Mirrored Horizon - Prologue Chapter

Snapping awake, the first sensation that Scot could feel was pain.

Finding himself lying on his back, the pain he felt manifested itself in various ways. Both as a dull throbbing headache that caused him to clench his eyes closed, as well as a deep soreness throughout his body, like he had fallen from a great height.

While his ears rang loudly, for a moment he could clearly hear the voice of a man tell him with both kindness and deep concern...

"You'll be alright, I swear this to you. You'll be alright."

Strangely, the voice Scot heard did not sound like it came from beside him but from within. It was a voice of someone he did not recognize, but wherever it had come from seemed to distract from the pain long enough to cause his eyes to open.

Looking up from the ground, Scot was met by the blinding light of the midday sun. With the bright light in his eyes, it made it difficult for him to see his surroundings, but the one thing he could tell for sure was there was a low thick black smoke smoldering from something set ablaze closeby.

The air smelled of sulfur and was thick with dust, making it difficult to breathe. Given what his senses were experiencing, it wasn't a stretch for Scot to conclude he had been most likely caught in some kind of very recent explosion. But from where? How? He couldn't remember...

Forest.
Teacher.
Friend.

...Images quickly flashed in Scot's mind, followed by an intense pain in the center of his skull that felt like someone had just jammed a knife in his head. The pain triggered him to close his eyes once again, as he pondered what he had just seen. He knew the places and people he saw were from his past but now suddenly devoid of any context, like meaningless photographs that had spilled out onto the floor. None of the images felt like they had any sense of time or space to them.

Breathing deeply to attempt to subdue the pain, Scot thought it was best to simply just get out of wherever he was as quickly as possible.

With a strained grunt, he managed to roll himself onto his stomach before quickly pushing himself up off the ground. To Scot's surprise his body felt heavy, just the simple act of getting himself back on his own two feet felt like the most exhausting thing he had ever done.

Staggering for a moment, he managed to steady himself before finally taking in a deep breath and opening his eyes.

As he took in the sight before him, an expression of shock washed over his face.

Scot found himself standing at the edge of a stage looking down onto a large circular dirt arena a few meters below. The arena appeared to be at the center of a enormous multi-floored colosseum made from a dull, grey colored concrete and steel. Everything about the colosseum looked make shift and tacked on, as copper mechanical tubes both thick and narrow lined the structure. The tubes seemed to connect to every part of the structure and had small transparent sections revealing a glowing teal colored fluid flowing within them.

Scot immediately recognized this fluid was cyanode, a fuel for most of the technology that powered Vena. From what he could recall, Vena was a single massive city found in the Northern Hemisphere of Vendalla whose culture revolved around the use of aether energy as the foundation powering their technology. Which was different from where he had grown up all his life...

As he recalled the cyanode, a strange thought came to mind. How could he remember his name and what things were, but not recall how he gotten himself on top of this stage above the arena. With the dull pain slowly growing in his head, he wondered for a moment exactly how hard he might have hit it.

Looking down, Scot could see around a hundred men and women in tattered red jumpsuits inside the arena, who were either lying dead or unconscious near the center. Those who remained standing were bloodied and bruised, holding various kinds of worn and weathered melee weapons at their sides: knifes, swords, spears, staffs, and even a couple of pitchforks.