Rapture [Ver. II] •SNEAK PEEKS INSIDE•

CAPITULUS I | BONEGARDEN

He woke alone.

Salt hung sharp in the air. Foul iron, on his tongue.

There was a difference in the air trapped in the room with him—it was heavy with damp, hard to breathe—he couldn't help but feel severely out of place.

At first, he avoided opening his eyes. It was so hard, his body so tired—and for a moment, all he knew was a blur of warm light.

It surrounded him like falling sand. Kept moving. Kept swaying...

Why was it all swaying?

In the dark, tendrils of gold caught what little light there was, where it scattered in arcs, revealing pieces of a room. Something brushed softly against his fingertips in time with every other sluggish beat of his heart. Like a pendulum, everything shifted with him. One way. Another.

He remembered very little of reason—nothing explained this, where he was, what must have happened—but there was a place he knew. One where the waves never crashed like they were meant to. One where, instead, they whispered shyly to the sand. Seafoam carried splinters to prick the tips of his fingers—was that was he was feeling?

His nail caught on a groove in the wood, fingers curling inward in response to it.

But he remembered, too, that the sun had risen blistering red, and so much worse, was the cold of the tide, biting away at him upon every ebb and flow.

No, a beach wouldn't be so dark—the heat remained on his skin even when he tried to blink it all away. The grains of sand sparkled like gold, and he struggled to define them—frustrated with the way his body ached to hell, the way it wouldn't work. He wanted to see, to know what it all was, what it meant—for in all this, something was surely missing, something had changed.

He just couldn't know what it was.

The swaying got worse—his teeth gritted, and when he tried to find the floor with weak hands, the ground was swept out from under him—

It was with a heavy thud that his face met the wood—the proper floor, surely—and the impact was enough to put some things into perspective.

His lip curled back in a scoff, but even that sent a tugging pain through his face. He settled instead for pursing his lips, teeth biting down into his lips to hopefully distract from the old pain with new.

He blinked away what felt like sand in his tearing eyes. Through the cloudy tears, he was able to narrow his sight on the small dark mark left in the wood just under his face. His hand rose to confirm what he saw, every movement suggesting he'd been asleep for ages. It came back expectedly bloody.

A shifting sound met his ears.

This is what truly cleared his mind—the shock of realizing he wasn't alone, hitting him harder than a spooked carthorse. His eyes cleared at last, but they were useless to see past the dark looming in the other end of the room. He heard it clearly, though—felt the scuffing of boots shake the floorboards just so.

He tried to track the noise with his eyes, but it proved a massive mistake when a door screeched open on it's hinges, and a blinding light poured in.

A shout rolled past his lips despite the way he tried to hold it back, but his eyes stung violently at the drastic change.

His hands shielded his face from further damage, but the rocking didn't stop—it kept his thoughts trapped in a sort of high that he had barely managed to escape for the moment.

Who was that?

His eyes burned, but they grew used to the light—and it actually wasn't so bright, after all, only that the room was so dark. Still, his hands hovered by his face, readying to shield it from any other possible misfortune.