 Once, but not now, was written by S. Reagan on the SCP Wiki. You can find a link to it in the description below, and it is under a Creative Commons share-alike attribution 3.0 license. Sometimes when he closed his withered eyelids, the old man could see the prayers of his youth. Moonlit grasses, he could feel and hear the gentle whiskers of the wind against his flesh. That was long ago. Sometimes when he dreamed, he would forget that he was old and leaped through these fields, shrieking with the elemental joy of existence. There were others there, young, like he was in the dream. Their faces were blurry, but heartbreakingly familiar, and it felt wrong to have forgotten them. Then he would wake again, see the corroded metal walls of his prison. Technically, he wasn't bound to the cell, he could leave at any time. He just had to get up and walk out, but beyond, the world had changed into something lunatic. It was too bright, too complex, as though it had been designed to confuse and daisome. Burning white lights, random surfaces at dizzying intervals, so that the air seemed to drown or choke him. It had not been this bad when they first brought him to this dismal place, or maybe it was him who had changed. His faculties dispersing themselves into the suffocating walls, and so, Harry stayed. He tried to take refuge and fantasy, losing the present as he had lost so much of the past, but those open prairies were becoming harder and harder to recall of his own volition. Steady found himself walking, endless, twisted corridors, doors sagging with decay and dark, damp mold, dripping from the ceiling. He wondered whether it was the ruin of his own mind he was imagining. He remembered his mother, his siblings, though in his mind they had become mixed with his children and how they had played amongst the trees and the open prairies he had been taught how to hunt. In those days, prey had been plentiful, easier to catch. His mother had brought him an old, tattered one, alive to show him how to hunt, and he and his brothers and sisters batted and clawed at it until it shuddered and expired. Did it think, he wondered. Did it feel? Did it understand it was old and could no longer defend itself? Even then, his tribe had not been large, never more than twenty. In those days, the prey were different, bones thick and long, ridges over their eyes that were the skins of other animals. Their teeth and claws were barely a threat to the long arms of his tribe, but sometimes they had other teeth made of stone that they could hold in their hands, sharp, glittering things that tore at your flesh. And then the prey had changed, a smaller, scrawnier sort of prey, with more stone teeth than the others, so that at first, tribes still hunted boneheads. The thinner prey hunted the boneheads, too, though, not for food, and between them the supply dried up. This new sort of prey was harder to hunt and catch, even back then. They sealed themselves away in burrows which gave way to hives, with the horrible, criss-crossing branches exactly perpendicular to each other that made his eyes water, and his stomach heaved when he looked at them, and they had the burning light, like lightning, but contained in a bundle of sticks. Still, he'd prospered, found a mate, he found that if he tried hard he could recall the curves of her body as they lay together and had children, who ran wildly over the plains like he had, but the prey had grown ever further entrenched, and it seemed the more the prey swarmed together, the harder it was to get inside, to skip over into the twilight world that let them move between the walls and the floors of their hives. They ringed their hives with running water, the first time he had burrowed into that, he remembered the mind-consuming movement, which was the taste of what the whole world would eventually become. How had he been captured? He thought for a moment that he could no longer remember, until the outlines of a narrative suggested themselves to his mind, but was it true? Who could tell? He'd been alone, perhaps for decades, the last member of his tribe. He could no longer recall whether it was his mate or one of his offsprings, but they'd vanished one day, like all the rest, sometimes entertained himself with the thought that she might be still alive, and then he wondered what that meant. He wouldn't wish this, the disintegration or incomprehensible confinement on her or any member of his tribe. He thought he could remember waking one day, feeling hungry, or hungry than he'd ever felt in his whole existence. He roused himself from the near-hybernation in the tree where he lived, and he descended. The prey's hive nestled in the shadow of a hill on the far side of the lake, the old man remembered being far larger in his childhood. The prey drank at it. He'd realized one day, long ago, and in their teeming thousands, they must have depleted it. When it was dry, the prey would be gone, and then, what would he do? He approached, moving over and through the earth that they had pockmarked with their tall gold seeds, leaching the life out of it. The hive was bigger than he remembered, and more dazzling, the luminescence the prey produced to light their way through the night that it once belonged to his tribe, catching a big, flat, reflective surface that seemed profoundly unnatural. Just one, he thought. He just needed one of them, and he could sleep again. He would find one of the caves the prey made under their hives and sleep. He shivered as he passed through cold, yellow light. Here at the edge of the hive, they still had open areas around each burrow, though they had grazed the grass so thoroughly that there was almost nothing left. He remembered seeing one of them, small, tender in his mind's eye, and the old man drooled. He'd watched it for days, waiting for a moment when it left the safety of the pack. These days, precious few moments, these things guarded their young so fiercely. Then, while it was running near its burrow, he took it, long arms closing around it, fingers searing into its flesh, a twist practiced many, many times, and it was gone. He could not wait to hide. His hunger was too severe. His remaining teeth were already gnawing at the soft tissues of its nose and ears, even as he hugged the small body to him and shrank into the shadows of the tree line. Then the light, and the pain. The prey had found him hours later, eating what was left of the infant, and shown their brilliant light in his eyes. Blows fell on the old man, crushing him. He felt something pop in his arms, something shining was looped between his wrist and the tree, and they went away. He tried to retreat to the fields in his mind, but the cold iron kept him here. It found a way to escape it later, but that was after they had put him in a cell at the center of the maze. And then the white coats had come and taken him away, and the lights had grown brighter, and the pain more intense. No food, no food, he was dying, he thought, distantly starving one day at a time. When he had been young, he'd seen an old man die of starvation. He'd killed another member of the tribe, and no one would share their food with him. His limbs had hollowed out, and his skin had become like a dried leaf. For a long, long time, he'd hoped that others of his kind would come and find him, that they would save him from this humiliation. But they would not relieve his hunger. He knew that. They would not share their food with him. He'd become that old man, and he had committed a sin. He could not remember the reason he had fought the larger male. Times had become hard and praise scarce, and the other male had failed the tribe. It occurred to him that the older male might have been his father. The old man remembered the onlookers, faces blurred and shifting, watching as he pummeled the larger males with a floor and put his hand in the other's skull and moved his fingers until there was no life in there anymore. But he had done no better, and his people had grown thinner and thinner and lapped him one by one to find richer hunting grounds elsewhere. And now he was alone. And as the years went by in the middle cell, he began to think, an awful, awful thought. I am the last of my kind. Once these bewildering creatures and whitecoats wouldn't have confused him. His mind would have been clean and sharp, and he would have navigated the horrible labyrinth outside his cell, once, but not now. Now he wandered alone in the crumbling, steel darkness. The pain in his stomach overwhelming what was left of him. I've lost everything he thought I've lost everything. He twitched as he realized that in his distress, he had drifted further from his cell than he had ever done before. Those decaying corridors of mine fell behind him, and he found himself in what he thought was the waking world. Here the air was fresh, his old lungs exhaled suddenly, as though he had been submerged in ice. He was in a small, tunnel-like space, like the burrows of foxes or badgers, but hard-cornered and metal in the fashion of the prey. Below him were slats of light, and he realized dimly that through them he could see the entire world of the white coats, clean, clinical. There was something wrong. Red lights were wheeling back and forth hypnotically. The white coats were running, rushing away to be replaced by others with blue hardhats and determined expressions. Then he smelt it, the scent of injured prey. So rich, so replete in memory, but so harrowingly distant. They wondered if he had just imagined it, like so much else. But now, there it was again, the old man stirred his long black limbs. He raised himself up as far as he could, his ragged nostril sucking in the fresh, cold air. In his ears, dulled as they were, picked up that long, forgotten cry. Did you bring a symbol of syllables, almost human, as the prey called out in pain and fear? The dribble came thickly down his withered chin, and dry, old eyes moistened again As he remembered, marrow and blood soaking into pink, juicy meat, just like it had been in the old days. No doubt the white coats would take this morsel from him, as they had taken it away before, but he didn't care. There wasn't enough left of the old man to care. He could only move down, through the slats, towards the light, and the old man came drip, drip, dripping down the wall. Thank you very much for listening. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button, and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. 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