"Dear child, won't you stop your incessant bawling? You do know that I have no tolerance for weakness."

The light had long since left him. In his head, it had been forever gone. Darkness replacing its forgotten predecessor of joy and laughter. Something that he scoured his mind to remember. To hold. There was no light on the outside, either, causing the present absence of all colour - spare the black. The child found the hollow, desolate chambers barely palatable as they stood usually, bathed in sparse, red, artificial light, always rank with the odour of hopelessness and despair. The room was entirely bathed in charcoal. The room itself was empty, devoid of any outline from a furnishing but he would always bump into something. A wall. The floor. A fist. A blind boy, stumbling around on harsh, calloused hands and knees.

There wasn't more to need - the static in his tired eyes created moving figures and shapes against the walls. In the blackness, he would fear that he had gone permanently blind until the light would find him again and touch his skin and soothe him and bind him in a momentary sense of relief. The room became like a void, and he only knew he wasn't drifting eternally through nothingness because he could reach out and touch the cold, solid walls with his tiny, feeble hands. The tiny hands that he would grasp and hold himself with when he would bring his knees as close to his chest as they would come and huddle himself into a corner, bracing himself between two, harsh brick walls. Folded over himself in this position, exhausted and terrified, he would wait. Wait for the dark to retreat. Wait for it to stop trying to swallow him. It would always try to consume him, touch him, rot him, dead or alive. In both mind and body.

The blackness was a monster in itself. A monster that liked to smother him like a thick, choking blanket of dark, filling his chest with gnawing anxiety. A monster with thin, wispy fingers like smoke that trailed across his blotched yet fair skin, sending cries down his spine. A monster that liked to torture the child by isolating him from any familiarity, even in the cold, harsh chambers. Once the darkness came, the door which he was pushed through would hide within the walls, making the poor, frightened boy forget how he had even gotten into the void in the first place. Everything would become so still and quiet, that the sound of the blood pulsing in his ears became unrelenting. His own tired, sickly breathing like the howling of ghouls. Moreover, the dark enjoyed plucking the imaginary monsters from his head and inviting them into the room.

It always liked the monsters from the mountain as the best candidates for emotional harm and torture, especially the huge, White Giant from the most awful of his nightmares. The one that could howl tame winds into whirring blizzards and smite him down with one touch of its grotesque, yellow-clawed hand. With a huge, hunched form wielding fists like a man. But still, so far from anything like a man. It left man blood smothered in the disturbed snowfall. The skies twitching with frost. Those monsters would be the ones to make him cry, make him squeal, make him shut his eyes to try and expel the horror. Though, somehow, he could never truly escape the horrible creations inside his own head. Something had to be terribly wrong with him. All he could see was the monsters all of the time. Not just in the dark. He lived amongst the grotesque and dangerous every day. The Master wasn't terrified of them, he worshipped them like deities. Why was he different? Why was he afraid?

No. Perhaps he was so scared of the darkness and the monsters because they weren't like him. The only living creatures he knew inside these walls were like them, not him. His master's creatures were hairy and mean, with giant teeth and claws and gaping maws that could snatch him up in a heartbeat. Snap his tiny bones. The only inhabitants of the place that bore the slightest resemblance to him were The Master and The Tall Purple Man, and that was when you squinted your eyes. to only view a silhouette and not a visage. The child was terribly afraid of The Tall Purple Man who lurked in the hallways. His whole body would uncontrollably seize up when the child felt the Behemoth's stare searing into his back. The Tall Purple Man was huge and lumbering like the White Giant from his dreams. Though it was purple instead of white and instead of terrifying him with ear-splitting roars, it intimidated him to tears with its eternal silence. Its mouth was puckered shut like a zombie's jaw and the only noises it made were low, rumbling grunts and snorts, like growling. Its eyes were hollow, cold and dead, so very dead and emotionless.

The Master was different to both of them. He was the only thing that the child could communicate with. The term 'thing' was to be used specifically because the child wasn't sure how far the older creature lay between monster and Man. The child had always found that The Master loved to speak. Compared to the child's innocent, meek words, his vocabulary was expansive and although he stood hunched over like an old man, he carried himself with immense pride. Though his voice was refined and sophisticated, it was harsh, like blood, running off of the corners of finely crafted glass or slate.

Though, everything about The Master was unfriendly and cold and made the small, delicate baby hairs on the back of the child's neck stand up in fear. When the master touched him with his bony, gloved hands, he didn't feel loved or appreciated, he just felt controlled, like a puppet on strings. Children were curious and wanted to know the answers with harmless intent. This wasn't curiosity, this was distrust and suspicion. Although The Master always spoke about the wonders of his creations and efforts and held the boy, his pawn, with such high zest, the child knew that there was something unnatural and sinister beneath the cloak he bore on his hunched back. He was too afraid to allow the rest of his small world know that he knew that so many of the missing pieces of his existence lay locked in place behind The Master's cold, solid mask. His façade of mystery.

Though, just as he was mysterious, he could be brutal and callous. Those pale, gaunt, yellow eyes could twist in anger and land a blow on his tiny, weak body. The ugly blotches on his skin of purple, brown and yellow were fair testimony to that. Although still young and innocent, the child was already developing an innate sense of loneliness within his life. He was unable to remember anything before his life with Master, so where had he came from? There had to be somebody else like him, there just had to be. What was outside those walls that The Master tried to hide from him, bathing him in the illusion that the outside was a cruel, abandoning place. If he was afraid here, if without reason, was the outside world an existence of unbearable pain and hurt? Was the Master really the Vanguard of safety?

The current darkness brought unquellable guilt upon the child. His senses went completely numb with nothing to focus on, so he could only sit and contemplate his own mindless understanding. It was like a berg of ice in his guts that he was unable to melt or shift. It sat stationary inside him, creeping down into his core, creating feelings of unworthiness and remorse that he was still too young to fully understand. Sitting there, in the cold, lonely room, he knew exactly why he was there. He had done something wrong. He must have. The Master wouldn't do what he does if he hadn't been an annoyance, would he? The Master didn't like it when he was needy, or tearful, or when he asked too many questions. He was just a deadweight, deserving of abuse. It seemed like he had no true use, as if he was kept alive solely for some future purpose.

His body was like a fine porcelain, not a heavy, durable steel. He was covered in scuffs and scratches. Bruises and lash marks. He couldn't help hurting, just like he couldn't help being hungry or cold. This was a cold place. Cold like the mountains. This was a place where he was always hungry and famishment was always gnawing at his belly, chewing his insides, his stomach slightly caved in, with ribs looking skeletal from lack of suitable nutrition. The Master kept the best food out of his reach and only gave it to him when he cared less about questioning his own existence and began listening more keenly to The Master's preaching. Would these things get better the more he listened? The more he became like The Master? When the day came that he would stop being afraid of the monster and become one? Maybe. He only had one memory of somebody different that would bring him food. Somebody with a pure, idyllic touch and laughter, lots of soft, gentle laughter. An illusion by one of the monsters, or remnants of his beginning before the world turned its back on him?

"Pity. It seems that in the shadow of the advanced societies and metropolises constructed by mankind, I have forgotten how imbecilic and needy their offspring can be!"