He remembered his name, or only his first name; Nathanael. There was not much else he remembered once waking up to an unfamiliar ceiling. His thoughts swirled around, dissipating the fog in his mind and finding pieces of familiar words that he could muster.

Thinking long and hard, he managed to bring out a sentence from his mouth.

“Where am I?” he said. Nathanael looked around, away from the wooden ceiling, and saw the room he was inside. All made of the trees from a forest down a sharp hill, and stone support from below the plains of snow. A single, lit lamp hung in the middle of the room, showering its light in every corner it could reach. The one and only window rattled by the weather outside, heavy snow, and wind, he couldn’t see what was behind it all. There is a table with paper and pencils inside drawers, a chair with folded-up clothing, and a pair of used boots.

Nathanael sat up on the bed, not sure what to do next. His memories of certain objects and words kept on emerging, one by one, as he glanced at everything he could see.

There were lingering images in his mind, though he couldn’t get rid of the abstraction, he could tell the figures to be people, six or seven others. They were empty of any existence, people with static profiles and frames of the void, standing idly in empty space.

Nathanael was startled as the door suddenly opened with no warning. A young woman, little to no expression to be shown, walked in. Her wavy short brown hair waved when she turned her head and noticed him awake.

“You are awake,” she said, plainly, looking towards his direction with little to no interest.

“Uh… where–”

“Get dressed and come down. Seth will be back soon and would like to speak with you.”

With that interruption, she left the room with no more to say, and no answers to give.

“…”

Nathanael took some time before he got into his clothes. He thought of staying where he was, not understanding why he would follow the mysterious woman.

There really wasn’t anything he could do in the room except to wait. Or he could listen to the woman and walk outside the room, which he ended up doing.

He was grateful for the thickness and comfort that the clothes gave him. Taking off the sheets and leaving his pale skin exposed to the cold breeze, coming from open cracks around the walls, gave him the shivers.

The hallway he met wasn’t long. Few doors here and there, leading to different rooms on the upper floor. Paintings of the snow landscape hung about the walls, also pictures with trees and what looked to be a small stone structure. Nathanael eyed one of the more odd and abstract paintings, all wavy of white and blue hues, and strangely they looked to be moving.

Nathanael shook his head and continued on, he still felt tired after waking up, rubbing his drowsy eyes.

The stairs were at the end of the hallway, and it led towards what he remembered to be a kitchen and a dining area.

There were cabinets with silverware and kitchen trinkets. A box to the side filled with ice and preserved meat. Small crates with vegetables and fruit, still looking healthy and fresh, and other food ingredients were around the kitchen.

A large painting hung over a sturdy cupboard, depicting four people posing in front of a large structure with pillars and a giant gate. Three of them had their faces scribbled over, for whatever reason. Along the cupboard was a neatly placed rifle with wooden supports to prevent it from falling, the same rifle as one of the three with his face abstracted carried in the picture. Also, between the rifle were two flower pots filled with white flowers and roses.

Even as he noticed the different objects around the room, his memories were only giving him words and things. Nothing from his past.

He looked at the windows with drawn-out curtains, showing the snowstorm outside, but not a spark in his mind. The couch in the living area gave no sign. The fireplace didn’t light up his memory. The clothing rack gave no glint. The decorative, untucked carpet along the floor is just the same as the rest. And the back door leading to the harsh weather outside…

Nothing.

Nathanael gave a deep sigh. Then his eyes wandered towards the dinner table.

On the table was a dish with some newly baked bread. His belly rumbled at the sight. He was positive it was for him and didn’t think twice as he sat down and immediately took a bite. It was delightful and hot, the crunch from the end, then feeling the softness within, it sated his sudden hunger. Though it would have been better if more was added to it.

A glass of water sat by the plate, and he drank it until it was halfway. Its coldness ran down his pipe, clearing off his thirst he only noticed now.

He finished the bread and water, he thought of what to do next.

“Was I supposed to wait for this… Seth guy? Where did the lady go?”

He looked around the room, but she was nowhere to be seen.

He didn’t leave the plate and glass alone, he wandered towards the kitchen. His memory reminded him of a sink, but that wasn’t in the house. But he did find a small tub filled with water in the corner. Plates and cutlery were dripping liquid on a towel by the table next to the tub.

He stood over the tub and found himself staring at his reflection. A young boy he could guess was around sixteen. His hazel eyes looked to match his short blonde hair. He didn’t look well built, he was more slender with barely any muscles.

“You gonna stare into the tub all day, or are you going to clean up your dish?”

Startled, and nearly dropping the two objects, Nathanael turned around to face an old man.

He walked in from the back door, which Nathanael didn’t hear open. The man looked over to be fifty, hair and beard looked to be starting to grey from his dark hair. He had wrinkles around, showing his age. And the man looked to resemble one of the four from the painting earlier. The one who didn’t hold the rifle or had his face abstracted.

“S-Seth?” Nathanael said, unsure if he was the one the lady spoke of.

“I’m guessing Lydia gave you my name? That’s fine, that’s good.” He grabbed a chair by the table and sat down, he motioned Nathanael to do the same. “You can leave the plate and glass by the tub, come sit down for a moment.”

Nathanael listened and did.

“Now, kid, do you know what happened?” Seth asked.

“Uhm…”

There was nothing he knew. His mind was a swirl of emptiness and full of void. The fog that gradually fades to show certain words and familiar things, but never anything from his past. All he knew was the time his eyes opened to show the room he woke up in, anything past that was a blank page.

But, despite his lost past, he has that one lingering image, of shadowy people, standing in an empty existence.

“I found you collapsed in the snow.” With the lingering silence, Seth spoke up, his voice gentle and kind, but also with hints of grumpiness. “You had clothes that shouldn’t be worn in such weather. I thought you dead, but on closer inspection, you were still breathing. I needed to throw away some luggage in order to haul you to my house. And the damn nature managed to get to it before I could run back.”

“Sorry,” is all that Nathanael could think of. He had no clue what to say, he wanted Seth to control the conversation.

“Don’t be, it was just a bag of worthless scrap. Tell me, why would a boy, in no ideal clothing, be out there? Were you trying to go somewhere? Did you get lost? Or perhaps you wanted to die?”

“I… don’t know.”

Seth sighed and laid back in his chair.

“What do you mean by that?”

“That is exactly what I mean; I don't know. I just don’t know.”

“What’s your name? Surely you should know that.”

He did. Though there was something missing, he wasn’t sure what that emptiness was next to his name Nathanael. Something obscured and gone from his reality, just the same as his memory of shadows.

“Nathanael,” he said.

“Nathanael, huh? Alright, Nathanael, at least you seem to remember something. Does anything, anything at all come to mind? Where do you come from, any familiar places, or any people you know?”

The only response Nathanael managed to give, was a single, sad look down at the table. Seth noticed his somber tone and stood from his chair.

“You just woke up, perhaps it might come back in a few days. You can stay in the house, another mouth to feed is fine by me.”

“What should I do?” Nathanael asked.

“You don’t have to do anything special to stay. But, if you’re up for it, you can help out around the house tomorrow; the day is about to end. Right now you can explore the house, just to familiarize yourself with the place. Just make sure not to ruin anything valuable.”

“R-right…”

With that, Seth left him by his own accord and was seen entering another room on this floor.

Nathanael thought he would say something more. Their talk felt rather quick, and he didn’t exactly understand how the man trusted him to be left alone so easily like this. Either Seth was just really friendly to others, or he thought Nathanael to be no danger to his house. Whatever it was, Nathanael couldn’t understand.

He took Seth’s advice and took a look around the house.

The upper floor contained only personal rooms – five in total – and a hatch on the ceiling leading to the attic. Though he got permission to look around the house, he wasn’t sure if he should go looking in there. If he wanted to look, he couldn’t; he didn't have anything to reach the hatch after all.

Down the stairs had the kitchen, dining area, and living room. The back door led to a snow-covered wooden platform, its elevation from the ground was hidden beneath the flat snow landscape. With the wooden railing shown above the snow, Nathanael expected that to show the platform’s end until you would sink further into the snow.

The weather outside was still harsh, so he didn’t want to find out yet how deep the snow was.

Going past the stairs and into a hallway, he found the bathroom. Though he was expecting to see a toilet, he was met with only a hole in the ground with a bucket. The bathroom didn’t look to be exactly part of the house, it looks more like an outhouse that was crudely fastened and fixed on the side of the building. Looking at it from the outside, it would look as if someone stuck a few more wood planks to create a new, really small shack – an odd bump that didn’t look natural to a normal house.

When he opened the door and saw the inside, he instinctively clutched his nose from the smell. But oddly enough, he didn’t smell the odor of excrement, but instead a rather unusual pleasant aroma of flowers in each corner of the small outhouse.

The door a few steps forwards into the hallway, away from the bathroom, was the door Nathanael saw Seth disappear into. Before he would take a look inside, and hopefully not intrude, he took a glance at the front door. Nothing really to see there, but he did notice four gas masks hanging beside the entrance.

Whatever the gas masks were for, Nathanael would someday later find out. He took his attention back to the door behind him.

As he grabbed the handle to pull down and open it, someone on the other side did so first.

He was face to face to whom he now knew was Lydia, the woman who he first met once waking up.

They looked at each other in awkward silence. Lydia didn’t seem to stir, her emotion not exactly shown across her face. Nathanael wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say something or wait for her to do so first.

But no words came from either of them, Lydia walked past, leaving the door open and going to the upper floor.

Nathanael wasn’t sure what to think of her. He felt as if something was off, but didn’t exactly know what his inner self meant by that. Perhaps it was because of her nonexistent expressions, or because of something else he didn’t know himself. He wanted to say something to her, to hopefully get rid of these odd thoughts he was having.

He turned his attention back to the open door.

It was a studio, much larger than any other room in the house. Small and large paintings covered every corner and wall. There were no windows, lanterns lit the place with their small flames. Each painting had only one primary color, with small differences in shades and hue of that same dye. mostly abstract, but Nathanael could make out the snowy landscapes of one painting, and another with a sharp hill and trees below.

There were eight pictures that caught Nathanael’s attention the most, and they were the biggest; If he stretched out his arms outwards on either side of him, the width of the painting would be similar to that length, and the height would be half of that width. The paintings hung in an octagon formation, all looking towards the center of the room, and they all represented something Nathanael didn’t know of. On the ceiling was a compass. The North shows a painting of an orange expanse, and a yellow field. The East a gray decay, and light-green haze. The South with red fractures, and a dark-blue abyss.

The West is the oddest of them all, white winter of snow plains and endless gray skies that never dissipate. The fluffy white falling at a steady pace, but also harshly. Trees that all look the same, no diversity at all. But there was an odd abstraction amongst all that white hue, something his mind wouldn’t recognize. Small glimmering voids, a mass of shards missing from his mind, or never even being in his mind from his beginnings. Then there was the last painting, a light-blue static, a picturesque of something that once was alive with wonders, but now a broken, shattered realm.

“What do you think of them?”

Nathanael looked back down, away from the ceiling, and towards Seth, who was in the middle of the room painting on a small canvas, depicting yet another abstraction of white. He didn’t turn away from his work, he was in concentration, his thoughts in another world he saw alone.

Presuming he was talking about the eight pictures, Nathanael answered after a while of thinking and finding the right words to describe them. Or… he tried.

“Well… they look peculiar. Each painting with its own same color but with different shades. The white one is the landscape around here, right? But the others look more… odd. As if they are of other places, but nothing really comes to mind about them.”

They were all abstracted. Either that was the intention or he really couldn’t understand them. Scenes from something his past wouldn’t show, or wouldn’t want to be known just yet.

“You did just wake up, of course, you wouldn’t know of the others. They’re the art of my life, my journey, and the oddities of this world. The life cycle of different creations. Of different achievements each of their own had. Of broken worlds and shattered dreams. A life that can no longer be reached.”

Seth placed down his paintbrush and cleaned his hands with a used cloth. His painting before him looked unfinished, a piece of work he brushes a few strokes every day.

“Nathanael, have you seen the entire house?” Seth asked.

“I’ve looked around, yes. But I didn’t search the other rooms on the second floor, nor the attic. I hoped something from my past would emerge… but it’s all still a blank.”

“I see.” Seth looked at a clock above the door. “You should head to bed, nighttime is arriving. I’ll find you something to do tomorrow.”