His eyes opened.
For a while he didn’t move at all.
The ceiling above him was wrong — not the flat gray concrete of the lab, but old white stone, carved into high, sweeping arches.
Sunlight came in through windows taller than any door he’d ever walked through, falling in long bright rectangles across a polished floor.
He blinked.
Turned his head, slowly, one way and then the other.
The room was enormous.
A bed sat in the middle of it, big enough for four people, surrounded by dark wooden furniture that smelled faintly of wax.
The walls were pale stone, but not plain — carvings ran along the pillars and framed the windows, patterns he didn’t recognize, from no tradition he knew.
No hum of machinery.
No restraints.
No tubing.
No one behind glass watching him.
He sat up.
The sheets rustled against some kind of linen shirt he was wearing.
And the first thing his mind actually registered, before anything else, was that nothing hurt.
After what they’d done to his spine — the kind of pain that seemed to rewrite what pain even meant — the absence of it felt wrong somehow.
Unnatural, almost, like a held breath that hadn’t been released so much as forgotten.
He looked at his hands.
Clean skin, no needle marks, none of the raw red lines the lab had left on him.
He rubbed his palms together anyway, like he needed to check.
Where am I.
The thought arrived flat and cold, and nothing came back to answer it.
He pushed the blanket off and swung his legs over the side of the bed.
Standing took a second — his legs were unsteady, weak in a way that suggested he hadn’t used them in a long time.
He held onto the bedframe, waited, then took a step.
Then another.
The room stayed silent around him.
There was a heavy double door on one wall, banded in dark iron, and a smaller, plainer one in the far corner.
But it was the light from the windows that pulled him forward.
He crossed to them.
He stood there a long moment, hands on the balustrade.
Below him the land went on for miles.
Green fields rolling out toward dark treelines, a river cutting through the valley and catching the noon light in long silver streaks, and past the trees, mountains cutting up hard against a clear sky.
The air smelled like pine and wet earth.
No buildings stacked on top of each other, no traffic, no engine noise — just wind moving through the valley, steady and constant.
He walked further out, the stone cold under his bare feet.
Looked left.
Looked right.
None of it meant anything to him.
“Where…
am I?”
His voice sounded strange out here, small against all that open space.
Then a shadow moved fast across the terrace floor.
He looked up.
A bird — that was his first thought.
Wide wings, gliding easily on the wind currents.
Then it banked and started coming down, circling back toward the towers.
He watched it come.
Closer.
Something about it didn’t sit right.
Not the shape of the wings — the size.
He took a step back toward the bedroom doors without quite deciding to.
It kept descending, and only once it was close did the actual scale of it become clear.
Its wingspan was wider than the terrace he was standing on.
One wingbeat sent a gust of air hard enough to catch his shirt and push him back against the wall.
It passed directly overhead.
He stared up at it, his breath stuck somewhere in his chest.
He’d been braced for a large bird of prey.
What he’d actually seen could have picked up a house.
It circled once more above the towers, then dropped down toward a courtyard somewhere below, out of sight.
He stayed pressed against the stone.
He had no idea where he was, no way to place any of this.
This wasn’t home.
The creature was coming back.
He stood frozen on the terrace, his fingers locked white around the edge of the balustrade, unable to look away from the shape in the sky.
This close, its size didn’t fit into anything his mind knew how to process.
The wings moved slow and heavy, each downstroke shoving a wall of air across the lower battlements.
Its shadow slid over the courtyard like something spilling, swallowing the gardens below until the whole valley seemed to dim.
He stepped back, heel scraping stone.
Then again.
“What—” The word came out dry, barely a word at all.
It didn’t change course.
It was coming straight for the terrace, and his breathing had gone shallow, like his lungs had forgotten how to finish the job.
There was nowhere to go.
Even if his legs worked — even if he turned and made it through the bedroom doors — what would that do against something that size?
The castle itself looked small underneath it, like something a child had left out in the rain.
He wanted to move.
Drop to the floor, get down, anything.
His legs wouldn’t do it.
They just locked.
It kept coming.
Closer.
He shut his eyes and clenched his jaw, waiting for it to hit.
Nothing did.
Seconds passed.
No wood breaking, no stone cracking.
He opened his eyes, chest heaving.
The sky in front of the terrace was empty.
He turned, and the shape was already well past the western tower, gliding on toward the mountains like it had never noticed the building at all.
He stood there against the wall, breathing hard and uneven.
He pressed a hand against his chest.
His heart was still racing.
“I’m alive.”