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The Lost Ones Ch.0
🕑 Added 2023-10-01 09:55:08 +0000 UTCPrologue
The Mirror Man
Dave East, former Janitor and very briefly a mage, felt the skin on his hands tearing as he pulled himself up the mountainside made of broken glass. Everything in this cursed land was broken glass… or shadows.
His bloody fingers found one more crevice to dig into, the pain flaring as he finally pulled himself onto a ledge. Wide, flat, and, most importantly, smooth glass stretched away from him.
He was almost there; he just needed to rest for a moment.
Dave was supposed to be dead; he knew that. Bernice had planned it perfectly with one end in mind. His death.
All that work, all that planning. A lifetime of effort to finally become a Mage. A noble… and she had taken it all away in a moment. One day, that was all he got. A single day as a Mage before being plunged into a fresh hell.
Now, some mirror creature was running around in his body with whatever the hell Bernice was while he was trapped here with nothing but the shadowy forms of his nightmares to keep him company.
Dave smiled ruefully.
They had made one small error. A simple enough misunderstanding, he supposed. He wasn’t afraid of his nightmares. Most people were, he knew. But Dave had learned long ago that to give in to that fear was to be weak. And he had always worked to be strong.
Hatred replaced the fear, and Dave East found fuel in that hatred. A fuel that had propelled him all the way to become a mage.
Sure, he slipped up. He trusted, and now he was paying the price.
But that was okay, he nodded to himself; he had paid a lot in his short life. He could pay again.
What he could not do, was give up.
Sighing heavily, Dave pulled himself to his feet and wiped his bloody hands on what little remained of his tattered mage robes.
He could not afford to sit and rest. That was part of the horror of this dimension. Even as he had that thought, a shadow started to form on the smooth ledge he sat on.
Dave concentrated on the hatred inside himself, feeling his blood pound in his veins until his vision started to waver in time with his pulse. Just as the shadow began to rise into the form of an old bully, his hands began to leak a swirling red energy like a thick smoke.
With a roar, Dave punched out, smashing his smoke-wreathed fist into the shadow form. The red, glowing smoke stuck to the shadow, and it writhed as he saw the haze of hatred grow from a faint trace until it overtook the whole shadow.
Dave held out his hand, pulling the smoke back into himself. His body flushed with energy, his wounds healing, and his exhaustion fading.
With a weary smile, Dave turned back to the mountain and reached up for a new handhold.
His hatred settled back into the pit inside him as he climbed, even the sharp bits of glass not causing it to stir. Dave did not hate this place, though he would prefer to leave. Would leave, he corrected himself. Now was not the time to lose his focus or his drive.
But still, he did not hate this place, with its jagged glass and empty silvery white landscape. Not even as he felt the blood flow down his arms, and his grip became slippery with blood.
He had not hated it, even in that first moment when Bernice and the creature wearing his skin had covered their mirror and left him to die at the hands of his own nightmares.
Dave East hated many things, the most recent additions being Bernice and her new mate, but just as before, he turned that anger and hate into something positive.
The first moment when he had realized he was tricked, abandoned, and surrounded, he felt that hatred burst forth. With a roar, he launched himself at the gathering shadows and, in the seconds that followed, destroyed them all.
His mana and magic, which he had spent a lifetime lusting after, were useless in this world. His hatred, on the other hand, gave him power.
Many who discovered that fact would have lost themselves to that hatred, reduced to a creature of base instinct by the wash of anger that accompanied it. But a lifetime of smiling in the faces of his abusers and thanking them for whatever crumbs they dropped at his feet was great training.
Like his hatred, his anger was a pet beast. A mount he rode with total mastery.
And so began his search.
For weeks now, he had run and fought and climbed. Dave East had combed this new world with one aim in mind. A way out. Two days previously, he had seen something that might just offer him his first clue.
He had been working his way through a glittering canyon, one of over a dozen he had passed in his endless run when he came across a strange sight.
It was a body.
A young man in strange clothes. Dave assumed at first it was a jester or the like from his own world. The clothes were undoubtedly bright enough. But the style was wrong. The blue trousers were made of a course material but finely made. The shoes were puffy, with soles of a strange material he had no word for. A naked torso revealed the tattooed skin, which seemed to follow no system he knew of, and the red hair faded to white at the tips.
That was all Dave could tell at first. The body looked dried out and desiccated. Almost as if everything inside it had been drained. The cause was clear when Dave rounded the next corner.
The Shadows clustered around another figure, their hands reaching into the mouth, fingers pushing into the eyes and ears. The body shriveled as he watched impassively.
Now he knew what was in store for him should he stumble in his path. A grizzly death indeed.
The following fight was more challenging than any he had experienced here. The freshly fed shadows putting up more fight than usual.
After he absorbed their remains, Dave had spent a rare moment of peace. A single look had confirmed the bodies could not have been from his world. Nothing about them fit.
That meant there was another way into this world, and that meant a possible way out.
Dave pulled himself up onto the final terrace and laughed. He had seen this distant peak after exiting that fateful chasm, and now, at last, he was here.
Raising his weary head, Dave East, a former Janitor with one day’s experience as a mage… let out a yell of triumph.
He sat up, his eyes roaming over the slivery landscape that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Every hill, valley, tree, building, or road made of silvery white glass.
Then he looked ahead of him at the wide plateau at the top of this mountain. More especially, he looked at the mansion that sat there. A mansion made of dark stone and deep red wood.
Not a spec of glass in sight.
Dave pulled himself to his feet and ran, the shadows boiling up behind him as he left a bloody trail to the front door, which opened before him in welcome.
Falling to his knees as he crossed the threshold, Dave spun and faced the massed shadows that… could not enter.
He laughed, spitting at them.
In a moment, the shadows dispersed, unable to torment him here, wherever he was.
With a deep breath and a relaxed smile, Dave passed out and slept for the first time in weeks.
==============
Dave woke as night began to fall. Which was interesting, as in all his weeks in this world, it had never gotten dark before.
Looking out the still-open door, Dave saw a dome over the mansion slowly darkening, creating an artificial night. Before anything else, he closed the door.
Light bloomed from sconces in the walls of the long hallway as soon as the door closed.
“Hello?” Dave called, his voice croaky as he hadn’t spoken in anything other than a roar in weeks.
“Hello?Hello?Hello?” The echoes sounded off, distorted, and a bit creepy.
After weeks in the endless silvery landscape feeding off hatred and shadows, Dave was pretty much immune to anything creepy at this point.
He walked down the hallway, noticing the dust on everything. On closer inspection, the dust was exactly what he had expected: finely ground glass.
The mansion’s ground floor was entirely empty. Not a speck of furniture, sign of life, or mark in the dust to say anyone had ever been here.
Moving up, Dave found his first furnished room.
A bedroom, complete with an exact recreation of his cot from his room as a Janitor.
“Huh,” Dave shrugged and looked around, finding everything exactly where he would expect it to be. He grinned as his hand wrapped around the handle of his broom. “Never thought I would need you again, old friend.”
Grabbing his other cleaning supplies, he got to work.
Something told him this was the correct thing to do, so he did it. His instincts had always been his guide. The one time he ignored them… he ended up here.
Dave never made the same mistake twice.
So he swept, mopped, scrubbed, and polished everything on the first floor. The whole place sparkled by the time he was done.
Returning upstairs to put away his tools, Dave found a new door opposite his room. Opening it, he smiled.
After a long, hot shower, Dave got dressed. This time, he wore his old Janitor uniform. The familiar jumpsuit was as comfortable as an old glove. He began to whistle as he worked, this time on the top floor, so far consisting of nothing more than a long corridor with two doors in it.
Still, Dave did what he had always done and cleaned.
When he was done, he found a third door.
This one led into a small closet covered in dust and grime.
Dave cleaned; it had worked so far.
As he finished, he heard a noise. The first one he had heard so far came from downstairs.
Wreathed in the smoky essence of his own hatred and armed with his battered old broom, Dave walked downstairs to face whatever waited for him.
It turned out to be a kitchen.
Dave blinked, letting go of his rage as he found one of the formerly empty rooms was now filled with equipment. Some he recognized, like the stove. Others, he didn’t. Some large thing, like a metal chest on its side, was almost the same size as him. Opening it, he recoiled as a wave of icy cold air wafted out.
A strange light glowed within, showing what appeared to be food in strange packaging, all kept cold by whatever magic made the thing work.
Not wanting to waste the magic, he hurriedly closed the thing and kept up his search.
An hour later, much searching and experimenting left Dave with an enormous sandwich consisting of plants and meats he had never even seen before and a glass of very hot water filled with some powder that smelled like that coffee stuff the nobles adored.
Dave felt he could understand their feelings after his first tentative sip.
After eating and drinking, Dave cleaned the entire kitchen.
Sure enough, he found another door on the second floor when he returned upstairs.
Dave stared at the door for a long time before shaking his head and going to his cot.
Everything was strange in this world, but this place had him beat.
“Tomorrow, we make a plan,” Dave told his faithful old broom as he went to sleep that night.
===============
And so it continued for the next two days. Dave would get up, eat, and then clean the house. Each cleaning revealed a door or filled a room. Once that room was used and cleaned, another would appear.
As the artificial night fell on the third day, Dave found the stairs to the third floor.
He had been scrubbing the brickwork at the end of the hall when suddenly he was cleaning a door instead. And behind that door, a set of stairs.
Which was interesting, especially since the mansion had only two floors from what he could remember.
With a sigh, Dave closed the door again and went downstairs.
For the first time in days, he would go outside. Just long enough to see if there really was a third floor.
That proved difficult, as, at some point in the last couple of days, the front door had vanished.
Dave stared at the blank wall where it used to be and blinked.
He tried cleaning the wall, but nothing happened other than the brickwork got cleaner.
Dave decided to get an early dinner.
As he ate, he looked out of the kitchen door, staring at the blank wall where the front door used to be.
He appeared to be trapped. Sort of.
A quick glance showed that the windows were all still there. He could go out the windows, he supposed.
He looked away, and when he looked back, the windows were gone.
Dave smiled as he bit into his sandwich.
“I’m not allowed to leave?” Dave asked as he sipped his coffee.
Silence.
“I’ll take that as a yes then.” Dave wiped the corners of his mouth and started to wash up. As he did, Dave considered his position. He was clearly a prisoner. A very well taken care of one, but a prisoner nonetheless.
Considering the world outside, Dave found he was not exactly opposed to staying.
This place was fascinating.
He cleaned, and new things appeared. Strange things, but nice things.
Looking around himself, Dave admitted he had never lived better. Everything he wanted from being a noble, he had here.
This place was a palace compared to his world or that horrific mirror one.
And all he had to do was clean.
The next morning, Dave was content to remain in this strange building for the foreseeable future. Somehow, it knew that. Whatever controlled this place must be able to read his mind, Dave thought, as he stared at the front door, which was once more in the wall where it should be.
Dave opened the door, looking over the same glassy world he had entered from a few days ago.
Dave East smirked, closed the door, and went to make himself some eggs and coffee for breakfast.
He was free to leave as long as he didn’t want to. That kind of thinking was something Dave East could understand.
After breakfast, Dave climbed the stairs to the third floor.
It took him a while, as he cleaned as he went, and the stairs seemed to go on for miles.
However, the sight that greeted him as he swung open the door at the top really took his breath away.
It was a gallery. A massive one.
The room stretched away into the distance on all sides, with only a single feature in all that vast space. An ornate stone chair carved of what appeared to be pure onyx.
Curious despite himself, Dave walked over and examined the chair. Eventually, having checked it thoroughly, he sat down.
As soon as he did, it seemed to mold around him, making him feel weightless, warm, and safe.
Looking ahead of him, he saw a set of words appear in the air, seemingly made of smoke or mist.
Welcome to the Archive of the Lost Ones.
The lost, the forgotten, the failures, and the almost were…
These are their stories, and this is their memorial…
Welcome, Keeper of the Archive,
Do you have a person in mind, or shall I choose a random story?
“I think,” Dave hesitated, “I think I want to see someone who almost had it all.” He smiled ruefully, “Show me someone like me.”
A line of mist appeared before his chair, and a large silver mirror held in an onyx frame rose from it. Dave sat forward as the surface rippled, and a figure appeared…
Comments
Clayton Danvers
NOTE: Features a character from the short story No One Sees The Janitor. It is worth reading if you want to know more!
