Categories > Games > ICO

Rand and the Castle

by agent_capone 2 reviews

Kind of a tribute to ICO, this story chronicles the tale of a young boy named Rand who wakes up trapped inside a giant castle with no memory of his past. This is only the beginning and I will conti...

Category: ICO - Rating: PG-13 - Genres: Drama - Published: 2008-01-30 - Updated: 2008-01-31 - 1409 words

0Unrated
clink
creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaakkkkkkkkkkk
BANG


Nothing. There is nothing for a while. Just a slow, cold wind.
And then……
The light…..
Oh, the precious light…..

The boy stumbles forward, out of the darkness and into the warmth of the light. He falls, pain and cold resonating through him.

There are images, fuzzy, bleak, twisted. There are memories, faded, blurred. There is a terrible cold, a terrible desperation, a loud sound…..grating?.....and then the dark. The horrible dark.

Suddenly, his eyes burn. His head twitches, as his basic functions spring into gear. His heart kicks into gear, pumping stale blood to every corner of his body. A bloodshot eye opens, and immediately begins weeping tears and blood. His muscles retract and expand causing an enormous throb to echo throughout him. His brain shuffles into action, his first thought
noooooooooooooooooo
disappearing into the depths of his subconscious. His body revives, recuperates, reawakens.
And the boy is oblivious to it all.

This time there is a loud clang and the boy jerks into consciousness. He stares for the briefest of moments on the cold stony floor and tries to scream, realising he is barely able to open his mouth, let alone scream.
He can smell blood, sweat, urine and salt. He moves, a dull intense throb belting through him. He ignores it and pulls himself to his feet. There is a small pile of blood and liquid where he lay. His eye
FUCK
aches, and his fingers are covered in blood as he touches it. He pushes deeper through some insane urge, screams, and then faints.





Sometime later he awoke, the light stretching across the room as it approached night. The room was tiny, made of solid stone with a single solitary window high on one of the walls. It was cold and it was empty. There were no sounds; even if there were, the echo of this place would drag them far away.
He picked himself up again, noticing that the wet patch and the throb in his head had gone and his eye was no longer bleeding, though it still ached. His head spun sickeningly for a brief moment and then subsided. He felt an enormous sense of loneliness, of majestic solidarity, and he had no idea as to why he felt this.
His vision blurred in and out, and he realised that the room wasn’t empty as he had thought. There was a large box standing upright against one wall, like a sarcophagus. He could see the cramped space he had been standing in. The sarcophagus looked like it had been designed to fit him exactly; it curved to accommodate for his head, torso and leg area. It was a stunning gold colour with tiny jewels encrusted into and odd circle shape where his head had been. Black lines ran around it, creating an odd pattern that hurt his eyes after looking at it. They had burned themselves into his retinas so that they danced around his vision wherever he looked.
There was a door to the opposite side of the window, large and wooden, barred by three huge steel bars. They fell into metal stirrups which acted as a simple lock. It seemed that it was designed never to let anything in once it was closed.
The boy moved toward the door. The silence…the simple depth of it….was frightening, almost sinister in its epic proportions. He laid his shaking hands on the middle bar and heaved upwards as hard as he could, putting all his strength into lifting it out of its holding. He was weak though, and he soon collapsed back down on the hard stone of the floor. After some amount of time – how long he could not say, and for the remainder of his time in this place he would never fully understand the concept of time – he got back up off his feet and tried again. The bar grated slightly and then fell back into place.
Somewhere, down below perhaps, there was a sickening grate of metal on metal as something moved. It stopped sharply, creating a high screech that blasted through the boy’s ears. He grimaced slightly, and waited.
For a while nothing happened. Then, the middle bar on the door creaked ever so slightly and groaned as it began to move. It started off the hold sharply, and then eased into a slow moving arc as it groaned out of the stirrups and upwards, until it stopped vertically parallel to the door. There was another sound – one the boy could not recognise – and the top and bottom bars slid to the side, disappearing into the walls beside the door. When the bars had moved completely, the boy
rand
heard a click in the door and it creaked outwards at an incredibly slow rate. The boy witnessed all this with a half dazed mind, his concentration often lapsing and flitting about. He could see what was happening, but later he would remember little of it. Eventually the door clanged still and the boy could see out of his tiny prison.
Sunlight flooded onto his face and he shielded his face from the blinding rays. He moved forward, out of the tiny room, and stepped out into an enormous room, what he could imagine as a giant dining hall, stretching as far as he could see before him. There were hundreds of windows high on the walls and giant pillars stood proud and elegant along the room, stretching high up to become part of the stony ceiling. The entire place was a grey stone, and the sunlight shining through was the only source of colour.
The light began to dip, drying up as night took hold of the apparent world outside. The boy began to walk.

He walked for an age, the pattern of stone, windows and pillars never ceasing. Throughout this time, blurred images came to him and he could almost grasp what they were. He continued to walk aimlessly while dozens of memories pounded through his mind, disappearing as soon as they had appeared. When the boy finally reached the end of the seemingly endless hall, only one piece of information had stuck in his mind. The rest had become a whirling jumble of grey, spinning just out of reach in his mind.
He had an insane instinct that his name – or at least, how he saw himself as a being – was Rand, and that there was more. He could not delve further though, as any more thoughts on who he was were simply swallowed up by the whirlpool in his mind.
Rand. It seemed somehow odd to him, but strangely fitting. With this thought, he collapsed onto the cold stone into a sleep so deep he didn’t move an inch until his body awoke many, many hours later. While he slept, there were more noises, loud and brutal sounds that echoed throughout the strange place. Rand slept restlessly through it all, as blurred dreams invaded his subconscious.

When Rand awoke, sunlight was again streaming through the high, narrow windows of the seemingly endless hall. He felt much better, more there than he had the previous day, or however long ago it had been. His eye continued to ache however, and his brain still throbbed rhythmically inside his skull.
And suddenly…there! Still dazed and recovering from his long sleep, Rand spun around, so sure, so certain that there was someone there, someone watching him…
But there was nothing except the slow drift of the sunlight across the stone floor and the absolute vacuum of noise around him. There was no one there…but Rand had an uneasy feeling deep inside of him that he was being watched somehow, that he wasn’t alone. This eerie feeling troubled him, and frightened him also. After his sense of isolation and confusion, he wished fervently to meet somebody else who would hopefully explain why he was here. Whoever (or whatever) he felt watching him now was sinister, something horrible that he instinctively longed to escape from.
Something stuck in his mind, however. Absolute vacuum of noise. A thought came to Rand…a coherent and logical thought that stuck in his mind, unlike the flitting and drifting images that he’d contended with up until this point.
No noise...why not?
He opened his mouth to shout or scream, and nothing came out except a dry rasp. Rand burst into tears.
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