only a rasping of air and a faint grunt escaped his lips.

  The world hung still like for an excruciating moment. Then from the silence, a voice.

  “Bel’s mercy Marna, man’s seen us. No use trackin’ n’ hidin’. Arright folk, let’s be out.”

  The sound stunned Elias. It was a gentle, firm voice, but it clashed so horribly with the world he had known since waking. The natural silence had been broken, and with it he felt a sliver of innocence whither away.

  From the shadows of trees and behind rubble, four people emerged. Each was wearing simple, cotton garments and had a small scarf wrapped around their neck pulled up over the mouth. They had burlap sacks slung across their shoulders, along with a wooden bows and stone-tipped spears.

  The head he had seen earlier belonged to a woman. Due to the scarf, he could not place her age, though he assumed her to be young based on her stature. The other three seemed to be male. Two were of slight, lithe build, one with brown hair and the other with gray. The third man, in contrast, was large, toned, and bald. This man had no weapons, and instead carried two more sacks.

  The gray-haired man pulled the scarf down, revealing a time-weathered, clean-shaven face. The man eyed Elias, one hand extended with palm down as if to calm a wild beast, the other reaching toward the spear on his back. From the corner of his eye, Elias could see that the woman had retrieved her bow and knocked an arrow.

  “We been trackin’ ya for the better part of an hour. Loud as a ragin’ keeper ya were.” The voice identified him as the man who had first spoken. He took a few steps forward toward Elias, and Elias instinctively backed up until his back leg hit the highway’s railing. His grip tightened on his walking stick, and he pulled it up in front of himself in a defensive position.

  “Now, now, is arright. No need for that,” the man said, and his hand dropped away from his spear. Elias relaxed a little. The man stopped walking forward and cautiously pulled his left sleeve up, reveling a scarred section of skin forming a strange symbol in the shape of a bull’s horns.

  “We be Lord Bel’s. Ya don’ look too familiar here, so ya best be knowin’ this area be his almighty domain. Let’s be tellin’ us, who owns ya?” The man asked.

  Elias had know idea what the man meant. Lord Bel? He opened his mouth to say so, but once again only a grunt came out. The man lowered his sleeve and stepped back.

  “We never seen one lookin’ like ya. But surely ya belong to another Lord? Show us yer brand n’ we promise notta hurt ya.” He made a signal with his right hand, and the other man pulled out his spear.

  Elias tried to move, but his feet would not move. His mouth hung open, and his eyes darted between the four people. After a moment, the man spoke again.

  “Arright, maybe ya don’ know our tongue. Mother Harta tol’ me once that the other domains speak in strange words. Alec! Hold him. We be needin’ to see his brand whether he be likin’ it or not.”

  The large man with no weapons nodded, then moved up to Elias. Elias tried to will himself to move, to do anything. His mouth alone was obedient, finally shutting. No other muscle budged.

  The large man, Alec, grabbed his arm. Elias did not protest. He pulled up the sleeve, revealing his blank arm. Surprised, Alec turned to his companions.

  “He’s no brand, Dunnin,” Alec reported. The others looked to each other in confusion.

  “Maybe check the other arm, Alec,” suggested the woman. Alec pulled up Elias’s other sleeve. The smell of another human so close to him was overwhelming. So many smells, unfamiliar yet known. Elias felt the mental haze begin to drift in, and he knew that this time he could not fight it.

  “Nothin’ again, Marna,” said Alec.

  They continued to talk among themselves. Alec released Elias and returned to confer with his companions. Elias tried to listen to their conversation, but the words washed meaningless through his brain.

  He felt his knees go week first. He knew what was coming, and he knew he was powerless to stop it. For the second time in his brief life, Elias lost control. His body tumbled forward onto the decaying concrete as his mind slipped into the comfort of the dark.