"I don't know."
My life could be distilled into those three words. What little I remembered of it, anyway.
"I don't know," I said to the voices, each time they asked me those same questions. They never asked anything else.
"What is your name?"
"I don't know."
"Where do you come from?"
"I don't know."
There'd be a pause, for exactly six seconds. I'd count the beats in my mind. Sometimes, if it was late in the questioning, my racing heartbeat would throw off my counting. It was never enough. They'd always ask again.
"What is your name?" came the voice from nowhere - always male, but not always the same voice.
"I don't know," I'd say to the surrounding emptiness. My voice didn't echo. The blackness seemed to shallow it whole. I couldn't even see my hand held up before my face. No amount of staring wide-eyed ever brought clarity to the nothingness.
"Where do you come from?"
"I don't know."
Sometimes, as they questioned me, I'd push my knuckles against my closed eyes, trying to make bright pressure-smears just to bring colour to the darkness.
It never worked. That's how I knew I was blind.
I couldn't say how long it took for things to change, but change they did: first the question, and then the answer.
My 'day' begin the moment my eyes first opened, no different from before. As ever, I couldn't move beyond the small confines of what I considered my cell. I checked each time I awoke, running my hands along what felt like cold, featureless stone. The stone tasted like salt, and smelled of blood. There was no door.
"What is you name?!" demanded the voice. A low and aggressively masculine tone, today. Almost angry.
"I don't know."
"Where do you come from?"
"I don't know."
I wondered if I'd committed some grievous crime. Perhaps this was my punishment. That made sense, didn't it. The thought wasn't a new one, for it often danced through my consciousness, inspiring more fruitless, answerless musing.
I'd asked the voices before, of course, many times. I'd also learned quickly enough that they were extremely unforthcoming. They would ask, but never answer.
"What is your name?"
I sighed, slinking back to the thin blacker I considered my bed. In the sightless dark, I wrapped the rag around my shoulders, and returned to shivering.
"I don't know."
"Where do you come from?"
"I don't know."
I was hungry, which surprised me. I rarely woke feeling hunger. Though I couldn't remember eating or drinking anything since first waking there, I knew they had fed me. Still, the only taste I knew was that the walls left a saline tingle on the tongue, so I suspected my sustenanc came through an intravenous process during the hours I was unconscious. The tiny pinpricks along my forearm were always the sorest just after I awoke.
"What is your name?"
I'd answer differently, at first. I'd railed at the unseen voices, demanding answers and insisting I shouldn't be here. The latter claim always felt more than a little hollow, since I had no idea at all whether I should be there or not. I often wondered if I deserved to be contained as I was. Perhaps I did. Perhaps I was a murderer.
These thoughts granted me little guilt, for I could remember nothing of my life outside these walls. Penance was an easy trial when one couldn't recall the sin.
Eventually, the routine settled into place. I no longer invented names or spat out meaningless syllables. I abandoned the sullen silences, and the equally ineffective shouted questions. They hurt me whenever I said anything except the truth.
"I don't know."
"Where do you come from?"
"I don't know."
I'd never understood just how they inflicted pain onto me, but the pain would begin in my head and bloom outwards from there. A dull torn behind the eyes would leak to my eyes and the roof of my mouth, creeping down my spine. The last time I'd managed to endure it until my fingers felt as if they were aflame. The pain had dripped all the way down my torso, infecting half of my body.
Pain was the catalyst for honesty. I told the truth after that moment. I told it unfailingly.
"What is your name?"
Was I going to die here? Did I have long to live? These thoughts struck with greater force than any guilt. Feeling my own flesh never offered much in the way of enlightenment. With no sight for reference, I was reduced to guesswork. There was no loose skin, scars or obvious winkles, though I had a considerable amount of muscle mass. I was still the dark as to how old I was.
It was a bizarre feeling to not know how old I was, somehow stranger than not knowing my name, or remembering the sin that sentenced me to that cell.
"What is your name?!" The voice snarled this time.
Was that a repetition? Had I missed an answer? The pain sparked like a second heartbeat in my head, throbbing in my sinuses and the delicate tissue connecting my eyes to my brain. I had to clear my mouth of the sudden drool-flush.
Maybe they would kill me if I held back from answering. I'd tried to die that way before, back in the beginning, but the pain always broke me, leaving me weeping and panting, confessing the truth yet again.
"What is your name?"
I looked up, seeing nothing, already feeling the tremble in my fingers as the pain spread with pinching fire down to my jaw. A snorted breath, not quite a laugh, broke from my lips. I felt myself smiling, felt the welcome warmth of the tears on my face. Perhaps this was what going mad felt like. Perhaps I'd been mad for months already.
"What is your name?"
My cheeks hurt, both from the spreading punishment and the ache of grinning. This shouldn't be funny, but it was. In a way, it really was. What had I done to belong here? It must have been something bad. Something really, truly bad.
Was I important? Did I know something they wanted to pry from my skull? If that was the case, they were out of luck; the memory-starved darkness in my head was as empty as the blackness before my eyes.
That set my laughing again, harder this time.
"My name," I began to answer, but crumbled into childish sniggering. The pain ramped up, quicker than before, knifing to my tongue and throat in a quick pulse. I gagged, but didn't stop grinning. If there'd been anything in my system, I would have thrown it up right then and there.
"What is your name?!"
"I don't know." The pain receded, but didn't dissipate completely. I was still locked into a madman's smile as I drew another breath.
"I don't know."
I leaned back against the wall, the laughter finally fading.
"My name is whatever I want it to be! My name is whatever it needs to be, to get me the hell out of here!"
As soon as those words left my mouth, the pain exploded throughout my entire body, simultaneously. I fell to my knees, unable to stand the pain that burnt inside my legs.
My body contorted as the agony rampaged across my nervous system. Never before had I experienced such torture. I yelled at the darkness for it to end, but the voices were gone. No matter how many times or how loud I shouted, there was no response.
In that moment, I knew that this was my death, so I embraced it. Anywhere was better than here.
I felt something streamed down from my eyes, nose and ears; I couldn't tell what it was, but I assumed that it was blood. My blood.
At the same time, a new taste greeted my almost forgotten tastebuds. A liquid was slowly filling the space in my mouth. There was a strong taste of iron to it, which only confirmed that I was bleeding from the inside out.
I spat it out to clear my mouth, only for more to its place. I tried again and again, but the blood slowly started to fill my lungs. Coughing and spluttering, I desperately tried to breathe, only for more bodily fluids to enter my air ways. My lungs burned as the cells were starved of oxygen. Dizziness overcame my mind, as I collapsed on the cold, hard floor. I felt the blood pool around me as my life slowly poured out of me.
[In Equestria]
Princess Celestia had just finished lowering the Sun, bringing about the night after another peaceful day. And thus Princess Luna began her duty. Slowly the white glow of the Moon peeked out from the clouds, with the stars amerging one by one like pin pricks of light in the sky.
"We wish thou a good night, dear sister," Luna stated.
"Good night to you too, Luna," replied Celestia.
Suddenly, the two alicorn princesses felt a massive distortion in the magical energy of Equestria, enough to make the ground shake beneath them. Nothing in recorded history had ever caused such a disturbance before.
All they knew was that something very powerful had occurred.
And for the first time in centuries, they were frightened.
Death below, the unknown above.
One choice.
A moment's inattention or a single slip and I would be dead, broken on the knifed-bladed rocks below.
My fingers were bloody, gripping the cliff by the narrowest handholds. The muscles in my calves were vibrating like plucked strings, and my arms burned with acids, though I had no memory of exerting myself.
How had I come to this place?
I had no answer to that, nor did I know much of anything save that the rugged wall rock before me was slick with water and vanished into the mists of rain above me. All I knew was that I was finally out of the god forsaken cell and, what's more, I was no longer blind nor dead.
What lay at the top of this cliff? No answer was forthcoming, but what lay at the bottom was clear enough. My right hand was cramping, and I eased each finger from the rock with the gentlest effort, trying to lessen the pain in each joint.
Long black hair hung before my eyes and I shook my head to clear my vision. The motion almost hurled me from the cliff and I clamped my fingers even harder onto the rock. I spat rainwater and looked up into the grey swirl of misty clouds. How close was the top of this cliff? Would it be easier to climb or was the ground, distant as it was, closer?
There was no way of knowing, but I had to make a decision soon.
A bad decision was better than no decision, and I understood that I had only two options. Retreat to a known fate or climb to an uncertain future. Though I had no memory of myself, I knew that going backwards was not in my nature. A decision, once made, had to be seen through to the end, for good or ill. How I knew this about myself I didn't know, but with the decision made, I knew it was the right one.
I lifted my right hand and slid it up the cliff, looking for a higher handhold, and, finding one, gripped it tightly. Gently, I eased my left hand up and took hold of a thin protruding rock. With my hands safe, I lifted my foot, the bare sore torn open (by climbing this far?) and placed it securely. I pushed down and lifted my body higher, feeling a potent sense of victory at even this small distance.
With agonising slowness and patience, I climbed upwards again, each movement painful and dangerous, but achieved with a relentless determination that I would not fail. The rain intensified and lashed my body with icy needles, as though spitefully seeking to dislodge me from the rock.
Rain, exhaustion and pain all conspired to weaken my resolve, but the more their combined efforts attempted to prise me loose, the harder I gripped. Hand over hand, one foot after the other, I pushed myself higher and higher. Each moment of ascension was a rebirth, each continued bresth a revelation. The rocks below diminished as I climbed, yet the clouds above seemed to climb with me, revealing yet more of the cliff, but no sign of s summit.
For all I knew, there might never be an end to the cliff. I might climb until my strength finally gave out and I fall to my death. The thought did not trouble me much. Better to fail after all efforts have been expended than to die never having found the limits of my endurance. That gave me strength, and I climbed onwards, faster now that the mountain had become my enemy, a thing to overcome. With an enemy to focus my thoughts, my strength grew and my will to succeed sharpened to a razor's edge.
Now all I could see above or below my was the cliff face, an implacable black wall that wanted me to fail and die. I gritted my teeth and spat at the rock before me in anger. Blood ran down my arms in thick runnels, my hands torn and opened to the bone by the jutting slivers of rock bearing my weight, but the pain was nothing compared to the thought of letting this ascent beat me.
Why the thought of defeat should be so painful to me when I did not fear to die, I did not know. After all, what did a man with no memory or future have to fear? The thought faded, but with its departure another feeling stole upon my thoughts.
I was not alone.
Someone - or something - was watching me.
That was surely ridiculous, for who else would be so foolish as to climb a sheer cliff in the rain?
Yet the thought persisted. Finding a ledge where I could rest without tearing open the many gashes on my feet, I eased my body around so that my back was to the cliff. The mist descended, and an impenetrable sheen of moist fog obscured whatever lay before me, but in descending, it had revealed a measure of the sky above.
I saw the stars.
A veil of beauteous darkness strewn with pinpricks of brightness, sprays of light from unimaginably distant suns. I knew of stars - what they were and the chemical anatomy of their life-cycles - but where I had obtained this knowledge was as mysterious as how I had come to be on this cliff.
They wheeled above me in a sweeping arc, constellations and auroras like sunbursts.
And at the heart of it all was something else, something that had always been there, always watching me, and which always would. Dimly I sensed that this was no benevolent guardianship, but the patience of a hunter stalking its prey.
Like an ocean maelstrom lifted from the seas and set amongst the heavens, it spun with sickly colours and diseased froths of matter and light. A region of space that swallowed time and spat out its doomed fragments, it stared down at me like the eye of something monstrous and colossal, a power young to the universe yet which would outlive the stars themselves.
It made me sick to my stomach to see it and I closed my eyes as a lurching sense of vertigo slipped over me. My legs wobbled and I was suddenly dislocated from control of my body. My back came away from the cliff face and I felt the vast empty space in front of me, the dizzying sense of standing on a slender ridge of stone thousands of metres above the ground.
My hand scrabbled at the rock, but found no purchase. My body leaned out over the abyssal depths as my mind screamed at me to fight this weakness. A scratching finger found a thin crack in the rock and I jammed my hand into it as my body swung out into the empty air.
Pain tore at my arm as my entire weight fell from the ledge. I bunched my fist as I felt my grip slipping, skin tearing back from the top of my hand. I gritted my teeth and fought against the flailing panic welling up within me. Anger fuelled me and forced it down.
This cruel baptism of fire imposed an icy calm on me, and I took a deep breath as I blotted out the pain from my injured hand. I reached up and secured a hold with my free hand, and let out a pained breath as the tension in my other hand eased. My feet found purchase after a quick scrabble, and I eased my bloodied hand from the crack in the rock.
I found fresh reserves of strength to climb. Hand over hand I ascended, my confidence growing with every metre I gained in the war against the cliff. The closer I came to the top, the more numerous the handholds became,bad though the cliff had finally accepted it would not claim my life. I pushed up once more and groped for a handhold, but my ha d met only air.
And I realised I'd reached the top.
