[skill: horizon chain - sanity anchor!]
Splashing into clear water, my feet tried to carry me forward. I didn't know where I was walking anymore, or why. I was just moving—dragging my body forward, trying to resist the claws scratching at the edges of my mind.
Dragging my ankles through the shallows, I soon realized there was nothing else but this endless, clear water around me. The realization slowed my steps until I stood still.
Above me stretched a sky too perfect to exist—clear blue-white, with a sun that seemed painted on. Beneath my feet, the water was a murky blue-black where I disturbed it, while beyond that, it was pristine, impossibly clean, revealing every rock and ripple just inches below the surface.
There was no one here. No footsteps behind me. No distant figures. Not even my own shadow.
[skill: horizon chain - failure!]
"I should drown."
Falling face-first into the water with a slap of sound, I lay motionless, feeling the tiny waves bash into my body. Then, slowly, I turned in the water to stare up at the frozen, too-blue sky.
"Maybe I shouldn't drown."
I blinked.
The water around me erupted with thousands of swords stabbing downward, frozen in the act of piercing the surface. I blinked again, and they were gone. Another blink—black hands instead, reaching from the deep, stretching for the sky. Another blink—empty, desolate water. Another—serpent skulls and draconic fish heads breaching the water, floating as if caught between rising and sinking.
One last blink—and it was all there at once.
Swords pinned into the water.
Black hands clawing upward.
Serpent skulls drifting, uncertain whether to sink or rise.
Each object belonging and not belonging to the scene at once, like forgotten memories halfway between drowning and breathing.
Still submerged, I could feel the water wrapping itself around me, clinging to my clothes, running fingers through my hair. It felt almost... affectionate. Like the water was alive and pulling me close, cradling me like something precious.
"I wonder... when was the last time anyone hugged me? When was the last time I hugged anyone?"
Before the thought could fully form, hands—wet, firm, and real—broke the surface around me. They grabbed at my limbs and dragged me, not fighting against the water but through it, deeper and deeper, until they carried me out of the pond and onto a muddy shore.
"We have the mental patient!" one of them said—a doctor? A nurse? A voice?—as they dropped me onto the soggy ground.
"Beginning resuscitation!" Another leaned in, shadow swallowing his face. But before he could touch me, my left hand shot up of its own will, gripping his throat, squeezing until his breath rattled in terror.
"Who are you...?" Distracted, my gaze slid across my own arm, across a map of scars that shouldn't have been there. "Scars?"
"Restrain the patient!"
Three sets of hands fell on me, dragging me off the man whose throat I held. His coughing echoed strangely, louder than it should've been, like the world couldn't quite regulate its own sounds anymore.
Forced down onto the cold, wet grass, my arms were wrenched out to the sides, crucified by unfamiliar strength. I thrashed weakly, but there was nothing left to resist with.
"Hold him!" One man crushed my legs into the mud with his weight, shouting, "Call Doctor Sathuna! Tell her patient eleven tried to kill himself again!"
Our eyes met. He froze for a second—then leaned in, voice shaking:
"Do you recognise me?"
"You're the guy crushing my legs with your fat calves. Of course I do," I groaned, the surrealism of it all slithering through my mind like cold mist.
"My God... T-tell Doctor Sathuna patient eleven has regained consciousness too! Quickly!"
"I'm already here," came a panting voice.
A frail woman rushed over, her dyed emerald-green hair and faded coat blurring at the edges of my vision, like she was an unfinished painting.
"Get off him. You're only confusing him more," she snapped.
The three nurses scrambled away from me, like puppets whose strings had been cut. The woman knelt by my side, peering down at me through opaque glasses that caught the light and erased her eyes.
"What do I look like to you right now?" she asked, her voice both close and distant at once.
My mind reeled. Why did my own madness paint her here, as this? A doctor shaped by a memory, or maybe a memory shaped by a doctor?
It didn't matter. None of this could be real. I knew that much.
"Excuse me," she said sharply, snapping her fingers inches from my face. "Answer the question. Do I look like a doctor to you, or a witch from a fantasy story?"
"...a doctor," I muttered reluctantly, though everything about her presence trembled with wrongness.
"Your hysteria really has vanished," she mused, poking at my forehead, as if trying to check whether my skull was still solid. "What's the last memory you have of seeing me like this?"
Pushing her hand away, I said, "None. You're a figment. All of this is just my mind collapsing after being awake too long."
"You've got the awake part right," she murmured, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Four days. That's how long you lasted before I watched you pass out into the pond from my office window."
My gaze drifted. The office window on the side of a towering red brick building nearby. Its curtains fluttering out like broken wings along the wind, flapping lazily outward.
The building itself was all wrong. Too big. Too red. Its walls bulged slightly, as if breathing. It blocked out the sky behind it completely, like a monster squatting atop the earth. It was far too mundane a building.
The fake Sathuna blocked the sun too, her presence somehow heavier than her body suggested.
Chains rattled somewhere nearby.
I lifted my head slightly, scanning for them. [Horizon Chain.] It was trying to fix my mind, patch the holes, sew sanity back into the frayed fabric.
But all I saw were the others—mental patients wrapped in too-tight straitjackets, their bodies entangled in chains, guided across the grass by nurses who might as well have been wardens. My own mind trying to trick me into thinking
"This is very new," I whispered, but whether I meant the world outside or the one unspooling inside me, even I couldn't tell anymore. And this was just the beginning.
"Actually, this is very good timing. You had a visitor today, if you remember me telling you," Doctor Sathuna said, resting her chin in her palm as she crouched over me like a crow over something half-dead. "Come on. Before you have your time with them, we can talk more seriously about yourself. Even if it will be the hundredth time doing so."
She offered her hand to me.
The mud beneath me felt wrong. Like a living thing, slick and warm, clenching my shoulders and back with fingers too soft to be made of earth. I could feel the pull of it, like it was trying to drag me backward, back down into the drowning place where the world still made sense, or at least pretended to.
But which one was real?
A life of gods and monsters and galaxies bleeding together—or this... this singular gray world with its dead grass, its breathing buildings, its doctors who wore their faces like masks?
What made more sense?
I took her hand.
The hands of ink in the floor gripping me gave one last desperate yank and then broke apart like with ease i rose. I glanced down. Just mud. Just dirt. No fingers. No clutching hands. Nothing to fear.
"I'll handle the patient," Doctor Sathuna declared sharply, brushing aside the mass of muscular nurses still crowding around us.
"Are you sure?" The one whose throat I'd gripped rasped, still clutching his neck, his voice raw and uneven like broken glass dragging against itself. "He's one of the highest-risk patients we have, Doctor."
"And I'm also his personal psychiatrist," she snapped, her voice cutting across the wet garden like a knife. "No one knows him better than me. I'll be fine even without your muscles, Benjamin."
She didn't wait for further argument. Grabbing me roughly by the collar like I was some wayward child, Doctor Sathuna began dragging me across the spongy grass, her heels sinking slightly into the muck as she pulled.
Saluting goodbye with two fingers, I let myself be taken, grinning at the absurdity of it all.
"Stop doing the Polish salute!" she hissed, swatting my hand away with a crack that left my skin stinging. "Just follow me back to my office. I'll explain your situation there."
As we passed other patients, I caught glimpses of their madness like flashes from a broken film reel.
Some drooled into their own laps, eyes wide and staring at invisible heavens. Others giggled to things I couldn't see—bare patches of air or creeping cracks in the walls. A few spoke in urgent whispers to peeling wallpaper, arguing with patterns only they could understand. One man barked and yipped at the sky, crawling in ragged circles on hands and knees, tailbone twitching in mimicry of a phantom tail.
They barely noticed us passing... but then again, they didn't have to notice.
I felt them.
As soon as I turned my back, it was like their gazes slammed into me all at once—slithering over my skin, prying under my clothes, coiling around my spine. It wasn't sight anymore. It was touch. Hundreds of unseen hands crawling over my back like spiders, each one whispering wordless things against my bones.
Twisting violently, I looked behind me ready to rip the invisible things apart but there was nothing. Only the garden. Only the patients swaying, muttering, laughing, barking.
"This way~!" Doctor Sathuna called, her voice lilting as she held open the heavy steel doors of the asylum.
Dragging a hand across the back of my neck to chase away the lingering chill, I forced myself to follow her inside. I told myself the sensation was just my nerves, just my mind unraveling itself out of boredom, or fear, or exhaustion.
I told myself that.
The moment I stepped across the threshold, the smell hit me—a wall of sterile, chemical stink, so thick it felt like it had mass, like it was pushing me backward.
Bleach. Disinfectant. Something darker lurking underneath, a sharp copper tang like blood poorly washed away.
The doors slammed shut behind me with a clang that seemed to echo longer than it should have, stretching out like a heartbeat through an empty cathedral.
The asylum's interior loomed—narrow hallways, ceilings too low, fluorescent lights that buzzed and flickered like they were barely holding back a deeper darkness.
Paint peeled from the walls in long, curling strips. A place designed to keep things contained... but what exactly? The patients? Or something worse?
"This way," Doctor Sathuna said again, her voice less sing-song, more clipped, like it was unraveling word by word.
I followed, dragging my feet through invisible syrup. Each step sank deeper than the last, like the asylum itself was trying to consume me—chew me down into its foundation where all the forgotten patients slept.
Chains clinked somewhere deep inside the walls, or maybe inside my own skull. I couldn't tell anymore.
We passed rooms—more like aquariums really—each one trapping its own twisted exhibit. Patients slept curled like dying insects or twisted in silent arguments with shadows only they could see. Some smiled too wide at the walls. Others stared blankly, mouths moving in constant, noiseless confessionals.
Up and up and up the floors we climbed, but it was wrong somehow. I couldn't remember how many stairs we had climbed. Sometimes Sathuna was in front of me, sometimes she was behind, sometimes there were two of her, flickering at the edge of vision like an old VHS tape eaten by mold.
When we arrived at her office, it barely felt like arriving. More like... remembering arriving.
It was a boring room. Far too boring. Exactly like her old headmistress office at Felcrii University. Only it lacked the sinister energy that had once turned every step there into a game of chess. Here, the atmosphere just sagged, heavy and sterile and wrong.
"Clothes," Sathuna said, tossing a set of cotton shirt and trousers at me with a lazy flick of the wrist. She shut the office window with a final click that seemed to echo backward in time, like I'd heard it close long before she actually moved.
"You must be cold from falling into the pond."
"I hadn't noticed," I said, and meant it.
Setting the dry clothes aside, I stripped out of the damp ones while Sathuna turned her back. My fingers moved slowly, like dressing a puppet, like someone else's body had been thrown onto mine.
"You never seem to notice." Sathuna said idly. "As expected of someone with peripheral neuropathy." Her voice doubled for a moment, like two recordings played a fraction of a second apart, before snapping back into one. "Do you remember what peripheral neuropathy is?" she asked, her tone turning clinical, almost bored.
"Dulled or blocked senses," I answered without thinking, searching for a mirror instinctively, like a compulsion written into my bones. "Damage to the peripheral nerves."
"Good."
She watched me as I turned in circles like a dog chasing its tail, searching for something reflective, something to anchor myself to.
"There's not a single reflective surface in the whole institution because of you, by the way," she said, so casual it barely registered at first.
From the desk drawer, she pulled out two photographs and slapped them down on the polished wood. A soundless sound. A slap without an echo.
"Every time you caught your reflection while lost in your imagination, you went berserk and shattered it," she explained. "Hence the curtains. Hence the rules."
I approached the desk like it might vanish if I looked away.
The photographs... they're of my body, covered in scars. Bites, slashes, burn marks that webbed across skin like an entire lifetime of violence caught in a single, frozen breath.
In the other world—my world—I'd fought monsters, crossed battlefields, suffered wounds that healed too fast because of the immortality that cursed me.
Had my mind recorded every one of them? Branded them into this body, in this world?
Had they always been there? Or was I just now remembering? Another detail crept into view like a roach beneath the door.
"Why is my face missing in both photos?" I asked, though I already knew.
"Like I said," Sathuna replied, pulling out a thick file from another drawer. Her hands shook slightly—like old film frames stuttering under the weight of gravity. "You go wild when you see your own reflection."
She opened the file, and a smell like burnt paper and old blood wafted up, sickly sweet.
"Now let's begin where we always do," she said in a voice too rehearsed, like a puppet reading off a broken teleprompter. "You are Patient Eleven of the Empyrean Crusader Institution for the Mentally Insane. Located on Earth. England. Just outside the city of Cornwall."
The words wrapped around my head like chains. Tightening.
"You were an internet influencer—a VTuber—under the pseudonym Traveler. Journeying across the world. Visiting countries."
The sound of chains tightening echoed from nowhere distracting me.
"You were homeless before that. No family. Born February 29th, 2000. In 2020, as Covid struck, you lost your mind without warning. Built an elaborate fantasy world. Adapted books you read into your delusions. Your followers thought it was an act. Until it wasn't."
The sound of chains crushing ribs resounded into my ear drums.
"You lashed out at a civilian in Heathrow Terminal. Declared legally insane during trial. Was brought here. Spiralled deeper and deeper despite every treatment attempt."
She droned on, her words bending the air around them, stretching time thin. I could feel the seconds slipping sideways, colliding into each other. Every blink was a glitched stutter in the world, a hiccup in the film of reality.
Her voice layered over itself. Different versions of Sathuna listing different histories, different details. Some where I was violent. Some where I simply vanished. Some where I never existed. All meant to assure me this was the real reality with how detailed it was with explanations for everything that couldn't be explained.
None of them fit. None of them fit!
Slamming my palms onto the desk hard enough to rattle it. The twisting reality settled like a leaf falling on dirt. My action making Sathuna jump, her file slipping from her hands, the papers scattering like dead leaves.
At the same time, the chains inside the walls screamed. A chorus of iron and agony rattling behind the paint before going silent as this false reality fixed itself into a proper world again in my vision.
"Not once have you told me my name," I said, voice cold and certain. Glaring at her with everything I had left. "Go on then. It's in that file, right? My name. You keep calling me Patient Eleven. Or Traveler. Why not my real name? Why haven't you?"
Sathuna's calm face cracked. Behind the eyes, behind the voice, the mask slipped. A frightened look. Real, genuine fear. The Sathuna I knew, the real one, would never have broken so easily. It was almost pitiful, how fast the illusion wavered.
I laughed—small, bitter—because even trapped inside whatever this was, my mind still knew itself better than they did. "What a fucking sick trick to myself this is! The reason you can't is because not even i know what my real name is!"