I was alone from the very start, wandering the streets like a ghost. As a child, I didn't know what it meant to have friends. I only knew how to create them—figments I molded from the scraps of my fractured mind. They weren't like the other children. They were better, more real to me than the cold, distant faces that taunted me from the playground.
I tried to join in, tried to fit in with the rest of them. But they mocked me. They laughed at my 'friends,' saying they were nothing more than puppets, clutched in my trembling hands, controlled by the flicker in my eyes. It wasn’t long before their laughter turned to jeers, echoing in my skull like a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing. Day after day, the cruelty was relentless. Until one day, something inside me snapped.
I found a shovel nearby, its rusted handle biting into my palm. The weight of it felt natural, like an extension of the darkness brewing within me. Without hesitation, I swung it—once, twice, again—until their laughter stopped. Silence fell over the playground, the only sound now the wind stirring the fallen leaves. The world slowed, and I stared at the motionless bodies, blood soaking into the earth. I felt nothing—just the eerie calm of an empty mind.
The sirens came too late. By then, I was already lost to them, a prisoner in my own skin. They dragged me off to the asylum, a concrete tomb where I was sentenced to a cell barely larger than a coffin. There, they made me 'think' about what I had done. But thinking wasn’t something I could do anymore. They tortured me—stripped me of my name, my identity—shackled me in chains that sank deep into my flesh. Time became a blur, days twisting into nights, nights blending into madness.
Through all of it, I clung to my only truth: my friends. Lady Penelope, Parker, Captain Scarlet, Captain Magenta, Titan, Oink—they were real. They had to be. But the guards didn't believe me. Their mocking smiles were no different from the kids at the playground. In their eyes, I was just another freak, a broken mind rambling nonsense.
The day they decided to be rid of me, they didn’t bother with execution. No, electrocution was too clean, too easy. Instead, they ripped the clothes from my body and dragged me to the cliff behind the asylum—a jagged edge where the ocean gnawed at the rock like a hungry beast. Without a word, they hurled me into the abyss.
The sea swallowed me whole.
For a brief moment, there was nothing but cold, all-encompassing darkness. I was weightless, suspended between life and death. The water was my coffin, and the storm was coming to seal the lid.
The sky turned black as ink, the wind howling in fury. Waves rose like towering beasts, crashing down upon me. I was tossed and broken by the currents, my body a rag doll caught in nature’s merciless grasp. There was no escape, no salvation—just endless water and the crushing pressure pulling me under, deeper and deeper. The taste of salt filled my lungs, burning, choking. I thrashed, but there was no air, no land. Just the endless ocean, and the storm’s fury.
A wave larger than the rest rose before me, a monstrous wall of water that seemed to block out the very sky. It crashed down with the force of a god’s wrath, and I was lost—tumbling, spinning, drowning. The last of my breath escaped in a flurry of bubbles. Darkness took me, and I surrendered to the depths.
But in that final moment, when the weight of death pressed upon me, something reached out from the void—a presence. A cold, alien force, something far beyond the storm, beyond the sea. It was then I realised that this was not the end.
It was the beginning.
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