Arjun was a knot of anger, fear, and pain. He wanted to scream at the man, to ask him why, to beg for a way out. His mouth opened, but only a dry, rasping sound escaped; his broken body could not form the words.
The brutal man—the one who had stabbed him, the one who now seemed to rule this terrifying fate—bent slightly. He didn't touch Arjun, but his eyes, sharp and cold, pierced the boy's own.
"Be calm, new one," the man commanded in that strange, guttural language Arjun now understood. "You will not find your home in the abyss. You die here now, you die truly and forever. The link is weakened, and it will not save you again."
He stood back up. "Everything you need to survive at your age, to follow simple instruction, is already in your mind. If you require more knowledge, you must observe and learn. Find your own truths."
The man extended a hand, and a faint, pale blue light, the same color as the storm from Arjun's world, shimmered around his palm and washed over Arjun's body. A gasp of sensation—not agony, but an intense, buzzing warmth—rocked him. He felt the grinding pain in his bones cease, the torn muscles stitch back together. The healing was immediate, but the memory of the injury was not erased.
"This is the last gift you receive," the man said, the tone a clear warning. "You are now responsible for your own survival."
Then, without another word, the figure vanished. Not through a door or a shift of light, but simply gone, leaving Arjun alone on the cold earth, perfectly healed, but utterly broken in spirit.
Arjun lay there until the initial shock passed, then slowly rose. There was no escape. There was only the brutal, inevitable reality of the Mindrift. Following the cold, implanted knowledge in his head, he walked back to the excavation site, to the dark gate, and slipped back into the facility. No one questioned him; he was, after all, only a day into his captivity, and his stunned silence was apparently common. The other children, pale and vacant, helped him find his separate, tiny room and showed him the common schedule.
Two days after the failed jump, Arjun sat in the cold silence of his room, the only light coming from a flickering wall fixture. He found a piece of charcoal and the worn cover of what had once been a small language dictionary. It was the only place safe enough to record his observations.
Excerpt from Arjun's Dictionary/Journal
It has been two days since the cliff. I am still here. My existence is no longer a question of 'if' but 'how long.' The information I received from the man—the Stabber—is a terrifying new reality.
This place is a training center called 'The Mindrift.'
The Students: We are all children, snatched from other worlds—mostly teenagers. We are divided by our circumstances back home.
Students with Parents: Their parents pay a massive fee—a tribute paid through the link in the other world—for the child to be trained in V'aar (psychic energy). They come for scheduled training sessions and then return home. They are assets.Students without Parents (Like Me): We are kept here permanently. We have no home to return to, and no one to pay for us. We are considered resources. If we show no development in our training, we are not sent home. We are sold. Our value is determined by the speed and skill of our mental achievements.
Everything is run by the students themselves. We do all the washing, cooking, and cleaning. The schedule is rigid.
The Training - Basic Level: The training is classified by achievement, not by age. The first and most critical stage is learning to feel your surroundings. They call it Initial Sensory Alignment.
It's done through intense meditation during the work cycles. The goal is to develop a sense of environmental awareness similar to how an insect navigates. We have no antennae, but we must use our skin, ears, and nose together to sense minute shifts. We train to feel the air currents as if our skin were covered in a thousand sensory hairs (setae). We listen for the tiny vibrations in the stone, smell the metallic decay in the air, and build a three-dimensional map of our immediate area based on this collective sensory data.
If a student can feel their surrounding environment to a certain extent—if they can sense an object behind them with their skin alone—they are deemed ready for the next level. I have no choice now. I must achieve. I must survive. If I fail, I am worth nothing more than a slave sold to the Void.