The Light On Your Face For The First Time

The hum of artificial lights reminded Veronica of a night she once spent in a hospital bed, after breaking her arm as a child. She hadn't cried when the bone snapped, not even when she was about to go into surgery. Only in the aftermath, once she was awake and alone in her hospital bed without the comfort of her brothers or parents—her father had gone to the cafeteria—did silence overwhelm her, and she sobbed. Most vividly, she remembered the buzzing overhead, how the light twitched and lonely footsteps down the hallway frightened her. She sobbed, vulnerable and abandoned.

This time, Veronica wasn't reclined and ensconced in sterile bedsheets, vulnerable or abandoned; she was slouched over, her face sweating inside a mask molded to her facial features, forehead resting on the surface of a table. The buzzing grated on her ears. When she realized she was conscious, Veronica grunted and sat up, then grimaced at the dizzying pain pounding through her head.

"Ah. You're awake."

The voice stiffened her shoulders. Veronica squinted through mesh eyeholes, vision obscured in the peripherals, but easily focused on the shape of a person standing on the far side of the room. He stepped toward the table, holding a clipboard at chest-level before taking a seat across from her. A gleaming golden mask stared back.

"Quite the entrance you've made," he remarked, slowly tilting his head. "Particularly because we weren't expecting you." Then he chuckled.

Dread filled Veronica's lungs and made it hard to breathe. She tried to move her hands onto her lap, only to find her wrists bound to the back legs of the metal chair she was sat on. Alarm rattled her body as Veronica tried to get a better look at her bondages, but not even her feet could move, so tied up to the chair legs that her thrashing caused the chair to squeak and groan, scraping the floor in futility.

"I don't suppose you were expecting to be here either."

Veronica's attention snapped back to him. He was the first person to actually speak to her in this place. She only knew he was a man from the masculine intonations of his voice; even if his manner of speech was airy and indifferent, at least he was human. "Where am I?" she demanded.

"Somewhere between dreaming and dead," he answered.

"Don't bullshit me. Tell me where I am."

"Now, how could such keen forensic intuition be so incapable of recognizing truth?"

"My keen intuition is telling me someone's fucking around with the truth."

"Mere flirtations."

"Tell me the truth."

"You're fun," the masked man teased.

Veronica bristled. "Stop fucking with me and tell me where I am!"

The man leaned back, steepling his white-gloved fingertips on the clipboard in front of him. An air of playful amusement bolstered his harmless look overall: clean white wool pullover, honey brown hair framing his mask, its baby-soft visage like a renaissance angel cast in gold. A smile took shape in his voice. "Very well. You're in the Sanctum, under the jurisdiction of the Court of Sancteid, the only human establishment in the realm of Echoless."

"That's great. Now tell me where I am on Earth instead of the fucking gibberish you just gave me."

He hummed. "You're not on Earth. At least, not in the way you think you are."

"...What?"

He leaned forward. "You've fallen between the cracks of your reality, my dear, and landed in ours. This realm is a by-product of yours, similar to the concept of antimatter—a shadow of your existence, undetectable except as an absence of ordinary matter—as you bathed in light may only see what is illuminated. Until you tumble into the darkness... at which point, what lies in the darkness takes shape. You are in an opposite plane."