Who am I?

"-Fuck!" Breaking a never-ending silence, a single curse at the highest volume could be heard.

Following the sound, we came across a 25-year-old man with long black hair and black eyes like the night, lying on a huge dune of scorching sand, breathing aggressively and sweating uncontrollably as if he had just come out of the worst nightmare someone could have.

"-Where the fuck am I?" the man said, still gasping and completely disoriented, but nothing and no one answered.

Carefully getting up to get a better look at the location, the man saw a completely different landscape from any common sight. It was like an endless desert with immense dunes and small stones in random locations, but the most surprising thing was that he immediately noticed something completely out of the ordinary. There was no sky, it was like a giant room with a ceiling completely covered by a reddish and lifeless smoke.

"-What clothes are these?" Looking at himself, the man also noticed that he was wearing loose hospital clothes made of a very thin material. "-I don't remember wearing something like this when I..." thinking about what he was wearing, his mind went blank, he didn't remember anything. The feeling was as if something had been stolen from him.

Desperate, he began to search every corner of his mind for something about himself and his past, but in the end, the result was what he feared most, he found nothing.

"-Who... who am I?" said the man, almost voiceless, as if he was out of breath.

Looking at that red ceiling, he began to reflect in extreme fear about himself. After all, how is it possible for him to wake up in a place like that without even remembering his name.

"-It's a dream, it has to be" trying to convince himself of this, the man spoke towards the horizon.

"-Yes, that's it, there's no other option!" In a desperate act, he picked up a small stone from the ground next to him and decided to hit it hard on his own hand to wake up.

"I... I shouldn't be able to feel pain" Looking at his bleeding hand, the young man once again entered into despair and began to scream and cry desperately, looking at the red smoke above when suddenly his moment of pain was interrupted by a slight whistle coming from the east of the dunes.

"A sound!" the man thought before madly running towards the whistle, up until that moment, only his own screams and shouts made noise, this new sound showed that he was not alone in this desert.

While running towards the east, he shouted for help without stopping, his feet burning with the heat released by the sand and his muscles getting tired with each step, but none of that mattered, the feeling of being able to get out of this emptiness and remember what he had forgotten was greater than anything else for him at that moment.

Climbing up and down the sand dunes, he finally reached where he thought the sound was made, but to make him more confused and scared, the only thing he saw was a huge black and gray pyramid with symbols on the edges that his mind didn't seem capable of even understanding. On top of it, all that red smoke from the sky seemed to be continuously sucked in.

On the outside, a huge statue of a being with a man's body and a crow's face holding an immense rusty balance could be seen. With no way out or place to go, the man decided to go towards the pyramid to find anyone or anything that could help him.

"It is sealed" As he approached, the young man realized that the pyramid was closed off by a huge dark stone and thick chains. He even searched for another entrance among the worn stones of the structure, but without success. Unable to find another entrance, the young man decided to head towards the sinister statue that composed the outside of the monument.

"-What is this now?" he grumbled, observing that at the feet of the statue there was something like a very old book, so old that most of its pages were lost to deterioration and the ink was almost illegible, but even in its state he began to read what he could.

"Please have mercy, please have mercy, please have mercy" it continued for another two full pages. What intrigued him most was not the content, but how the book was in a language he could understand, very different from the symbols on the edges of the pyramid, as if it was made for him. Despite his doubts, he continued reading, hoping for some clarification.

On the last page was written in an ink that looked and smelled like a type of dried blood:

"THE SMOKE HAS FALLEN, MAY GOD FORGIVE YOU"

As he finished reading the last letter, the man immediately looked at the smoke, realizing that it had been replaced by a dark and lifeless sky. Then, from the deepest silence, the sound of a gong could be heard throughout the desert.

"-What the hell is this now!" he shouted in frustration, and all the sand under his feet began to shake as if an earthquake had hit that world. The young man immediately began to run from that place when he felt something, something that could not be described in mere words, a terror, an immeasurable grandeur emanating from a single being, a being so grand that it could be called,  a god.

Chapter end