The smell of the burning tobacco lingered in the air, as the young man started falling towards the ground. The cigarette dropping from his mouth glimmered in the night, like a meteor amidst the starry sky. Arthur Luria fell unconscious.

  He had no idea what was about to happen to his body. A pain intense enough to knock him out ravaged his mind, followed by a sensation like that of a fever dream.

  He couldn't quite see his surroundings, or be aware of his body just yet, but he could feel something nonetheless.

  His senses were dulled and unclear. It felt like he was looking through a clouded lense, like his ears and nose were plugged, and a thin sheet of fabric was laid over the entirety of his skin.

  Thoughts were running amok in his brain, forming and scattering too quickly to try and develop them properly. His consciousness was hanging on by a thread.

  His body may have been out cold, but his mind was working overtime to try and figure out what had just happened. Granted, most of it was in the form of trying to put together those fleeting, feverish sensations.

  With some difficulty, he focused his eyes. His vision was still blurred, but at least he was consciously making use of his senses, that was already better.

  Fittingly, the sight that showed itself to him seemed straight out of a dream, or out of a hallucination. Lights and shadow of impossible colours overwhelming his tired eyes.

  If his main senses were dulled, the same couldn't be said for the awareness he had of his body. He felt as if he was floating in the vacuum of space, or sinking through deep waters.

  And as if he had been sent spiralling, everything around him was spinning, the ethereal and ephemeral colours blending together in a manner that hurt his head just by looking at it.

  The more he tried to focus on his senses, the harder his thoughts became to collect, and vice versa. Like his mind and body were now two separate entities, and he could only control one, at the cost of letting the other loose.

  In that case, he preferred to keep his thoughts clear. Every time he squinted, or tried to focus his vision, that intense pain spread out from his eyes to the entirety of his body. His senses were tightly connected, focusing on one would mean that pain would only increase.

  The feeling of needles piercing through every nerve, while blades cut up his joints and flames burnt his insides. And somehow, he was barely managing to stop himself from focusing on that pain.

  He shut his eyes. He needed to focus on his thoughts, and ignore the sensations from his body. He needed to ignore that vomit-inducing feeling of his body spinning without control, and that maddening pain. He needed to ignore those head-splitting lights, and that incredibly loud quietness.

  What he needed to do was figure out what was happening to him. How did he get in that situation? Where was he? He remembered leaving work at the usual hour. He remembered walking home.

  And he remembered walking back to his office in a daze. Mindlessly climbing the stairs, working his way around the lock on the rooftop's door. And while he was staring at the empty streets below him…-

  [Be born again, Arthur…]

  —

  ‘There’s a wall next to me. And some sort of window, maybe, over there.’

  Before he even realized he was awake, the young man turned his head to examine his surroundings. He ran his hand over the wall, right next to his body, which was laying down moments earlier.

  It felt like it should feel cold, but it didn't. He couldn't quite place his finger on whether it was warm or cold, or neither. Maybe he was still dazed from having just woken up.

  Unconsciously, his body had shot upright as soon as his thoughts resurfaced. His eyes, surprisingly lacking any eyebags, were lazily focused on the wall beside him. Pressing his palm against the surface, his brows furrowed.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Something was wrong. He didn't know what exactly, but something was wrong. Maybe it was just a gut feeling, but he knew something was amiss. It felt like a vital part of him was missing, an empty space inside of him needing to be filled.

  His hand moved towards his hair, running his fingers through the silky and smooth strands. ‘Weird.’

  He muttered inwardly. ‘My bangs aren't this long.’

  For sure, they weren't. His hair, dark in colour, only ever reached at most his shoulders, and that was in the rare occasions he couldn't find any time at all to go to a haircutter. And even then, the frontal part was usually much, much shorter than that.

  Blinking a few times, he didn't even realize the darkness of the room he was in. He could barely see his own hand right in front of his nose, and even then, he could only recognize its shape thanks to his sense of touch.

  He touched the wall next to him once again, before wiggling around. He was sitting upright. Weird. Did he fall asleep on the floor? No, there wasn't any spot in his bedroom where he could have laid down so comfortably next to a wall.

  Maybe he fell asleep on a couch, or in the living room again. His backside felt numb, that was probably the case. The living room's floor wasn't comfortable, at all, but he'd fall asleep pretty much anywhere when he needed to rest.

  No, wait, he didn't go back home, yet. Did someone knock him out in some alleyway to rob him? Or maybe he had fallen asleep on the company's rooftop? Surely not, it was way too dark. Even if it was night, night in the city wasn't ever dark, with all the streetlights.

  He blinked a few times, his eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. The wall next to him seemed to be made out of a rough, uniform material. Not wood, or bricks. He definitely wasn't at his house.

  Looking down, he was sitting on what seemed like a wooden plank, welded to the wall at its extremities with two pieces of metal. It didn't feel too uncomfortable, but it was far from being called a bed.

  Trying to move his body again, he found himself rolling off of the plank, and promptly falling face first towards the ground. Curiously enough, instead of the stinging pain he expected from hitting his nose, what spread through his body was a sensation not unlike a single slap, reverberating through his skin.

  It didn't hurt, but his body had hit the floor, that much was floor. Like slapping a body part with its blood flow cut off from having laid on it for a tad too long, it seemed like while his other senses were fine, his sense of touch was still dulled.

  ‘Still dulled?’

  Fixing himself and now sitting on the floor, a piercing pain struck him in the head. Fragments of memories, moments which he wasn't sure whether they had happened far in the past, or moments earlier.

  The rooftop. That voice, and then, that dream-like sensation of floating through water. And now, he had woken up in an unfamiliar room. Grasping his temple, trying to manage that head-splitting headache, he grimaced in pain.

  That's right. Something was definitely wrong. He tried standing up, but every time he moved a part of his body, the feeling of his nerves being pierced and his muscles burning up ravaged him. Still, he pushed through, eventually managing to stand on his two legs.

  The numbness hadn't left him yet, and he felt like he would trip and fall over at any moment, if he didn't fully focus on keeping his legs from collapsing under his own weight. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  Countless questions and doubts appeared in his mind, but, of course, he didn't have the answer to any of them. Thoughts flashed, coming and going, but they all lasted too little to settle on one. He needed to calm down and sort out his line of thinking.

  ‘As if I could calm down…’

  Out of habit, his hand lowered, rummaging through the pockets of his trousers, looking for that familiarly shaped, tobacco scented container. Though, it was nowhere to be found. He didn't have any cigarettes on him.

  His hand quickly rushed back to his hair, grasping at the strands to try and calm himself down. Huff. Huff. Even if he didn't have a cigarette, he breathed in deeply, before letting out the air from his nose. If barely, it worked to calm himself down.

  The pain persevered, even spreading to his lungs now that he was focusing on his breathing. He needed to figure out a lot of things. Where exactly he had woken up, why did he wake up there, and what happened to him.

  The easiest of those questions to answer, was the first one. He hesitantly lifted a foot from the ground and took a step forward, his numb leg trembling. Maybe he was scared of tripping over his own feet, subconsciously.

  Turning his head left and right, he found out this room was quite small. Two walls identical to the one besides him, and in front of him, an empty space divided by columns. No, they weren't columns, but rather, bars. That, and the wooden plank.

  It looked suspiciously like a prison cell. Even if it didn't make sense, it definitely looked like one. Three rough walls, thick enough to withstand physical hits and altercations between prisoners, a plank on either of the room to serve as beds, and an entrance blocked by bars.

  On the extreme opposite to the entrance, the dim moonlight washed over the room through a window. The metallic bars, although relatively thin, were covered in seals and symbols, and were extremely robust.

  If a prisoner tried to pry them open, or slip through them somehow, they were sure to damage the offender, as well. Those symbols had a meaning, though the specifics of which he did not know, that granted them power.

  If he tried to force his way out, he'd probably be knocked out cold on his feet, by a surge of electricity, or perhaps a blast of kinetic energy. Without even realizing it, he rubbed his left shoulder gently with his hand.

  ‘Chet!’

  Pain once again assaulted his head. His brain was pulsing like a heart, and with every wave of pain, memories leaked out. He didn't know whether he was obtaining, losing, or remembering memories, but that pain was dangerous.

  For a moment, he forgot his situation, pondering over memories and knowledge which he was sure of having no property over. Why he knew about the properties of those bars, or how strong the walls were, was unknown to the boy.

  The settled down as quickly as it came, leaving him gasping for air. This was a complete and utter mystery. He looked down at the wooden plank which acted as the cell's bed, and gently placed his hand on it.

  As he thought, it didn't feel like he was touching wood. Or rather, his sense of touch was still too numbed to properly identify something from his hands alone.

  Then, why was it, he could visualize exactly how that plank should feel? It wasn't like any wood he knew, and at the same time, he was familiar with it. A type of wood which collected heat easily during the winter, and discharged it with the same ease during summer.

  Cold during the arid, warm days where the scorching sun fed its light to the lands below, and able to warm a person's entire body during the cold and humid winter days. Coming from a tree with a rate of growth fast enough to be almost called an invasive species, many low income households, and establishments such as prisons, used them as beds.

  That wasn't knowledge he was familiar with. Not to mention, he couldn't quite recall it as fragments of information, but rather, something that simply sprung into his mind as soon as he touched the wooden plank.

  ‘And since they’re so cheap, it's easy even for poor families to have multiple, somewhat comfortable beds…’

  At that moment, a chilling feeling ran down his spine. When he was identifying the room, he clearly remembered his memories telling him that the cell had ‘two’ of those planks, two beds. And if there were two beds, most likely, he wasn't the only prisoner in that cell.

  “Up surprisingly early, I see.”

  From the opposite side of the room, a pair of scarlet eyes were glaring at him.