Chapter 2 — The Body I Didn't Know
Rowan woke to silence.
Not the comforting silence of his home—
No hum of air purifiers.
No distant laughter.
No soft footsteps from his parents.
This silence was empty.
Heavy.
Crushing.
As if sound itself had been sucked away, squeezing the air from his lungs.
His eyes snapped open.
Pain bloomed inside his skull, pounding from within like a relentless hammer.
The light was unbearable.
Not the warm, gentle sun he knew—
But a blistering glare burning straight through his skin.
The sky above was a white haze.
Endless.
Blinding.
Beneath him, the ground cracked like shattered bone—
Dry. Colorless. Dead.
A desert.
A barren wasteland stretching farther than his eyes could see.
No trees.
No buildings.
No roads.
Only sand. Rock. Heat.
And the screaming silence of a colorless sky.
He scrambled to his feet.
His breath came sharp and ragged.
Every limb felt wrong—
Heavy.
Foreign.
Rowan wasn't thirteen anymore.
He looked down.
His hands—
Too big.
Rough. Scarred.
His arms thick with muscle.
His fingers calloused.
The clothes on his back were coarse and worn—
Tattered leather and cloth.
The kind a soldier might wear.
He was twice the size he remembered.
Broad. Tall.
A man's frame.
Panic surged—fast, loud, clawing up his throat.
He tried to breathe.
Tried to focus.
But dizziness struck first.
Disorientation followed.
His thoughts spilled over like a broken dam.
How?
Where am I?
Why am I here?
He'd never been anywhere truly dangerous before.
His world was sterile. Clean.
Safe.
His parents had made sure of it.
Even the Containment Facility was a cage of glass and order—
Bodies sealed behind stasis and steel.
He was never meant to be here.
Not like this.
Not in this place.
Now he was alone.
Exposed.
Utterly unprepared.
Rowan stumbled forward.
Every step sank deep into the sand, as if the earth wanted to swallow him whole.
The sun pressed down like a furnace wall—burning skin, drying lungs.
There had to be something.
Shelter.
Water.
Anything.
But the desert stretched empty.
Endless.
A graveyard of heat and silence.
His knees buckled.
He collapsed hard, hands scraping cracked earth—
Desperate for something solid.
Something real.
His new body felt like a prison—
Limbs heavy chains dragging a life that wasn't his.
Then—
Fragments.
Fleeting memories that didn't belong.
This wasn't his life.
This wasn't his body.
Someone older.
Someone stronger.
Someone who had walked far beyond safety's glass walls.
Whose body was this?
He searched for a name.
A face.
A single truth.
But the memories slipped through him like water—
Each one vanishing before it could settle.
All that remained was the echo.
And fear.
Real fear.
The kind he'd only heard about.
The kind that made his heart a war drum.
The kind that whispered—
You're not ready.
Rowan sank down hard, breath gone, eyes locked on the shimmering horizon.
No sign of life.
No sound.
No time.
Only the sun.
The sand.
And a Trial that refused to explain itself.
He closed his eyes.
Tried to remember home.
Tried to hear his mother's laughter.
To feel his father's steady hand on his shoulder.
But that world was gone.
Distant.
Unreachable.
He was utterly alone.
And the Trial had only just begun.