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Eventually, finally, you can hear waters. From directly upwards and from one side you can hear what you believe to be the impact of a dense rain. It does not directly touch the shell of the room you are within, feeling more than one space removed from that. You are not on the top or outermost rooms of this structure.

The noise is not the flat and slapping wet of a warm rain, something from a summer. It is the spike of a hail or a sleet hitting the hard wood of an exterior wall and roof. You look at your own walls and realise that you are able to properly see the room for the first time that you can recall. The light has changed with the sounds and shadows are now noticeable. The light source for the room must be very low and not far from you, some floor-placed window; a gutter in the wall is allowing natural light into this room, if it is not externally-facing then perhaps it opens onto a lightwell.

Now that you see them, the walls look thin. Not the thin of a partition but certainly the thin of something not load-bearing. The ceiling is twice as far above the table as you are below it, or so it appears from this position. The table itself seems more heavily built and from different woods than the walls. You still do not have a full sense of how large the room is, but you know now that it is not quite square. There are five major walls that you can see, one significantly less wide than the others which, if this had been some smaller or more organic space, you would have said bowed out the shape of the others through its insertion at a corner, as though an overcrowding of teeth. The closest wall you would guess at three to four table-widths away from the table body, which itself does not appear to be quite central within the room. The closest nook, call it that, is therefore only a short crawl away, if you can discover any means or mechanism to move yourself from here to there. You drum your fingers.

You see something which is not a map and which yet reminds you of one, something topological. You see books. You do not see any chairs. The place where the man was initially sitting is directly in front of you and you cannot see the whole of it past the mass of your own torso and the overhang of the table itself. Nor can you see directly behind you. In the cones of clear visibility to either side, therefore, you do not see any chairs. Were there not chairs here when you entered? Perhaps any chairs would be more likely placed within the two broad areas that you cannot currently see. You believe, for no good reason, that one of those areas also contained a fireplace, which you cannot hear or feel any heat from. Given that you have been unconscious for a period you can draw no strong conclusions from that. You arch your back again and feel the damp of your clothing unstick. You try to recall if you were hotter when you arrived. Yes; but it was the heat of exertion, or so you imagine, or at least the exertion was sufficient enough to mask whatever other heat it may have been. You do not feel cold now.

You see a tiny wooden man on the floor, or at least something that might be such. Perhaps this is the room of a child or a room a child has been in. You squint hard but cannot resolve it. You move your eyes to focus on other elements beside and around it, some closer and some farther placed, in the hopes of picking up detail in a sideglance which your sight is otherwise too incapable of determining at this distance, which is not great. Perhaps you are near-sighted, whether long-term or as a result of your crisis or fatigue or trauma, you do not know. You ripple your toes in agitation.

Clearly, you have a small amount of movement in your outermost digits, and some flexibility in your midriff, at least as long as you are actively examining other things. If you push with your fingertips, squeeze your lower back and squirm with your shoulders, you can perhaps move yourself a tiny way. Your fingers and back ache and stiffen preemptively.

A journey is planned ·

#Fiction