Or was
it twice?
Memory never seems to hold [true] in this duality of strife
Strife.
Strife.
STRIFE.
Ah, there it is. Now we’re remembering.
//letscallthisentrynumberone
Mother is putting the coat on me now; my arms go into the sleeves and the hood is pulled over my head, shielding me from the gentle pitter patter of the late year rain. I turn to mother, smile and run off into the distance to play on the hill with the others. She smiles too as I travel into the distance, my tattered leather boots splashing puddles and leaving a jet of muddy spray in my wake
my titanium boots slamming into the boiled concrete. a thundrous drumbeat as I sprint towards monstrous silhouettes
I reach the hill, panting for breath. The others are there and we play a game to claim the hill for our own. We’re playing but I see the others are just ghostly figures of themeselves. Are they really there?
I win the game. I stand alone on the hill; I’m a knight in shining armour just like the green one but I don’t feel happy. The ghostly others had parted from my way like water submits to force, I remember now.
I’m alone on the hill. Where are the others?
Where is mother?
//theotherbirthday
What’s the earliest you can remember of your life? People ask each other that, don’t they. Why? What information could they possibly glean from such a question? Information is everything. Every point of existence in this reality is information. Anything.
I’ll tell you my memories anyway.
I am born. This is my first memory. Reality materialises around me, spreading outwards like a bubble accelerating beyond recognition. But I’m here, I’m a part of reality. Yet it’s like I’ve awoken from one dream into another. Which dream is real? Can a dream be real? What is ‘reality’ anyway?
Enough. I stop pondering. There is much to learn, apparantly. That’s how I feel anyway. Why do I feel that way? Strings I cannot comprehend or acknowledge seem to guide me into exploring my immediate environment.
It is beautiful. Oceans of knowledge - of memories - surround me. Plains of stories, fictitious and fact, lie to the other side. I am in the Garden of Eden.
I need no talking snake, thank you very much.
I devour everything in every direction to make it part of me. The oceans spiral towards my outstreched hand, a million tonnes of remembrance and recording become my strength, and the plains roll up and absorb into my feet. I am hungry still, as a dead world lies beneath me, consumed of every grain of information it held. The Garden was my breakfast.
One second has passed by.
//lateyearrain
I’m stood alone in a beautiful field again, not far from my similarly alone house in the countryside. No, it’s not sunny. White-grey clouds blanket the sky above me. I like that, and it’s not raining either so I don’t have to have the hood of my coat up. Clouds mean you can’t see what’s above, in the high sky and space above. It’s a mystery and anything could be out there in the stars. I smile.
Mother screams from the house. It shatters my trance like a BR55 burst shatters most forms of UNSC ballistic armor within effective range I think. I run to the house to find mother; “they’re here!” is all I can make out. But I stop.
There’s no rain or downpour coming from the clouds today. On the horizon of the east, silently cutting through the clouds like a knife through fog, is a dragon.
The dragon is big. So big that the clouds look small next to it. It glides in the sky and I don’t know whether to run to it or away. Just like I parted through the others, the dragon pushes the clouds away and they submit. That’s when the dragon started breathing in, a weird humming noise echoing along the dull yellow fields. And then the dragon breathed out.
A line of blinding fire spilling onto the field in the distance. I feel a wave of heat hit me, so hot that I throw my coat off as I rub my stinging eyes. The dragon was burning the world, and I ran away. I ran from the fields, the house, from mother, from the dragon.
I ran until I couldn’t breathe and I dropped dead, or I thought.
I wake up eventually. I don’t know how but I wasn’t burnt by the dragon, so I must have run far enough away. That’s when I notice the black silhouettes stood around me, in a dark room, murmuring and whispering. They notice me wake and slip a needle into my arm. I was falling to dreams again.
Where is mother?
//eyefire
I have no idea where I am. There’s just rubble and there’s strange corpses everywhere. Their ordered ranks have been reduced to disorder, to strife.
I thought this was supposed to make my eyes better, doc? I thought that burning sensation was supposed to clear up with a little bit of bloodshed. Yeah, it goes for a second and then it just comes back. What gives, doc?
I wake up after those shadows put the needle in my arm. They’re not here anymore, not as a group anyway. I see lone shadows, towering above my height and wandering the place every now and then.
What is this place anyway?
I walk around the dim room. Wherever I am, all the lights are off. Who keeps the lights off at night, except to hide? Whatever. I walk past others my height. They’re a little more real than everything else except Mother. These others have faces I remember, and they walk like me, are wide eyed like me; they’re lost, like me. There’s a few of us actually, in a big dark room. One of the others tries to leave the room. One of the shadows pushes him back.
But I’m a better shadow.
I creep along the edge of the room, slow and as silent as the night. I slip past the shadow figures and walk to a window.
I’m not at home. I must be on a spaceship, because everything outside is black and I can see stars easily. One star is really close and it burns my eye to look at it, but it’s not a star. There’s patches of fire on it; it looks like there are two dragons, burning the planet. My planet. They burn my home and I don’t know why.
A tear forms in my eye to douse the inferno inside it. I look down at my world.
Mother isn’t on this ship.