Waking up after death was never gentle.
It was never soft, never merciful. It always began like this—
—with pieces of memory missing, jagged blanks that felt plucked out by force.
Those missing spaces usually lingered for days, sometimes weeks, the confusion hanging on even longer, stretching itself thin across every breath he tried to take.
This time was no different.
It took nearly a full minute before Xavier even noticed he wasn't breathing.
At first, his mind tripped over itself, too sluggish to understand something so basic.
Then came the panic—raw, stabbing.
Then terror—colder, deeper—
—and then, finally, the rush of instinct as his body seized and dragged in a breath so violently it hurt.
Sound hit him next.
Not sound.
A roar.
A cavernous, world-swallowing roar that pressed into him from every direction at once.
Water.
Endless, crashing water.
The noise was so massive it felt like silence; his brain scrambled to process it, misfiring, insisting it heard nothing at all.
He wondered, briefly, if he had gone deaf—though deafness should never feel this loud.
Funny, how the body adapted.
How it fought, even when the mind didn't want to.
Xavier lurched upright with a gasp, palms grinding against harsh stone.
The rock was damp, frozen, biting into the nerves of each finger.
That intermittent pulse of pain—on, off, on—made him realize he was clenching and unclenching his fists without knowing it.
That terrified him more than anything else.
It felt like losing himself one sense at a time.
Touch…
Touch was still his.
It steadied him, even if he could only trust the sensation of his own hands, his own skin.
A tremor radiated through him— starting somewhere near his heart, rumbling outward, sharp and uncontrollable, into his ribs…
Down his spine,
Through his legs, and finally pooling in his toes before cycling back up again… a broken loop within his ironically named nervous system.
He sucked in another breath, slower this time, grounding himself in the overwhelming noise and the brutal cold beneath him—because if he didn't, he felt he might simply unravel.
And as he grounded himself, his mind scrambled for explanations—half-screaming with the echo of gunshots, of betrayal, of Wolsi's voice behind him, a of the brilliance.
Gold.
Fire.
Annihilation.
"Xavier," he whispered.
His throat tightened. He tried again.
More uncertain but also more determined.
There were tests to be done—had to be done; he had been through the tests a thousand times over, sometimes under the guidance of his father.
Other times under the guidance of his mother—she was stricter, so he was even stricter with himself.
"Xavier."
Louder.
"Xavier."
More complete.
"I am… Xavier."
He said it like a lifeline, like a spell he wasn't sure he still had the right to cast.
"I am Xavier… Ikaris Aionios."
The name felt foreign. As if it belonged to someone from the past—out of time, searching during confirmation, as if becoming and being were the same problem.
He forced himself to breathe, slow and sharp, as he had been trained—inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four.
And even if you were empty—FORCE IT!
Someone who can't master their body, can't master their life~
A soldier's breath. A survivor's breath. A liar's breath.
The things Xavier's grandfather had learned came from a time and place stitched into history with blood—Poland, 1944, on the eastern outskirts of Warsaw, during one of the final, desperate German sweeps.
He had been barely twenty, half-starved, and already carrying the guilt of outliving friends far braver than he thought himself to be.
He survived by doing what no sane man would admit to—curling into a pit carved out by artillery fire, coating himself in soil and blood, keeping his breath shallow enough to mimic death.
For hours he lay among the bodies of his own squad, forcing his heartbeat to crawl, fighting every instinct that screamed to run.
German boots crunched past him, paused, kicked the dead beside him… and moved on.
Cowardice or instinct—he never knew which kept him alive.
He learned to lie, too.
To look fellow resistance fighters in the eye and tell them the trench ahead was safe, that he would be right behind them.
He watched them run first.
He watched them fall first.
And he watched the pattern—German machine guns always rotated left, never right.
That saved him more times than any bravery ever did.
In winter, starving and shaking, he learned how to pry up forgotten anti-tank mines with numb fingers.
He strapped them to himself—insane, reckless, but the only way to turn dying into something meaningful.
Then he sprinted toward a cliffside the Germans used as a scouting ledge, timing their patrol route to the second, throwing himself into the open with the intention to take them with him.
He remembered the flash.
The sound.
The way the world lifted and folded in on itself.
He thought he had died.
In truth, he had only ended one nightmare to awaken in another.
When consciousness returned, he was in a freezing metal room deep in an SS medical bunker.
A spotlight burned down from above.
Chains dug into what remained of his arms.
He looked down—both legs gone below the knee.
His left arm severed at the elbow.
Most of his right arm missing entirely.
A chunk of his abdomen carved away, replaced with makeshift bandaging soaked in dark, drying blood.
German voices circled him, clinical, fascinated, speaking of regeneration rates and "testing the limits of Polish endurance."
They spoke as if he were not a man, but a specimen. A thing.
He lasted three days before he managed to roll off the table, tear the IV from his neck with his teeth, and slip into unconsciousness again.
He was later found by Soviet scouts when the bunker fell.
Barely alive. Barely human.
But alive enough to build a legacy—one that Xavier now carried in his bones, in his instincts, in every haunting memory that wasn't his but felt as if it were.
His hands shook violently, drifting between memories that were neither here nor there, and where he currently was, trying to sort one from the other.
He pressed his palms together anyway, bowing his head. Ground yourself. Anchor to the senses. The first rule of recovery.
It remained the same no matter where you were.
One second.
Another second.
A minute.
Xavier opened his eyes.
"Stone," he murmured, touching the cold cave floor, feeling the jagged imperfections of unknown rock formation. "Cave. Surface uneven. Wet. Nasty."
He reached sideways.
"Water." His fingertips, swollen and somewhat insensitive, brushed a puddle, shockingly cold. Or was it him? "Flowing water. Heavy pressure. Large fall nearby."
At least, he hoped that was the case. If not, he would be more far-gone than he could realize.
He blinked through the mist filling the cavern and forced himself to look around more properly, not just react.
Those who reacted, hardly ever won; unless, their reactions were catastrophic enough to be feared indefinitely.
Temporary fear breeds stronger enemies.
The cave was vast—at least two stories tall—with jagged black walls slick with condensation that resembled tears frozen at the moment of profound sadness's shedding.
Veins of quartz caught faint stray light, shimmering like frozen lightning.
Like Lichtenberg figures drawn by nature's forces, reimagined through the eyes of a virtuoso, and naturalized by nature's forces once more.
The cave resembled a natural cathedral carved by centuries of relentless water.
Behind him, a wall of rushing white obscured the outside world: a waterfall so massive he could feel its rumble in his bones.
Wind tunneled through the cavern's mouth, turning every hollow in the rock into a throat; long moans that rose unexpectedly into high, keening whistles.
Not frightening but haunting.
Like mercy before death.
A lulling to sleep so you wouldn't have to face the moment it happened.
Smell came next.
He inhaled—and gagged.
Earthly rot. Wet stone. Something sour beneath it—
Mold, growing in the cracks.
But the scent wasn't particularly unpleasant, only… different. Like it was not meant for humans—a long forgotten, dormant instinct that once meant something, but no longer did.
Above him, vines hung like limp fingers from the ceiling. Not normal fingers either—the gangly of a fairytale witch, only these stories were interpreted directly, tragedy and all.
Thick. Dark green cords. Some vines veined in purple, others whisper-thin and trembling in the draft.
Jungle vines.
The kind that devoured any and everything to survive.
All the clues are here. Put it together!
Put it together, Xavier! The thought brought him clarity.
He whispered everything, shakily cataloguing. "Vines. Tropical. Broad-leaf, epiphytic… damp."
Something shifted.
A weight brushed his shoulder. Cold. Alive?
Xavier flinched so hard he nearly slipped on the slick stone. A strangled cry ripped from his throat—too raw, too panicked, too unfiltered to be anything but real.
He whipped around, chest heaving—it was just a vine.
Just a long tendril that had loosened with the constant spray of the waterfall, dangling down and touching him lightly. Harmless.
Unless, of course, it suddenly evolved to have teeth and took a bite of him. As if his own thoughts had caused a change, Xavier stared at the vine for a couple of seconds longer.
Just to make sure.
He laughed.
No—he broke.
A trembling exhale, then another laugh, thin and wavering, spilled out of him as he pushed the vine away with shaking fingers.
"You're overreacting," he whispered to himself. "You're fine. You're alive. You're…" he looked around. "Somewhere…" paused, and added. "With a few memories out of order, but survived."
But the truth was much heavier, louder than the waterfall.
He had no idea how he survived. But he would remember—he knew he would. He always did in the end.
But other things would remain—Xavier had no idea where he was.
No idea who, or what, brought him here.
No idea whether Wolsi—that phantom of love and betrayal—was still alive too.
He steadied himself on the stone wall, breath frosting in the cold cavern air. There was only one certainty left: he had to move.
Before something in the cave decided to find him first, whether sickness or… otherwise.
...…
It was hours.
Or, at least, it felt like it.
He didn't know how many times he had repeated Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time in his head—until it drowned out everything else… even.
Even… the fact that it had been d**a**ys.
His feet slipped, depositing him onto his knees; it had hurt the first couple dozens of times but now, it was a distant ache—as if a reminder it was supposed to hurt more than an actual pain response.
The thorny underbrush sagged into a quiet hollow, half-swallowed by vines and dust.
At first, bypassing all the signs, heading deeper still, Xavier didn't understand what he was looking at—just piles of weathered stone, half-collapsed pillars leaning like exhausted giants, and carvings so eroded he couldn't tell if they were symbols or just the scars of time.
Still, something about it eventually stole his breath—the way the ruins clung to the earth like they were too stubborn to die, the way the broken archways framed the overhead stalactites like pieces of forgotten cathedral.
Elaborately fantastical yet indistinct.
Between the starving, weakness, and general lack of mental clarity, he understood enough to know that he didn't understand… wouldn't understand.
Admiration was all he held for art.
But the longer he looked, the more his heart sank—clues were all around him, yet he didn't know what type of architecture survived in sub-oceanic environments, didn't know why some stones felt warm to the touch while others stayed cold.
Still, he pocketed all the warm stones he could.
It helped… just a little—enough for him to feel other things; such as the fact that he was cold. So very cold.
Then he saw an opening.
Whether it appeared warmer than anywhere else or it was merely his imagination made no difference. Survival was survival, comfort was survival, even if only mental.
It was a narrow slit in the earth, half-choked by roots, exhaling a faint, weighted draft that felt like a secret brushing against his face.
Without thinking—without even wondering why it was so unusually warm—he ducked inside.
The air was the first thing to change.
It was thicker, almost syrupy, as if every breath was taken after a five-mile hike. Not overwhelming but definitely uncomfortable.
The walls shimmered with a thin mineral sheen, refracting mystery light just enough to sting his eyes—a shock of brightness after the pitch-black behind him.
It wasn't sunlight, just a paler shade of darkness, but it still felt blinding.
Xavier moved deeper, drawn by a consciousness-clouded naïve curiosity and thirst for survival. It made danger feel like a distant notion, like a rumor about that one person in school you never talked to.
A mile in…
Two miles…
By the third mile, for some reason, his feet felt heavy, his disorientation clearing step-by-step; What is happening? Why am I here? How did I get here? What about Wols—her?
He didn't understand where the sudden clarity came from; the haze was somewhat preferred—it allowed him to block the things he didn't want to see. Didn't want to think about.
When the dull ache behind his eyes started, it was concerning.
Then came the ringing in his ears, soft at first, but rising like distant sirens.
Everything became clearer the more he struggled; until—
the world started dimming.
The situation suddenly reversed.
Feet as heavy as lead, clumsy steps reminiscent of a drunkard running from a car accident.
The air tasted metallic; his heartbeat thudded in his throat as if trying to climb out; his vision began to ripple, like heatwaves had slid between him and reality.
Xavier leaned against the stone wall, but even that felt like it was shifting beneath him, pulsing with trapped heat.
When the dizziness finally hit him full-force, it was like the ground heaved sideways—then, he understood.
He had been breathing with little to no air for the past couple of minutes.
Panic punched through his chest, sharp and frantic.
The cave spun. His knees buckled. He hadn't even realized he had been running, jumping over rocks and dodging stalagmites as if he was trapped in a Mario-Cart game.
He dropped to the floor at some point, gasping for air that wasn't there. He had ventured too deep.
Standing didn't work, so he crawled and clawed forward—nails scraping against stone, elbows dragging his weight.
Every breath felt thinner than the last; his head swam violently.
With the last thread of instinct he had left, he crawled toward the faint promise of daylight in the distance; he had no idea how long he had been crawling for.
The tunnel narrowed.
His lungs burned.
Black spots bursting and receding across his vision.
He could hear his own heartbeat slowing, softening, like it was drifting into another room.
And then—the light came.
He spilled out from the crack into the main cavern, and though the entrance was a distance away, the chilling winds brought with it endless mouthfuls of breath.
Everything else was automatic.
He entered a state of dazed walking, stopping only when the roaring of the waterfall and chill of re-burgeoning hypothermia was present once more.
Only, this time, a warmth suffused his body—stones he had forgotten about, weighing him down through his run, causing countless scratches with every fall.
Yet, that warmth now kept him alive.
Unconsciousness claimed him, warmth and chill fighting for dominion of his body.
...…
The first two days after recovery was tense, contained, but also about finding his bearings—reciting his name, trying to anchor missing memories.
He didn't know much, only that hunger eventually grew teeth and began gnawing at him from the inside out.
He searched.
Xavier had had enough experiencing camping to know what he was looking for, if only adjacent to his current situation.
Survival, as it turned out, was a universal language whether trained by a World-War-obsessed father, or an African tribe with limited resources.
Body shivering from the cold, confusion at waking in a world that felt distinctly different; still, instinct drove him forward.
Hunger had a way of… of… simplifying things.
He ran his hands along damp stone, feeling for anything soft, anything living, anything he could tear apart and swallow.
The air was thin but breathable the deeper he went, cracks in the cavern wall pulsed warm air so he moved closer to those locations.
Moss.
Moss was the first thing he found—tasteless but filling.
...…
The next five days saw a shift from survival to searching for an exit.
The cold was slowly keeping back into his bones—much better but as if being accustomed to warmth just made the cold more distinct.
He could tell time by the distant angle of light filtering through the waterfall turning a deeper shade of blue.
The cave floor was freezing, painfully so, the kind of numbing cold that threatened to make you lie down 'just for a moment' and never stand again.
He gathered stones—flat ones, darker than the rest—placing them near the warm crack and letting them absorb whatever heat they could.
He pressed them to his chest, to his hands, eventually to his face, letting the warmth bleed into him every couple of hours, carefully imagining he was in the world's most expensive spa.
...…
Time passed.
Seven sunrise and sunsets.
Xavier learned the rhythm of the cavern: warm when the crack's breath swelled, freezing when it exhaled or closer to the waterfall.
The air in the deeper crevices was almost non-existent, and beyond a certain point, the dizziness was instant, as if a button had been silently pressed.
Adaptation was the tale of time.
And he knew enough to survive, then adapt.
He found the cracks with the largest warm-air leakage and established stations, little corners where temperature was tolerable and the air steady enough not to suffocate him.
As the sun set—its fading light turning the waterfall into a glacial silver—he rotated between these pockets of safety; his body learned the dark before his mind did.
And the fear was slowly beginning to trickle in.
...…
He had stopped counting the days at this point.
The fear had won out, but what was even more terrifying was when the fear faded, replaced by a simmering thrill-seeking recklessness.
Hunger drove him deeper again, further along the walls where moisture collected in running streaks, solving his water problem—not that that was ever in question given the waterfall.
But some nugget of knowledge told him water dripping from between cracks and stalactites was better than the water he normally had access to.
Luckily, he found food.
Vines.
Thin, sinewy, climbing across the stone like veins across skin. Some hung low enough for him to tug free, revealing pale green flesh beneath the bark-like exterior.
He sniffed.
Bitter. Sharp. Alive.
These ones were different, thicker—he hesitated, then bit into it.
It wasn't good. But it wasn't immediately killing him either, and that was enough.
As for whether he would be alive tomorrow—that was a problem for tomorrow… or, it wouldn't be a problem anymore? Either way, problem solved.
...…
It took a while for him to give up on eating the vines.
Then—he started eating vines again when the moss became too difficult to find.
The second time around, he learned to chew the vines slower, or they would tear his throat too sharply.
Then, he learned to mash them against warm stones first, softening the fibers just enough.
He learned to scrape minerals—mica-like sheets—from the walls and angle them toward sunlight leaking through the cracks above, concentrating light into a faint, warm beam.
A makeshift lens.
Enough to keep the food warm, or halt a pool of collected drip-water from freezing.
Eventually, after enough attempts, enough burned fingers, enough frustration, he warmed an entire basin's worth—just enough for a quick bath.
It was heart-pounding, shiver-inducing, and he had to dance the entire time he was showering, just to distract himself from the uncomfortableness.
...…
Prickles of a beard started to grow on his chin.
At sixteen-years-old and knowing his father, and grandfather, didn't grow a beard until their late twenties, it just fascinated him how he could grow one so early.
It was around the time his beard started to curl around his lips, having reverted to his base human wildness—pooping in corners too close to his water supply—hygiene science caught up to him.
Or maybe it was the vines… or a combination of both.
He woke shaking, drenched in sweat, half-delirious.
A week and a half—maybe longer—blurred into cycles of vomiting, chills, and lying curled near the warm crack of air just to stay barely alive.
He had to forego the vines, eating mold scraped from the walls instead—not because it was good, but because it was something.
Some molds made him dizzy; others made his stomach twist; others tasted earthy and harmless.
His mind was too muddled to recognize which was which.
Time kept passing.
He adapted. Human bodies always did, eventually.
...…
Xavier had pooped himself, huddled in a corner for who knew how long.
Hours… days?
A week?
When he stood again, the vines and moss tasted like slices of heaven.
With his renewed faculties came a sense of urgency for improvement—surviving wasn't enough; he needed to do something, or else the cave would eat away at him more than the vines could.
The next couple of weeks was a testament to obsessive progress—he built.
Xavier stripped vines into fibers and wove them together, clumsily at first, then with more precision.
He built crude frames of stone and twisted them into chairs, into supports for drying moss, into baskets for collecting water droplets.
He carved grooves into the wall using sharp rocks for tools, creating shelves for things that barely mattered but made the cave feel slightly less monstrous.
A home? No. Not even close. But a structure.
A place shaped by his hands instead of the indifference of nature—now that held some appeal to a chaotic mind.
...…
It had been months at this point.
There was nothing left to do; well, there was one thing.
As he had hundreds of times before, Xavier wandered to the mouth of the cave, just a few dozen feet behind the rushing waterfall.
It was louder… and louder still.
The air outside was cold but honest, clean in a way the cave never was. And there it was—the roaring, rush of water, thundering with the weight of tons.
Erosion and long years had carved a wide gap between the cave's lips and the falling water, leaving a sheer vertical drop straight down into the plunge basin.
He stepped closer—this was a sort of daring ritual to him.
A test, to see just how solid his mental state truly was—a week ago, standing by the edge, he would feel the urge to jump, but this week, such feelings had long since faded.
Background noise to his background noise.
The height was staggering. Hundreds of feet, maybe more.
The water below churned like shattered glass.
Even if he wanted to jump, even if some part of him whispered how easy it would be… hitting it would be like striking concrete.
He stood there, staring, feeling the wind pull at his hair.
And then it him. All at once.
Something he had been avoiding thinking about—though it was always there, in the background. Lurking. Waiting to be unveiled.
Wolsi.
She was everything… still everything—to him.
Not just the physical memory—those were fading—but the ache of the name, the weight of the loss he'd been running from since the moment he woke.
The heartbreak felt as if his chest cracked open.
The grief punched through him so hard he doubled over, hands on his knees, sobbing—made worst by the fact that he had to hate her in equal measure to the grieving.
Even more.
Real, ugly sobs—the kind that ripped through his throat and left his nose running, his breath heaving in broken gasps. His vision blurred.
He whispered her name again. And again.
There was no pride left to cling to—not out here, so far from society.
The sound, thankfully, vanished into the roar of the falls, stolen before it even left him.
He screamed anyway.
Kicked the stone floor. Vented as much as he could for as long as he could—emptying the pain in his heart.
One too many kicks.
The ground gave way.
For a split second, Xavier's breath caught—weightless—before the earth dropped out from beneath him, and he plunged into open air.
His last thought. A cliffhanger—literally.