The Apprentice (CoTE x LoTM)

Darkness stretched infinitely in every direction, a formless void as still as the bottom of an undisturbed ocean. It wasn't the kind of darkness he recognized. There was no gradient, no subtle play of light against shadow. It was absolute. Perfect. Almost fabricated in its lack of imperfection.

—what is happening?

Kiyotaka noticed something wasn't right immediately.

Why can't I—

He willed himself awake, struggling to shatter the odd unconsciousness enclosing him. But his attempts felt futile, as though grasping at shadows with hands that refused to manifest.

Was this a dream? His logical mind dismissed the thought even as it crossed him. Dreams might be incoherent, but they adhered to an internal rhythm—something identifiable, no matter how abstract. This was different.

No visual distortion, no sensations to indicate texture, sound, or space.

His limbs, were they even present? They refused to obey. Struggling was a futile gesture, but the incongruity demanded exploration.

And then came the whispers. Faint, fragmented syllables tangled together into a cacophony too dense for comprehension. They clawed at the edges of his thoughts, jagged and invasive, tugging as though testing his mind's breaking point.

What... is this? He didn't need them to be clear to feel the relentless erosion they inflicted. Subtle at first, then sharp, as though his mind was being dismantled piece by piece.

Another pain followed—a crushing pressure, dragging him downward through the bizzare consciousness. It gripped him in waves, shattering the illusion of control he once held over his body, his mind, and his world.

This is useless—I can't do anything, he eventually came to that conclusion.

The whispers grew louder—not individually, not in clarity, but in weight. A tumbling mass of voices pressed against him, words blurring into static, just beyond the limits of understanding. There was no rhythm, no discernible pattern to grasp, only chaos—an endless tide surging and receding, swallowing and spewing nothingness.

He tried to wrest order from the deluge, but it was like cupping water in a hand that wasn't there. His capacity wasn't the issue. The problem lay in their impossible simultaneity. They existed outside language, beyond meaning, an overwhelming flood defying systems that might otherwise make sense of them.

What was this? Even the depths of solitude drilled into him since birth felt structured—predictable, measured. Is this death?

Just as that thought surfaced, the pain crescendoed, bright and sharp, punctuating the muffled dissonance of whispers. His thoughts faltered; not with emotion, but with calculation. The strands of logic he sought to reconstruct bent under the pressure, clarity dissipating before it re-formed.

Control? Gone. Vision? Absent.

"...?"

He stopped thinking.

If he could furrowed his eyebrows, he would probably do so by now.

The whispers had gone, and the pain as well, with it dragging him upwards. To somewhere above this strange abyss.

He could feel them. His limbs. Eventually, his eyelids opened.

Where am I? is his first thought when he found himself staring at a ceiling marked by deep, irregular cracks. The texture seemed worn, the color a faded beige dulled to near gray.

Dust floated sluggishly through dim streaks of sunlight filtering in through dirty glass panes high above.

A muffled creak in the distance made his ears prick, but otherwise, the silence was deep, broken only by his breaths.

His gaze shifted downward. The space was cluttered—chaotic even. Shelves stuffed haphazardly with books too worn to reveal their titles lined the walls, the floor barely visible beneath discarded papers, overturned furniture, and a collection of objects whose purpose he couldn't discern.

He tried to move, but a sharp jolt of pain erupted in his chest, forcing him to halt. It wasn't the type of dull ache associated with exertion—it felt raw, immediate, and off-putting. His hands... they were unconsciously trembling as they touched his side, sticky with thick red substance that hadn't dried fully.

His attention shifted to his body. Except... it wasn't his body.

Who's body is this...?

A wave of confusion swept over him.

The hands that trembled before him weren't the ones he'd always known. They were coarser, with unfamiliar scars and calluses. The arms, thinner than his own, bore bruises and lacerations too fresh to ignore. Blood seeped sluggishly from what looked like a jagged puncture wound beneath his ribs, the damp fabric clinging to his side proof of its severity.

"What is this...?" His voice came, quieter and raspier than he'd expected, an unfamiliar tone in his ears. He raised a hand toward his throat, but the motion drained him; his arm dropped limply by his side before completing the gesture.

The disconnect between his mind and this body—a stranger's body—was undeniable. It wasn't just appearance or texture but the visceral feeling. Nothing about this vessel was his.

In the first place, how had this body sustained wounds that should have been fatal enough for him to die? How was he alive in it at all? And most importantly—how had I ended up here, like this?

He struggled to find an anchor. There were no logical lines, only questions branching endlessly.

The faint copper tang of blood lingered in the back of his throat, making the scene in front of him feel oppressively real. His thoughts flowed into assessment—his surroundings, his injuries, and the baffling fact that he existed despite what the evidence suggested.

There was no immediate explanation. No answers.

He exhaled softly as his gaze drifted back to the worn ceiling.

Kael Montclair—a dockworker in the Eastern District of Backlund. A man of twenty-four years.

More fragments surfaced, and he sifted through them cautiously. Shattered recollections flickered like a film reel in disrepair: calloused hands struggling against coarse ropes. Salted sea air mingled with the acrid stench of industrial fumes, saturating every breath. He caught glimpses of dark waters lapping against rotting wooden piers, a city's oppressive silhouette rising behind them in shades of soot and grime.

—none of this was his life; not the name, not the struggles, not the city called Backlund, which sounded both foreign and evocative.

But this was no dream; no temporary, fleeting delusion. This was reality—a strange, inverted one in which he, himself, had ceased to exist in his own skin.

What he couldn't rationalise, though, was how.

His mind turned back, retracing steps in search of explanations. Was this a dream? A fevered delusion? No, it couldn't be. It felt too real—too visceral. The pain in his chest. The blood on his hands. The unfamiliar tremble in his limbs. This wasn't a temporary lapse of reason; it wasn't transient. It was reality—a reality in which he had no place, no role— or supposedly.

Then a certain moment from his previous life surfaced—clear as a bell struck in silence.

Is it because of that book?

Just before he sleep in ANHS, boredom had led him to a seemingly insignificant book tucked away on a dusty shelf in the library. The pages had been yellowed with age, and the writing had seemed cryptic, nonsensical even. Yet, a single ritual had stood out among the pages, simple, almost laughable in its premise. It promised the act of transcending the mind, bypassing the body and shuttling it into another reality.

He remembered how casually he'd followed the instructions—partly in boredom, partly out of curiosity.

An empty room, some fleeting candles, and a few whispered words. A ritual of scant importance, he thought. There were no grand signs or symbols, nothing that could signal such an unnatural outcome. He simply followed the steps—lighting the candles in odd shapes and reciting the chant he barely understood—and then drifted off to sleep, as though it were no different from any other night.

But something did happen.

Now, staring up at the warped ceiling of this alien world, pieces aligned themselves with a dreadful clarity.

The ritual is actually working...?

It seemed implausible at best. Insane at worst.

And yet...

He lifted his hand, fingers still sticky with another man's blood, and turned his gaze to the unfamiliar skin. Logical minds sought patterns. Causes followed effects. Reality obeyed rules, even the strangest ones. And though every fibre of his being recoiled from this, he couldn't deny its apparent conclusion:

The how was as irrational as it was undeniable.

That led to further questions, though.

Why this body? Why here? Where exactly was here?

The structure of the day here in this world is the same. Seven days in a week, each with a name that matched the ones he had once known. And then twenty-four hours per day. Months numbered the same, repeating in cycles. On paper, it seemed almost identical to the world he once inhabited.

Yet, as his mind wandered further, the illusion cracked. The sky here was no replica of what he remembered, particularly from the crimson moon and the celestial objects.

It would be a comforting thought to simply believe that this was a distant planet—a world entirely apart from his own— but it's just impossible.

Perhaps, this wasn't an entirely different world at all, just one at a different time, or a version of Earth far removed from what he once knew. It could very well be Earth, or a reality shaped by a fractured path in history, a version of the world where circumstances had diverged so fundamentally that even the sky itself had transformed.

This idea was both confounding and troubling. If this was Earth, why was everything else different? And why was he here, living someone else's life, in a body that wasn't his own?

His mind began to swirl with the paradox of it all, but as usual, he refused to be drawn into pointless speculation without further data. He should observe and analyze first.

His eyes scanned his surroundings again—the cluttered space, the discarded remnants of a life barely held together. It wasn't a home. The disarray lacked warmth or the consistency of habit.

No personal marks adorned the shelves. No presence lingered to claim its ownership.

This was likely a secluded, uninhabited corner of Backlund—perhaps a backroom or an abandoned place used for whatever purpose. An afterthought, not meant for occupancy, much less for a man to wake up in.

It was a space in flux. A temporary spot where lives intersected for fleeting moments before moving on.

The air reeked faintly of mildew and stale sweat, while footsteps far in the distance marked life somewhere beyond these walls, always moving, always uncaring.

For now, this place was his, as long as this existence in Kael Montclair's body continued.