Shienvien

Betwixt the Eternal Light

Always, always write it on a back up document program of some kind.

My normal OS on this computer has multiple layers of clippers installed, as well as the browser itself has been set to cache things, which means that basically everything I type up, bold, or as much as look at will be stored for at least a couple of weeks. This alternate OS which I'm only on because people invited me to a game? Nope...

Betwixt the Eternal Light

Half a dozen hours after I'd have thought (I was distracted by people), but I'm here now and ready to type up a post.
I suppose I could have her run into Jasper, but I'm not sure whether he's still on the Turncloak's trail and how far behind? It has been a week or more of time-leap IC with the Turncloak's second post. I had planned for my character to reach the same valley the Turncloak is in by following down the canyon, about two days after her last awakening. Jasper could see the commotion if he's nearby and join in?

I am also wondering how subtle the references to characters' memories would be...

Edit: Well, be I damned. Bloody thing crashed ate my post again. I'll see whether or not I feel like retyping it right now. And I was quite happy with it, too...

Betwixt the Eternal Light

Sarah Downwell

Given Name

...What was her name? She did not know, nor had it been relevant until now. She had, after all, been referring to herself as, well, simply 'I' in her head, and in the relative solitude of this place, it had thus far sufficed. There had been no one to call her by her name ... or by any other name.
She ... was a human, right? A human woman? What would a human woman be named? 'Alice' came to mind, but that probably was not her actual name; in fact, she was quite certain it had not been her name at any point in time. It did not quite have the right feel to it. But no other name - actual name, not some random silly word or noun as these folks seemed to be so fond of labeling themselves with - came to mind, either.
Alice. Whatever she had been before, in some other time and place, for now and to those people she would be Alice. Until she came up with something that would feel more appropriate, anyway...

Appearance

She is still discernibly a human, yet the time spent in this realm has been slowly changing her form, altering her appearance accordingly as she becomes further removed from her old life and self. Decay ... or adaption? This is a world for beasts rather than humans as she sees it, entities much more formidable than feeble humanoids, and all signs point to her old life - the one she still carries some sparse memories of - being gone for good. This is her home now, and taking the best of it is all that is left for her.
She stands at roughly six feet tall (~1.83 meters), weighs around a hundred and fifty eight pounds (72 kilograms), might come across as being in her mid-thirties if one does not know any better, and appears to have a fairly robust bone structure. She appears wide-shouldered, but also wide-hipped - the kind of build that in another time and place, before the rest of her features began to slowly take after this hellish place, might have been described as fit for "a good hard-working country girl". - The type that can give birth to a dozen children and still take care of all the hard farm-work on her own. She also has a waist that appears narrow compared to her hips, and a decently-sized bosom, both of which rather accentuate her femininity despite the overall strong build.
Her skin, however, is ghastly pale - no proper midday sun has fallen on it for a long time, not in this realm -, her features an odd mix of muscle and almost malnourished gauntness. Her lean-muscled arms and bony hands and fingers with well-defined tendons appear just a notch too long for her body, her fingernails sturdier than they should be; it might just be the result a bit poor posture, but her shoulders tend to slouch slightly forward as she sits or runs. More disconcertingly, her spine seems to be far more defined than it should be, almost forming a ridge on her back, and her shoulder-blades protrude more than they ought to the same - and it just might be that the same odd elongation that has been affecting her arms has added an inch or two to her back, too. As another distinct feature, her right hand is scarred and lacks some of its flexibility; the scar-tissue covers the appendage like a stiff glove.
Her gaunt face is semi-oval, elongated, with a finely defined jawline and a round chin, but underpronounced cheekbones. Her eyebrows are straight, a bit thicker than they should be, and pale brown in color, her eyes hazel-green and fairly round - to the point where she can easily leave a slightly surprised, clueless, concerned or scared impression even when she is presently not experiencing those emotions. The nose under the eyes is average-sized, if a bit too flat and round-tipped for her liking, her lips surprisingly full, if only very pale pink in color. Her teeth appear to have survived this place surprisingly well, though the lower incisors appear to have been filed a third shorter after a life of having a mild underbite.
Last but not least, her light blonde hair is in a surprisingly good condition, hip-length and thick, even if the ends are broken rather than cut. It still does flow... She likes her hair.

Belongings

* An axe - one of the heftier ones meant to be used as a wood-cutting and splitting tool. It has a shaft made of polished oak that is a bit over two feet long, and an iron head, over a handful of pounds heavy. Slight traces of rust where the head connects to the shaft left aside, it appears to be in a good condition. Someone has been taking care of it - sharpening it, and it seems also oiling it a bit. She feels a connection with this axe... Perhaps because it is one of the very few things that actually followed her here. Often carried in hand, sometimes awkwardly fitted into her bag.
* A knife, a tool more so than cutlery piece. Has a blade about eight inches (a bit over twenty centimeters) long and a carved wooden handle with leather wrapping around the grip. May in fact be made of steel - surprising enough, given that steel is more expensive than iron. Much like the axe, it seems to have been well cared for, but the very tip has dulled a bit more than the last sharpening could undo, and the guard-equivalent of the handle right next to the blade has seen some contact with rougher surfaces. Another item of the distant past. It comes with a worn leather sheathe from which some decorative elements appear to have fled in the past.
*A simple longsword along with a reinforced scabbard and belt. She tends to actually wear the belt - and has managed to attach her knife's sheathe to it, too, but doesn't actually have notable skill using the sword itself. It is made of steel, but not of the finest quality. About an inch of the three-foot-long blade's tip has broken off, and its blade has several notches in it even after she attempted to sharpen it. It has a cross-guard, round pommel and a handle which probably used to be wrapped in leather, but is now simply a metal piece. It associates with regret, and Regret she calls it.
* Flint and steel, a whetstone. Standard tools for starting fires and sharpening blades. The steel is not from this world, but the flint and whetstone appear to have been harvested from some local region.
* A small glass bottle - some nine centimeters or around three and a half inches tall - in which there is about sixteen milliliters of some kind of impure oily liquid. The fluid is dark yellow and perpetually has some manner of black flakes floating near the bottom. The bottle has a piece of cork or similar woodlike material for, well, a cork. She has the feeling that it is valuable - the bottle itself, that is, not its contents.
* Two flasks of water, containing up to a liter an a half each. Water is important, and she knows it deeply. Typically in her backpack. Currently full and half-full.
* A simple backpack of heavy rough fabric. For carrying things, what else?
* Worn pair of leather boots. She fears that the sole of the right one might soon become loose altogether.
* Two pairs of socks.
* Five shirts. Two are typical long linen women's summer-shirts, three were probably meant for a man, and are in fact too big for even her broad-shouldered six-foot-tall frame...
* A very torn woolen striped skirt. It is eerily familiar.
* Two pairs of trousers. A bit too long for her, and not quite fitting at her hips, but she can make them work if she rolls up the legs a bit and is wearing the belt.
* A pair of thick mittens.
* A thick winter-coat. She sometimes wears it thrown over her shoulders since it is too cold for a shirt, but she has no jacket or sweater to speak of. Also used for mattress and blanket.
* A few rags.
* Two dozen pieces of string ... look like shoestrings more than anything.
* Some things that can pass as food - dried mushrooms, questionable meat, some odd roots... About three pounds in total at the given time, which amounts to far too little. Also seven coconut-sized and very, very spiky (though the spikes have been bent and broken) fruits from what looked like some kind of bizarre semi-wooden cacti. She somehow knows the latter are edible and juicy, but also mildly corrosive. Eat too much, and your mouth would bleed...

Memories

Original memories at the first awakening

Alas, but two of them were but vivid nightmares to begin with; what good do the terrors conjured by one's own mind do amongst the brief images from a perfectly mundane - if not to say boring - life?

It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, a bit longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.

Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, and the land was covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.

She was looking down, at the toes of her shoes peeking out from under her skirt. Said shoes were white, but covered in dust. Dust, dust, dust... So much dust; dusty was also the gravel road under her feet, and to a small extent also her light skirt. It had not rained for a while ... from there the dust. And the carriage that had rolled past her earlier had brought a whole cloud of it with it. Sun was blazing, and a blonde strand of hair had fallen in front of her face. She was still too embarrassed to look up. She could not look up ... and now she had probably been quiet for so long that it was probably uncomfortable and awkward for the person standing before her, too. She probably looked incredibly stupid...

Cold water sloshed over the edge of the bucket she was carrying, dripping over her feet and the wooden floorboards. It was a large bucket, cumbersome and heavy, but it was the only way she could get water to the large metal container at the end of the back room. Arms slightly shaking from the effort, she set the container she had been carrying down right where she stood, in the middle of the room, and stretched; her shoulders and back ached from the last handful of buckets. The room was dim; two tiny windows with four little panels of uneven dirty glass each did not let in much light. Glass was expensive; many people only had holes with shutters in their walls, if that...

It was raining; it had been a light drizzle, but now it was pouring. The sound of the raindrops hitting the ground had turned into a deep rumble. Or was it thunder she heard in the background of it? It smelled fresh ... and wet, but mostly fresh. She was running, her bare feet hitting the meadow, the blades of grass brushing against her calves, her one hand gripping the hem of her shirt, as if she were afraid that the wind might steal it, and the other pressing something against her chest. The raindrops were beating against her face; her shirt was soaked through and through. But she was smiling, and happy, and free! The rain was warm, and the day was no longer as smotheringly hot. Deep down she knew she was not supposed to be out in the rain, but it was fun, and she had the excuse of having been sent to retrieve the package from the village when the rain caught her...

She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.

Wind was whipping at their face; their chest was heaving and falling in the rhythm of powerful wingbeats. Wings, dark, wide, powerful... They could feel those moving. Feel raw, unadultered power. Strength. Determination. Very strong sense of purpose, even if what their objective was had vanished from their mind for the time being. There was, however, the faint impression that it was something ominous, something wrong, that people would be hurt, innocent people, people that they did not want to hurt... That impression was coupled with the undeniable sense of forward progression and sheer unstoppability, determinism, fatalism, the inability to alter the course of fate or even adjust one's own actions. Lack of control. They were but an automaton, and from that was born fear. Fear of not for one's own self, but of one's own self and the deeds one would eventually inevitably commit.

The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her long blonde hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.

She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor next to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.

Her throat ... it felt like no air could pass through it, as though it were contracting closing down on itself. There were painful stabs in her chest, her heart hurt - also much like someone were squeezing it just a notch too hard. Her mouth was opening and closing, but no sound was emitted. Her voice simply did not comply. Neither did her eyes. She kept blinking as they stung and her sight kept blurring. Finally, something wet and warm ran over her face, dragged down by gravity. It could not be, could it? It could not be! At last, she could get a word from her mouth, though her voice sounded distant and detached, numb even.
"What ... what do you mean?" It could not be... She had misheard. She had definitely misheard. Or misunderstood. In any case, it was wrong! It had to be...

There was a glint of light and an unearthly glow. Something rumbled, the ground was wrong, it tilted, and she fell ... fell, fell, fell... Something snapped, and she hit a near-vertical surface; reflexively, she dug her fingers in. They had talons, and they rent the metal of the surface. She was only very slowly sliding down the surface she clung to, but yet she still felt like falling, falling, falling... The surface was hard, but it lacked temperature. She knew she had been injured, but she could not feel the pain, only the blood running down her back. Falling, falling, falling, but yet the surface before her eyes was still. She was no longer sliding down; her taloned fingers had dug in deep enough to carry her weight. The combination of falling and utter motionlessness made her nauseous and disoriented. She must not slip and fall again; that would be the end. There was not one thing more certain than that.

The axe was hefty - a bit over two feet of hard polished wooden shaft and a solid iron head. Her legs were rooted to ground, spread a bit wider than her shoulders. The axe she raised overhead, only to bring it down on the tree-trunk-segment before her, as thick as her waist and with a line through its heart already riddled with cuts from unsuccessful attempts of splitting it. The momentum the axe-head had gained from its own weight and her arms' strength was significant - it bit two inches deep, but this time, the trunk's fibres were torn apart as a crack began to crawl towards its base. The axe-head was stuck, but it was good. With a breath let out in a huff, she allowed herself a blink of an eye's worth of rest, before she raised the axe overhead again - with the entirety of the section of tree-trunk being lifted with it. Up in the air, she flipped the axe around, and then she brought it down again, the back of the axe-head hitting the surface of the base first. With its own weight, the tree-trunk pressed further onto the axe-blade upon impact, and the crack spread deeper. Another raise of the axe, another flip, another swing downwards, and the trunk-segment split open fully, halves falling to two sides. The ground was dry hard dirt, covered in pieces of bark and wooden chips. To the right, there was a log wall, to the left grass; in the distance loomed a dark forest.

The chicken was brown - all their chickens were - and her orange eyes were fixed on her hand in what appeared to be disapproval. Chickens did not have facial expressions ... right? ... but yet she had seen ones stare at her in wide-eyed confusion, beaks slightly ajar, curious chicken doing their best to see what she held, necks stretching impossibly long, and, as was the case with this one, apparently a disapproving chicken. Yet she moved her hand closer still, seeing how the feathers of the already puffed-up chicken literally stood on ends till she looked almost twice the normal size. A notch closer, and the chicken's head darted forth, her beak hitting her knuckle. It hurt - not much, but enough for her to draw her hand back with a start. There was a minuscule piece of skin torn loose, barely a flake larger than pinhead, with just the faintest speck of red seeping out. But she only had to fetch the eggs...

The flames were dancing; the air of the night was cold, but the person she was resting against was warm. From somewhere, they had found an old blanket to cover their legs with. There were stars in the sky.
"My father used to know the names of many a constellation... The only one I really can find is the Great Bear. And the Northern Star." He let out something that was probably a short chuckle. "At least I'd always know which way is north on a clear starry night... Not that those occurred often."
His voice sounded so different when she had her ear resting against his chest. It was strange... Was this also how he heard his own voice? She could also hear his heartbeat, feel him breathing. It made her feel ... strange, but not in a bad way. She cared about him and, well, it ... being so close to him... It felt good, but also made her feel oddly ... nervous? No, nervous was not the correct word. On top of all, she was also tired after the long day, and it was incredibly relaxing, to be like that. She felt as though she would fall asleep soon...
"Are you cold?" he asked, sounding mildly concerned.
"Mkmm..." she languidly mumbled in an attempt to reassure him. "No, I am good..."

Memories after the second awakening

One dear memory was lost to this hellish world, none were twisted, none but one lone new experience took root...

It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.

Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, and the land was covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.

Cold water sloshed over the edge of the bucket she was carrying, dripping over her feet and the wooden floorboards. It was a large bucket, cumbersome and heavy, but it was the only way she could get water to the large metal container at the end of the back room. Arms slightly shaking from the effort, she set the container she had been carrying down right where she stood, in the middle of the room, and stretched; her shoulders and back ached from the last handful of buckets. The room was dim; two tiny windows with four little panels of uneven dirty glass each did not let in much light. Glass was expensive; many people only had holes with shutters in their walls, if that...

It was raining; it had been a light drizzle, but now it was pouring. The sound of the raindrops hitting the ground had turned into a deep rumble. Or was it thunder she heard in the background of it? It smelled fresh ... and wet, but mostly fresh. She was running, her bare feet hitting the meadow, the blades of grass brushing against her calves, her one hand gripping the hem of her shirt as if she were afraid that the wind might steal it, and the other pressing something against her chest. The raindrops were beating against her face; her shirt was soaked through and through. But she was smiling, and happy, and free! The rain was warm, and the day was no longer as smotheringly hot. Deep down she knew she was not supposed to be out in the rain, but it was fun, and she had the excuse of having been sent to retrieve the package from the village when the rain caught her...

She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.

Wind was whipping at their face; their chest was heaving and falling in the rhythm of powerful wingbeats. Wings, dark, wide, powerful... They could feel those moving. Feel raw, unadultered power. Strength. Determination. Very strong sense of purpose, even if what their objective was had vanished from their mind for the time being. There was, however, the faint impression that it was something ominous, something wrong, that people would be hurt, innocent people, people that they did not want to hurt... That impression was coupled with the undeniable sense of forward progression and sheer unstoppability, determinism, fatalism, the inability to alter the course of fate or even adjust one's own actions. Lack of control. They were but an automaton, and from that was born fear. Fear of not for one's own self, but of one's own self and the deeds one would eventually inevitably commit.

The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.

She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor new to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.

Her throat ... it felt like no air could pass through it, as though it were contracting closing down on itself. There were painful stabs in her chest, her heart hurt - also much like someone were squeezing it just a notch too hard. Her mouth was opening and closing, but no sound was emitted. Her voice simply did not comply. Neither did her eyes. She kept blinking as they stung and her sight kept blurring. Finally, something wet and warm ran over her face, dragged down by gravity and leaving behind a moist trail. It could not be, could it? It could not be! At last, she could get a word from her mouth, though her voice sounded distant and detached, numb even.
"What ... what do you mean?" It could not be... She had misheard. She had definitely misheard. Or misunderstood. In any case, it was wrong! It had to be...

There was a glint of light and an unearthly glow. Something rumbled, the ground was wrong, it tilted, and she fell ... fell, fell, fell... Something snapped, and she hit a near-vertical surface; reflexively, she dug her fingers in. They had talons, and they rent the metal of the surface. She was only very slowly sliding down the surface she clung to, but yet she still felt like falling, falling, falling... The surface was hard, but it lacked temperature. She knew she had been injured, but she could not feel the pain, only the blood running down her back. Falling, falling, falling, but yet the surface before her eyes was still. She was no longer sliding down; her taloned fingers had dug in deep enough to carry her weight. The combination of falling and utter motionlessness made her nauseous and disoriented. She must not slip and fall again; that would be the end. There was not one thing more certain than that.

The axe was hefty - a bit over two feet of hard polished wooden shaft and a solid iron head. Her legs were rooted to ground, spread a bit wider than her shoulders. The axe she raised overhead, only to bring it down on the tree-trunk-segment before her, as thick as her waist and with a line through its heart already riddled with cuts from unsuccessful attempts of splitting it. The momentum the axe-head had gained from its own weight and her arms' strength was significant - it bit two inches deep, but this time, the trunk's fibres were torn apart as a crack began to crawl towards its base. The axe-head was stuck, but it was good. With a breath let out in a huff, she allowed herself a blink of an eye's worth of rest, before she raised the axe overhead again - with the entirety of the section of tree-trunk being lifted with it. Up in the air, she flipped the axe around, and then she brought it down again, the back of the axe-head hitting the surface of the base first. With its own weight, the tree-trunk pressed further onto the axe-blade upon impact, and the crack spread deeper. Another raise of the axe, another flip, another swing downwards, and the trunk-segment split open fully, halves falling to two sides. The ground was dry hard dirt, covered in pieces of bark and wooden chips. To the right, there was a log wall, to the left grass; in the distance loomed a dark forest.

The chicken was brown - all their chickens were - and her orange eyes were fixed on her hand in what appeared to be disapproval. Chickens did not have facial expressions ... right? ... but yet she had seen ones stare at her in wide-eyed confusion, beaks slightly ajar, curious chicken doing their best to see what she held, and, as was the case with this one, apparently a disapproving chicken. Yet, she moved her hand closer still, seeing how the feathers of the already puffed-up chicken literally stood on ends till she looked almost twice the normal size. A notch closer, and the chicken's head darted forth, her beak hitting her knuckle. It hurt - not much, but enough for her to draw her hand back with a start. There was a minuscule piece of skin torn loose, barely a flake larger than pinhead, with just the faintest speck of red seeping out. But she only had to fetch the eggs...

The flames were dancing; the air of the night was cold, but the person she was resting against was warm. From somewhere, they had found an old blanket to cover their legs with. There were stars in the sky.
"My father used to know the names of many a constellation... The only one I really can find is the Great Bear. And the Northern Star." He let out something that was probably a short chuckle. "At least I'd always know which way is north on a clear starry night... Not that those occurred often."
His voice sounded so different when she had her ear resting against his chest. It was strange... Was this also how he heard his own voice? She could also hear his heartbeat, feel him breathing. It made her feel ... strange, but not in a bad way. She cared about him and, well, it ... being so close to him... It felt good, but also made her feel oddly ... nervous? No, nervous was not the correct word. On top of all, she was also tired after the long day and it was relaxing, to be like that. She felt as though she would fall asleep soon...
"Are you cold?" he asked, sounding mildly concerned.
"Mkmm..." she languidly mumbled in an attempt to reassure him. "No, I am good..."

Did this sun never raise nor truly set? Always with this twilight, always, no change, no life, no nothing but her. It was a rocky field she was clambering over, rocky and unforgiving, merciless. Jagged edges and hard corners, from pebbles to massive boulders as tall as she was, all loose, spanning as far as the eye could see... There! A figure, motion, someone! At long last! She tried to hasten her clumsy clambering crawl over the unfeeling sharp rocks, pale as bleached slate but with edges as sharp as those of obsidian.
"Hey!?" Her voice was rasped and shrill, she felt thirst. The air was too dry, too riddled with dust; inhaling for the single shout nearly sent her into a coughing fit. She must catch up with them, if they did not hear her shouting...
As she tried to speed up her chase, she slipped and fell, skinned elbow leaving a bloody trail onto the rock before her face, her knee emanating white hot pain as it smack met the ground. Her eyes swelled with tears, not those of only plain, but also those of hopelessness and desperation. She must not lose this person, whoever this was... This figure who appeared and disappeared on the horizon, becoming obscured by a larger rock as they hopped down one and appearing again as they were climbing over the next.

Memories after the third awakening

Death takes a cruel toll; three memories it robbed, two were twisted and bent, but even on this darkest hour, two brief scenes were brought along, if bleak in nature...

It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.

Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, and the land was covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.

The liquid was incredibly viscous, but yet fully transparent and clear ... like the purest water of a crystal spring, but only until you noticed the lazy, sluggish way it reacted to her steps, barely more liquid than jelly. There was the vague feeling that she should move on and bring the bucket to some place, but perhaps from simple morbid curiosity, she carefully lowered the bucket to the ground, its weight making her hands tremble, and knelt by its side. She saw her one hand gripping the edge of the bucket, and the other plunging deep into the viscous fluid.
It was cold. Very cold, as she realized after a second. Piercing, bone-shattering cold. As soon as the knowledge sunk in, she drew her hand out, but the fluid clung to her hand and wrist in a layer nigh an inch thick, cold globs of it dripping off and falling on her feet and the wooden floor. The cold, it hurt now, hurt so much... She tried to shake it off her hand, but that only lead to more of it falling off and onto her feet. Pain, so much pain...
She blinked to combat her vision blurring from the sheer intensity of the pain, but nevertheless something made her raise her hand before her eyes and observe it in the faint grayish light falling from somewhere to the right; the fluid seemed still transparent for the most part, now barely a fifth of an inch thick after most had been shaken or fallen off, but nearing her skin, she could see it becoming faintly yellowish, then orange, then red.
Blood. Her blood. It was seeping into the liquid through her skin...

It was raining; it had been a light drizzle, but now it was pouring. The sound of the raindrops hitting the ground had turned into a deep rumble. Or was it thunder she heard in the background of it? It smelled fresh ... and wet, but mostly fresh. She was running, her bare feet hitting the meadow, the blades of grass brushing against her calves, her one hand gripping the hem of her shirt, as if she were afraid that the wind might steal it, and the other pressing something against her chest. The raindrops were beating against her face; her shirt was soaked through and through. But she was smiling, and happy, and free! The rain was warm, and the day was no longer as smotheringly hot. Deep down she knew she was not supposed to be out in the rain, but it was fun, and she had the excuse of having been sent to retrieve the package from the village when the rain caught her...

She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.

Wind was whipping at their face; their chest was heaving and falling in the rhythm of powerful wingbeats. Wings, dark, wide, powerful... They could feel those moving. Feel raw, unadultered power. Strength. Determination. Very strong sense of purpose, even if what their objective was had vanished from their mind for the time being. There was, however, the faint impression that it was something ominous, something wrong, that people would be hurt, innocent people, people that they did not want to hurt... That impression was coupled with the undeniable sense of forward progression and sheer unstoppability, determinism, fatalism, the inability to alter the course of fate or even adjust one's own actions. Lack of control. They were but an automaton, and from that was born fear. Fear of not for one's own self, but of one's own self and the deeds one would eventually inevitably commit.

The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough nevertheless glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.

She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor new to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.

The chicken was brown - all their chickens were - and her orange eyes were fixed on her hand in what appeared to be disapproval. Chickens did not have facial expressions ... right? ... but yet she had seen ones stare at her in wide-eyed confusion, beaks slightly ajar, curious chicken doing their best to see what she held, and, as was the case with this one, apparently a disapproving chicken. Yet, she moved her hand closer still, seeing how the feathers of the already puffed-up chicken literally stood on ends till she looked almost twice the normal size. A notch closer, and the chicken's head darted forth, her beak hitting her knuckle. It hurt - not much, but enough for her to draw her hand back with a start. There was a minuscule piece of skin torn loose, barely a flake larger than pinhead, with just the faintest speck of red seeping out. But she only had to fetch the eggs...

She was starving. She had been starving once before, had she not? ...But it had been a different time and a different place, if not a different world altogether. It was a cave, or at least she thought so; it was utterly and completely dark, damp, and filled with rocks. A hiding place. No place for the sighted; she moved by hand. Each of her motions was almost startlingly loud - the pebbles she slipped on, the rustle of her garments, the metallic scrape of an axehead against some calcified mineral deposit. The air was cool, stale, and there was no sound but those made by her and water dripping, constantly, endlessly. It was maddening. There was this odd smell, smell that was not wet rock, not quite that of mold, but... But... She could not recall? Why could she not recall?
Her hands happened onto something that was not rock, something softer and more yielding. It crumbled when she touched it; it was fragile. Edible? Without much thought, she tried to scoop it up, stuff it into her mouth even if it tasted bland and felt textureless, even if some nagging feeling kept insisting it could be poisonous. Anything was better than the continued pangs of hunger ... right?

The flames were dancing; the air of the night was cold, but the person she was resting against was warm. From somewhere, they had found an old blanket to cover their legs with. There were stars in the sky.
"My father used to know the names of many a constellation... The only one I really can find is the Great Bear. And the Northern Star." He let out something that was probably a short chuckle. "At least I'd always know which way is north on a clear starry night... Not that those occurred often."
His voice sounded so different when she had her ear resting against his chest. It was strange... Was this also how he heard his own voice? She could also hear his heartbeat, feel him breathing. It made her feel ... strange, but not in a bad way. She cared about him and, well, it ... being so close to him... It felt good, but also made her feel oddly ... nervous? No, nervous was not the correct word. On top of all, she was also tired after the long day and it was relaxing, to be like that. She felt as though she would fall asleep soon...
"Are you cold?" he asked, sounding mildly concerned.
"Mkmm..." she languidly mumbled in an attempt to reassure him. "No, I am good..."

The land was bathed in an eternal sourceless light. It was a rocky field she was clambering over, rocky and unforgiving, merciless, everlasting, endless. Jagged edges and hard corners, from pebbles to massive boulders as tall as she was, all loose, spanning as far as the eye could see... Unfeeling sharp rocks, pale as bleached slate but with edges as sharp as those of obsidian. There was motion, she was sure of it, motion that should not be there. No! That was just the haze of heat playing tricks on her eyes, for rocks could not move, no. They ... those were but lifeless things, objects. And there she was wrong.
There was a rumble, like that of a landslide, and the rocks, big and small alike, went in for the kill. They went for her, rushing together, and there, in the middle of the endless field, the jagged edges tore her to pieces and ground up her bones.

Was it still there? She was breathing heavily, as if from physical exertion, and her body was covered in a light layer of sweat. Was there any use in running at all, or would it just find her by smell? The surface behind her back was cold and hard and sturdy - it would not let it through. But the sides ... it was all open, it was a canyon, she could not get out or hide but for in some small crevice, and surely it would be ... patient. It was to the left, she knew, thus she will have to go to the right. But how long till the canyon spits or she comes to an obstacle she cannot cross? Would it not be better to fight instead? The axe was ... heavy.

Current memories

Three memories were lost in the last demise, two were twisted and bent, and three remained from the last brief pseudo-life...

There was no way someone could survive anything like that; she dropped herself down the last ledge and turned to look at the corpse. He had fallen, from high above - from where she had been before she had made her own much more slower and more meticulous descent down here herself. The man's head was hanging limply to the side, a trickle of drying blood running down the rock beneath his skull, his one arm was out to the side at an odd angle, but otherwise he almost looked normal, save for the fact that bare sharp rocks made for a very peculiar resting place. Two sensations were stronger than others: an oddly biting deep regret and the lingering realization that there ... were others? Also the feeling that she should take what could be taken; the dead had no use for anything.

It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.

Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, and the land was covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.

He was standing before someone he could not see, since his head was bowed. He was kneeling, and there was a distinct sense of it being an important event of some description - especially for him personally. There were words being spoken, words of his deeds and recounting of his duties, but he could not decipher them. The time for him to speak his oath would be soon.

The liquid was incredibly viscous, but yet fully transparent and clear ... like the purest water of a crystal spring, but only until you noticed the lazy, sluggish way it reacted to her steps, barely more liquid than jelly. There was the vague feeling that she should move on and bring the bucket to some place, but perhaps from simple morbid curiosity, she carefully lowered the bucket to the ground, its weight making her hands tremble, and knelt by its side. She saw her one hand gripping the edge of the bucket, and the other plunging deep into the viscous fluid.
It was cold. Very cold, as she realized after a second. Piercing, bone-shattering cold. As soon as the realization sunk in, she drew her hand out, but the fluid clung to her hand and wrist in a layer nigh an inch thick, cold globs of it dripping off and falling on her feet and the wooden panels beneath her feet. The cold, it hurt now, hurt so much... She tried to shake it off her hand, but that only lead to more of it falling off and onto her feet. Pain, so much pain.
She blinked to combat her vision blurring from the sheer intensity of the pain, but nevertheless something made her raise her hand before her eyes and observe it in the faint grayish light falling from somewhere to the right; the fluid seemed still transparent for the most part, now barely a fifth of an inch thick after most had been shaken or fallen off, but nearing her skin, she could see it becoming faintly yellowish, then orange, then red.
Blood. Her blood. It was seeping into the liquid through her skin...

She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.

Wind was whipping at their face; their chest was heaving and falling in the rhythm of powerful wingbeats. Wings, dark, wide, powerful... They could feel those moving. Feel raw, unadultered power. Strength. Determination. Very strong sense of purpose, even if what their objective was had vanished from their mind for the time being. There was, however, the faint impression that it was something ominous, something wrong, that people would be hurt, innocent people, people that they did not want to hurt... That impression was coupled with the undeniable sense of forward progression and sheer unstoppability, determinism, nay, fatalism, the inability to alter the course of fate or even adjust one's own actions. Lack of control. They were but an automaton, and from that was born fear. Fear of not for one's own self, but of one's own self and the deeds one would eventually inevitably commit.

The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough nevertheless glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.

She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor new to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.

The woman's eyes were flickering from side to side, then fixing on her again, wide and ... terrified. She looked malnourished, starving, and her clothes were but tattered rags. Terrified ... of her?
"I am not like these things," she insisted, a pale, muscled arm stretching out in front of herself, fingers just a notch too long and nails sturdy, grown-out and dirty. She held her palm towards the woman, and in her hand there was nothing. It was an universally reassuring gesture: See? No weapon. She was armed herself, but her weapons were remained put away; the woman had none she could see on her.
"I am not like them, I won't be a danger to you, I won't take anything from you..." This time, it was almost a plea.
There was indeed nothing she could potentially desired that the woman had. In many a sense, she was poorer than her. There was nothing to take from her ... save from her flesh and bones.
"...Not like them." She did not know who she was trying to convince - herself, or the woman.

She was starving. She had been starving at least once before, had she not? ...But it had been a different time and a different place, if not a different world altogether. It was a cave, or at least she thought so; it was utterly and completely dark, damp, and filled with rocks. A hiding place. No place for the sighted; she moved by hand. Each of her motions was almost startlingly loud - the pebbles she slipped on, the rustle of her garments, the metallic crape of an axehead against some calcified mineral deposit. The air was cool, stale, and there was no sound but those made by her and water dripping, constantly, endlessly. It was maddening. There was this odd smell, smell that was not wet rock, not quite that of mold, but... But... She could not recall? Why could she not recall?
Her hands happened onto something that was not rock, something softer and more yielding. It crumbled when she touched it; it was fragile. Edible? Without much thought, she tried to scoop it up, stuff it into her mouth even if it tasted bland and felt textureless, even if some nagging feeling kept insisting it could be poisonous. Anything was better than the continued pangs of hunger ... right?

The land was bathed in an eternal sourceless light. It was a rocky field she was clambering over, rocky and unforgiving, merciless, everlasting, endless. Jagged edges and hard corners, from pebbles to massive boulders as tall as she was, all loose, spanning as far as the eye could see... Unfeeling sharp rocks, pale as bleached slate but with edges as sharp as those of obsidian. There was motion, she was sure of it, motion that should not be there. No! That was just the haze of heat playing tricks on her eyes, for rocks could not move, no. They ... those were but lifeless things, objects. And there she was wrong.

She was breathing heavily, as if from physical exertion, and her body was covered in a light layer of sweat. The surface behind her back was cold and hard and sturdy; roughly the same adjectives could be said to characterize the axe in her hands, too. Why axe, and not sword? The axe was heftier than Regret; it simply had more weight behind it, and thus it just seemed that it would hurt more if she were to bash the something's face in with it. And ... she had had the axe for far longer. The axe followed her. It was meant for chopping wood, not combat, but she knew how to use it. Clutching the axe's more than two feet long oak shaft tightly in two, she stepped out to face her foe. If you had nowhere to flee, then you fought.

The Fourth Awakening

Her eyes flickered open, blinked, focused on the rocky drop before her, and then blinked again. The rocky drop was turned sideways ... nay, she herself was lying on the side. Her sense of balance was trying to readjust itself; there was a sense of vertigo. Her left shoulder hurt, as did her left hip and thigh - she was lying on something hard, naught but a thin shirt and common pants covering her body.
Slowly, she tried to move her right hand in front of herself, looking at the pale appendage in an almost childlike wide-eyed wonder, flexing it tryingly - it could not quite be rolled into hard fist, not quite... Its pale skin was thick, hardened scar-tissue, its nails almost like talons. Human? She blinked again.

Something was missing.

The realization was startling, and suddenly her heart was pounding - there was a sense of urgency, and she sprung to a seated position, her hands grasping first blindly, and then darting for the objects the could glimpse from the corner of her eye - objects that had ever so conveniently been as if laid out behind her back. A bag, a coat and ... an axe. There, the things were there. She would not be searching in vain, as she once had.
She pulled the bag and the coat into her lap, and clutched the axe with her two hands, hugging it close. That was better. It was a familiar thing. She also remembered holding something different like that, in a dark room, something warm and heavy that was also part her... But that was a different world. Here, she only had the axe, and that was a good enough substitute. The axe followed her; it did not abandon her.
For a while she was just sitting there, swaying slightly from side to side. It was oddly comforting, and her heart slowed down its pounding and the anxious shaking that had come with it slowly subdued. The cold sweat that had broken out on her skin soon evaporated, or seeped into her clothes. The air felt colder now.

It was home now. She did not know where in it she was, but this world was her home now.

After a time she began to stir again, dropping the axe to her lap and meticulously drawing the coat loosely over her shoulders. It would not have fit in the bag. Far from it. And it was cold. The packpack, she peered into it, then pulled its strap over her shoulder. The axe, she held onto.
With the same contemplativeness she had been displaying ever since she had found her things, she drew her axe close, dragged herself up to one knee, then stood. Indeed, she was still holding the axe almost like one might a child. Her eyes, however, moved from to rocky drop she had first seen when she awoke to the sides, and then she spun around, looking at ... another rocky drop. It was a canyon. The walls did not look scalable, meaning only two ways were left. It was dry, but all rivers did lead to a sea... The question was - which way was the ground inclined?
She blinked again. There was a belt on her waist, attached to it a familiar knife and a sword -lying on top of its scabbard was probably partly why her hip hurt - that did not belong to her.

There had been a dead man. And regret. And need.

The sword was Regret.
It was a dry creek at the bottom of a canyon that she was in. Not a good place - no food, no water, no nothing. No cover from rain, should it ever fall again, no hiding place from beasts. Home was where water and food and shelter were.
She remembered hunger, and it had not been a good feeling. It was painful and gnawing. With it came desperation. Desperation was not a good feeling, either.
Both of those were things she wanted to avoid. Fighting, she wanted to avoid, too, unless she had to. But sometimes she had to, and the axe was reliable...

"I am not like these things," she had insisted, but she had also had the feeling that she was not being believed.

The True Life and Memories of Sarah Downwell

The Life

TBA.

The Memories

Status: Lost.
The chicken was brown - all their chickens were - and her orange eyes were fixed on her hand in what appeared to be disapproval. Chickens did not have facial expressions ... right? ... but yet she had seen them stare at her in wide-eyed confusion, beaks slightly ajar, curious chicken doing their best to see what she held, necks stretching impossibly long, and, as was the case with this one, apparently she was seeing a disapproving chicken.
Yet she moved her hand closer still, seeing how the feathers of the already puffed-up chicken literally stood on ends till she looked almost twice the normal size. A notch closer, and the chicken's head darted forth, her beak hitting her knuckle. It hurt - not much, but enough for her to draw her hand back with a start. There was a minuscule piece of skin torn loose, barely a flake larger than pinhead, with just the faintest speck of red seeping out.
But she only wanted to get the eggs - she had to fetch the eggs...
- Sarah Lindain, 6. She had been tasked to fetch the fresh chicken eggs by her mother, but one that was currently sitting on nest did not approve of her trying to reach for those she was warming.

Status: Lost.
It was raining; it had been a light drizzle, but now it was pouring. The sound of the raindrops hitting the ground had turned into a deep rumble. Or was it thunder she heard in the far distance?
It smelled fresh ... and wet, but mostly fresh. She was running, her bare feet hitting the meadow, the blades of grass brushing against her calves, her one hand gripping the hem of her shirt, as if she were afraid that the wind might steal it, and the other pressing something against her chest. The raindrops were beating against her face; her shirt was soaked through and through. But she was smiling, and happy, and free! The rain was warm, and the day was no longer as smotheringly hot. Deep down she knew she was not supposed to be out in the rain, but it was fun, and she had the excuse of having been sent to retrieve the package from the village when the rain caught her...
- Sarah Lindain, 10. When returning from the village eight kilometers from her home, she was caught in the rain. The package she was carrying was composed of everyday specialty items.

Status: Lost.
She was looking down, at the toes of her shoes peeking out from under her skirt. Said shoes were white, but covered in dust. Dust, dust, dust... So much dust; dusty was also the gravel road under her feet, and to a small extent also her light skirt. It had not rained for a while ... from there the dust. And the carriage that had rolled past her earlier had brought a whole cloud of it with it. Sun was blazing, and a blonde strand of hair had fallen in front of her face. She was still too embarrassed to look up. She could not look up ... and now she had probably been quiet for so long that it was probably uncomfortable and awkward for the person standing before her, too. She probably looked incredibly stupid...
- Sarah Lindain, 14. Standing before the first person she had ever had actual crush-like feelings for, and being oh so embarrassed.

Status: Lost.
The flames were dancing; the air of the night was cold, but the person she was resting against was warm. From somewhere, they had found an old blanket to cover their legs with. There were stars in the sky.
"My father used to know the names of many a constellation... The only one I really can find is the Great Bear. And the Northern Star." He let out something that was probably a short chuckle. "At least I'd always know which way is north on a clear starry night... Not that those occurred often."
His voice sounded so different when she had her ear resting against his chest. It was strange... Was this also how he heard his own voice? She could also hear his heartbeat, feel him breathing. It made her feel ... strange, but not in a bad way. She cared about him and, well, it ... being so close to him... It felt good, but also made her feel oddly ... nervous? No, nervous was not the correct word. On top of all, she was also tired after the long day, and it was incredibly relaxing, to be like that. She felt as though she would fall asleep soon...
"Are you cold?" he asked, sounding mildly concerned.
"Mkmm..." she languidly mumbled in an attempt to reassure him. "No, I am good..."
- Sarah Lindain, 16. A summer night with the first person she was beginning to feel actual love towards. The same person later became her first husband.

Status: Intact.
She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.
- Sarah Sadler, 19. The night after the birth of her first child, a boy.

Status: Intact.
Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, and the land was covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.
- Sarah Sadler, 24. A winter day after a summer of severe crop dearth. The same winter cost her second- and third-born their lives.

Status: Lost.
Her throat ... it felt like no air could pass through it, as though it were contracting closing down on itself. There were painful stabs in her chest, her heart hurt - also much like someone were squeezing it just a notch too hard. Her mouth was opening and closing, but no sound was emitted. Her voice simply did not comply. Neither did her eyes. She kept blinking as they stung and her sight kept blurring. Finally, something wet and warm ran over her face, dragged down by gravity. It could not be, could it? It could not be! At last, she could get a word from her mouth, though her voice sounded distant and detached, numb even.
"What ... what do you mean?" It could not be... She had misheard. She had definitely misheard. Or misunderstood. In any case, it was wrong! It had to be...
- Sarah Sadler, 27. Receiving news of her first husband's death in an accident. It left her living with her aging parents and her eight-year-old and toddler a year and a half old. Her father passed away a year later.

Status: Intact.
She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor next to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.
- Sarah Sadler, 28. Losing a small intricate wooden box gifted to her for her sixteenth birthday that she had used to store memorabilia. She never found it again.

Status: Intact.
The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her long blonde hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.
- Sarah Downwell, 30. Making pretzels, soon after the beginning of her second marriage. Her second husband's wife had died in childbirth, as had the newborn. She was now living with her mother, second husband, her own two children and second husband's second child (his first had fallen victim by the same year of starvation and epidemic that had killed two of hers - his family had been better off in terms of food, but the illness did not care).

Status: Distorted.
Cold water sloshed over the edge of the bucket she was carrying, dripping over her feet and the wooden floorboards. It was a large bucket, cumbersome and heavy, but it was the only way she could get water to the large metal container at the end of the back room. Arms slightly shaking from the effort, she set the container she had been carrying down right where she stood, in the middle of the room, and stretched; her shoulders and back ached from the last handful of buckets. The room was dim; two tiny windows with four little panels of uneven dirty glass each did not let in much light. Glass was expensive; many people only had holes with shutters in their walls, if that...
- Sarah Downwell, 36. Carrying water soon after the house was partially rebuilt to be bigger and in all ways better. Including, indeed, the somewhat expensive small glass windows.

Status: Lost.
The axe was hefty - a bit over two feet of hard polished wooden shaft and a solid iron head. Her legs were rooted to ground, spread a bit wider than her shoulders. The axe she raised overhead, only to bring it down on the tree-trunk-segment before her, as thick as her waist and with a line through its heart already riddled with cuts from unsuccessful attempts of splitting it. The momentum the axe-head had gained from its own weight and her arms' strength was significant - it bit two inches deep, but this time, the trunk's fibres were torn apart as a crack began to crawl towards its base. The axe-head was stuck, but it was good. With a breath let out in a huff, she allowed herself a blink of an eye's worth of rest, before she raised the axe overhead again - with the entirety of the section of tree-trunk being lifted with it. Up in the air, she flipped the axe around, and then she brought it down again, the back of the axe-head hitting the surface of the base first. With its own weight, the tree-trunk pressed further onto the axe-blade upon impact, and the crack spread deeper. Another raise of the axe, another flip, another swing downwards, and the trunk-segment split open fully, halves falling to two sides. The ground was dry hard dirt, covered in pieces of bark and wooden chips. To the right, there was a log wall, to the left grass; in the distance loomed a dark forest.
- Sarah Downwell, 41. Log splitting on a seemingly average day.

Status: Intact.
It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, a bit longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.
- Sarah Downwell, 57. Winter evening. Doing what work she still could to help her firstborn's family and spend her time during the darker part of the year.

Betwixt the Eternal Light

Good to hear that I'm in. I'll put the CS in the character tab right away and make my first post in probably a couple of hours, when I'm by a computer, not using cell, as I am now. She'll probably go bother Maldron and Turncloak Blade.

(Should there be some manner of post-announcement mechanic? Meaning that when a person actually begins writing a post, they say so in OoC, so others won't try to post at the same time and we don't end up with two conflicting posts?)

Betwixt the Eternal Light

Well, the one time I try to post from one of my secondary operating systems which doesn't have as advanced system of clipboards attached, the browser and forum unite their efforts in eating my post. There was a fair bit of elaboration on what I intend to try with her, but until I feel like typing it up again, here is the CS concept. (And yes, I'd rather her memories from this afterworld suffered from deaths, too - it's not like I'm making her life any easier with it.)

(I did write most of it in one sitting when I wrote the memories, in about two hours, so pardon if I had winded down a bit by the time I reached the end... I had half-intended to rewrite some of it now, but eh, not amused by the loss of content, so this'll have to do for now.)

Sarah Downwell

Given Name

...What was her name? She did not know, nor had it been relevant until now. She had, after all, been referring to herself as, well, simply 'I' in her head, and in the relative solitude of this place, it had thus far sufficed. There had been no one to call her by her name ... or by any other name.
She ... was a human, right? A human woman? What would a human woman be named? 'Alice' came to mind, but that probably was not her actual name; in fact, she was quite certain it had not been her name at any point in time. It did not quite have the right feel to it. But no other name - actual name, not some random silly word or noun as these folks seemed to be so fond of labeling themselves with - came to mind, either.
Alice. Whatever she had been before, in some other time and place, for now and to those people she would be Alice. Until she came up with something that would feel more appropriate, anyway...

Appearance

She is still discernibly a human, yet the time spent in this realm has been slowly changing her form, altering her appearance accordingly as she becomes further removed from her old life and self. Decay ... or adaption? This is a world for beasts rather than humans as she sees it, entities much more formidable than feeble humanoids, and all signs point to her old life - the one she still carries some sparse memories of - being gone for good. This is her home now, and taking the best of it is all that is left for her.
She stands at roughly six feet tall (~1.83 meters), weighs around a hundred and fifty eight pounds (72 kilograms), might come across as being in her mid-thirties if one does not know any better, and appears to have a fairly robust bone structure. She appears wide-shouldered, but also wide-hipped - the kind of build that in another time and place, before the rest of her features began to take after this hellish place, might have been described as fit for "a good hard-working country girl". - The type that can give birth to a dozen children and still take care of all the hard farm-work on her own. She also has a waist that appears narrow compared to her hips, and a decently-sized bosom, both of which rather accentuate her femininity despite the overall strong build.
Her skin, however, is ghastly pale - no proper midday sun has fallen on it for a long time, not in this realm -, her features an odd mix of muscle and almost malnourished gauntness. Her lean-muscled arms and bony hands and fingers with well-defined tendons appear just a notch too long for her body, her fingernails sturdier than they should be; it might just be the result a bit poor posture, but her shoulders tend to slouch slightly forward as she sits or runs. More disconcertingly, her spine seems to be far more defined than it should be, her shoulder-blades more protruding - and it just might be that the same odd elongation that has been affecting her arms has added an inch or two to her back, the same. As another distinct feature, her right hand is scarred and lacks some of its flexibility; the scar-tissue covers the appendage like a stiff glove.
Her gaunt face is semi-oval, elongated, with a finely defined jawline and a round chin, but underpronounced cheekbones. Her eyebrows are straight, a bit thicker than they should be, and pale brown in color, her eyes hazel-green and fairly found - to the point where she can easily leave a slightly surprised, clueless, concerned or scared impression even when she is presently not experiencing those emotions. The nose under the eyes is average-sized, if a bit too flat and round-tipped for her liking, her lips surprisingly full, if only very pale pink in color. Her teeth appear to have survived this place surprisingly well, though the lower incisors appear to have been filed a third shorter after a life of having a mild underbite.
Last but not least, her light blonde hair is in a surprisingly good condition, hip-length and thick, even if the ends are broken rather than cut. It still does flow... She likes her hair.

Belongings

* An axe - one of the heftier wood-chopping ones. It has a shaft made of polished oak that is a bit over two feet long, and an iron head, several pounds heavy. Slight traces of rust where the head connects to the shaft left aside, it appears to be in a good condition. Someone has been taking care of it - sharpening it, and it seems also oiling it a bit. She feels a connection with this axe... Perhaps because it is one of the very few things that actually followed her here. Often carried in hand, sometimes awkwardly fitted into her bag.
* A knife, a tool more so than cutlery piece. Has a blade about eight inches (a bit over twenty centimeters) long and a carved wooden handle. May in fact be made of steel - surprising enough, given that steel is more expansive than iron. Much like the axe, it seems to have been well cared for, but the very tip has dulled a bit more than the last sharpening could undo, and the guard-equivalent of the handle right next to the blade has seen some contact with rougher surfaces. Another item of the distant past. It comes with a worn leather sheathe from which some decorative elements appear to have fled in the past.
*A simple longsword along with a reinforced scabbard and belt. She tends to actually wear the belt - and has managed to attach her knife's sheathe to it, but doesn't actually have notable skill using the sword. It is steel, but not of the finest quality. About an inch of the three-foot-long blade's tip has broken off, and its blade has several notches in it even after she attempted to sharpen it. It has a cross-guard, round pommel and a handle which probably used to be wrapped in leather, but is now simply a metal piece.
* Flint and steel, a whetstone. Standard tools for starting fires and sharpening blades.
* A small glass bottle - some nine centimeters or around three and a half inches tall - in which there is about sixteen milliliters of some kind of impure oily liquid. It is dark yellow and perpetually has some manner of black flakes floating near the bottom. It has a piece of cork or similar woodlike material for, well, a cork. She has the feeling that it is valuable - the bottle itself, that is, not its contents.
* Two flasks of water. Water is important. Typically in her backpack.
* A simple backpack of heavy fabric. For carrying things, what else?
* Worn pair of leather boots. She fears that the sole of the right one might soon become loose altogether.
* Two pairs of socks.
* Five shirts. Two are typical long linen women's summer-shirts, three were probably meant for a man, and are in fact too big for even her...
* A very torn woolen striped skirt. It is eerily familiar.
* Two pairs of trousers. A bit too long for her, and not quite fitting at her hips, but she can make them work if she rolls up the legs a bit and is wearing the belt.
* A pair of mittens.
* A thick winter-coat. She sometimes wears it thrown over her shoulders since it is too cold for a shirt, but she has no jacket or sweater to speak of. Also used for matress and blanket.
* A few rags.
* Some things that can pass as food - dried shrooms, questionable meat, some odd roots... About three pounds in total at the given time. By far too little...

Memories

Original memories at the first awakening

Alas, but two of them were but vivid nightmares to begin with; what good do the terrors conjured by one's own mind do amongst the brief images from a perfectly mundane - if not to say boring - life?

It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, a bit longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.

Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, the land covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.

She was looking down, at the toes of her shoes peeking out from under her skirt. Said shoes were white, but covered in dust. Dust, dust, dust... So much dust; dusty was also the gravel road under her feet, and to a small extent also her light skirt. It had not rained for a while... From there the dust. And the carriage that had rolled past her earlier had brought a whole cloud of it with it. Sun was blazing, and a blonde strand of hair had fallen in front of her face. She was still too embarrassed to look up. She could not look up ... and now she had probably been quiet for so long that it was probably uncomfortable and awkward for the person standing before her, too. She probably looked incredibly stupid...

Cold water sloshed over the edge of the bucket she was carrying, dripping over her feet and the wooden floorboards. It was a large bucket, cumbersome and heavy, but it was the only way she could get water to the large metal container at the end of the back room. Arms slightly shaking from the effort, she set the container she had been carrying down right where she stood, in the middle of the room, and stretched; her shoulders and back ached from the last handful of buckets. The room was dim; two tiny windows with four little panels of uneven dirty glass each did not let in much light. Glass was expensive; many people only had holes with shutters in their walls, if that...

It was raining; it had been a light drizzle, but now it was pouring. The sound of the raindrops hitting the ground had turned into a deep rumble. Or was it thunder she heard in the background of it? It smelled fresh ... and wet, but mostly fresh. She was running, her bare feet hitting the meadow, the blades of grass brushing against her calves, her one hand gripping the hem of her shirt, as if she were afraid that the wind might steal it, and the other pressing something against her chest. The raindrops were beating against her face; her shirt was soaked through and though. But she was smiling, and happy, and free! The rain was warm, and the day was no longer as smotheringly hot. Deep down she knew she was not supposed to be out in the rain, but it was fun, and she had the excuse of having been sent to retrieve the package from the village when the rain caught her...

She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.

Wind was whipping at their face; their chest was heaving and falling in the rhythm of powerful wingbeats. Wings, dark, wide, powerful... They could feel those moving. Feel raw, unadultered power. Strength. Determination. Very strong sense of purpose, even if what their objective was had vanished from their mind for the time being. There was, however, the faint impression that it was something ominous, something wrong, that people would be hurt, innocent people, people that they did not want to hurt... That impression was coupled with the undeniable sense of forward progression and sheer unstoppability, determinism, the inability to alter the course of fate or even adjust one's own actions. Lack of control. They were but an automaton, and from that was born fear. Fear of not for one's own self, but of one's own self and the deeds one would eventually inevitably commit.

The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.

She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor new to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.

Her throat ... it felt like no air could pass through it, as though it were contracting closing down on itself. There were painful stabs in her chest, her heart hurt - also much like someone were squeezing it just a notch too hard. Her mouth was opening and closing, but no sound was emitted. Her voice simply did not comply. Neither did her eyes. She kept blinking as they stung and her sight kept blurring. Finally, something wet and warm ran over her face. It could not be, could it? It could not be! At last, she could get a word from her mouth, though her voice sounded distant and detached, numb even.
"What ... what do you mean?" It could not be... She had misheard. She had definitely misheard. Or misunderstood. In any case, it was wrong! It had to be...

There was a glint of light and an unearthly glow. Something rumbled, the ground was wrong, it tilted, and she fell ... fell, fell, fell... Something snapped, and she hit a near-vertical surface; reflexively, she dug her fingers in. They had talons, and they rent the metal of the surface. She was only very slowly sliding down the surface she clung to, but yet she still felt like falling, falling, falling... The surface was hard, but it lacked temperature. She knew she had been injured, but she could not feel the pain, only the blood running down her back. Falling, falling, falling, but yet the surface before her eyes was still. She was no longer sliding down; her taloned fingers had dug in deep enough to carry her weight. The combination of falling and utter motionlessness made her nauseous and disoriented. She must not slip and fall again; that would be the end. There was not one thing more certain than that.

The axe was hefty - two feet of hard polished wooden shaft and a solid iron head. Her legs were rooted to ground, spread a bit wider than her shoulders. The axe she raised overhead, only to bring it down on the tree-trunk-segment before her, as thick as her waist and with a line through its heart already riddled with cuts from unsuccessful attempts of splitting it. The momentum the axe-head had gained from its own weight and her arms' strength was significant - it bit two inches deep, but this time, the trunk's fibres were torn apart as a crack began to crawl towards its base. The axe-head was stuck, but it was good. With a breath let out in a huff, she allowed herself a blink of an eye's worth of rest, before she raised the axe overhead again - with the entirety of the section of tree-trunk being lifted with it. Up in the air, she flipped the axe around, and then she brought it down again, the back of the axe-head hitting the surface of the base first. With its own weight, the tree-trunk pressed further onto the axe-blade upon impact, and the crack spread deeper. Another raise of the axe, another flip, and the trunk-segment split open fully, halves falling to two sides. The ground was dry hard dirt, covered in pieces of bark and wooden chips. To the right, there was a log wall, to the left grass; in the distance loomed a dark forest.

The chicken was brown - all their chickens were - and her orange eyes were fixed on her hand in what appeared to be disapproval. Chickens did not have facial expressions ... right? ... but yet she had seen ones stare at her in wide-eyed confusion, beaks slightly ajar, curious chicken doing their best to see what she held, necks stretching impossibly long, and, as was the case with this one, apparently a disapproving chicken. Yet, she moved her hand closer still, seeing how the feathers of the already puffed-up chicken literally stood on ends till she looked almost twice the normal size. A notch closer, and the chicken's head darted forth, her beak hitting her knuckle. It hurt - not much, but enough for her to draw her hand back with a start. There was a minuscule piece of skin torn loose, barely a flake larger than pinhead, with just the faintest speck of red seeping out. But she only had to fetch the eggs...

The flames were dancing; the air of the night was cold, but the person she was resting against was warm. From somewhere, they had found an old blanket to cover their legs with. There were stars in the sky.
"My father used to know the names of many a constellation... The only one I really can find is the Great Bear. And the Northern Star." He let out something that was probably a short chuckle. "At least I'd always know which way is north on a clear starry night... Not that those occurred often."
His voice sounded so different when she had her ear resting against his chest. It was strange... Was this also how he heard his own voice? She could also hear his heartbeat, feel him breathing. It made her feel ... strange, but not in a bad way. She cared about him and, well, it ... being so close to him... It felt good, but also made her feel oddly ... nervous? No, nervous was not the correct word. On top of all, she was also tired after the long day and it was relaxing, to be like that. She felt as though she would fall asleep soon...
"Are you cold?" he asked, sounding mildly concerned.
"Mkmm..." she languidly mumbled in an attempt to reassure him. "No, I am good..."

Memories after the second awakening

One dear memory was lost to this hellish world, none were twisted, none but one lone new experience took root...

It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.

Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, the land covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.

Cold water sloshed over the edge of the bucket she was carrying, dripping over her feet and the wooden floorboards. It was a large bucket, cumbersome and heavy, but it was the only way she could get water to the large metal container at the end of the back room. Arms slightly shaking from the effort, she set the container she had been carrying down right where she stood, in the middle of the room, and stretched; her shoulders and back ached from the last handful of buckets. The room was dim; two tiny windows with four little panels of uneven dirty glass each did not let in much light. Glass was expensive; many people only had holes with shutters in their walls, if that...

It was raining; it had been a light drizzle, but now it was pouring. The sound of the raindrops hitting the ground had turned into a deep rumble. Or was it thunder she heard in the background of it? It smelled fresh ... and wet, but mostly fresh. She was running, her bare feet hitting the meadow, the blades of grass brushing against her calves, her one hand gripping the hem of her shirt, as if she were afraid that the wind might steal it, and the other pressing something against her chest. The raindrops were beating against her face; her shirt was soaked through and though. But she was smiling, and happy, and free! The rain was warm, and the day was no longer as smotheringly hot. Deep down she knew she was not supposed to be out in the rain, but it was fun, and she had the excuse of having been sent to retrieve the package from the village when the rain caught her...

She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.

Wind was whipping at their face; their chest was heaving and falling in the rhythm of powerful wingbeats. Wings, dark, wide, powerful... They could feel those moving. Feel raw, unadultered power. Strength. Determination. Very strong sense of purpose, even if what their objective was had vanished from their mind for the time being. There was, however, the faint impression that it was something ominous, something wrong, that people would be hurt, innocent people, people that they did not want to hurt... That impression was coupled with the undeniable sense of forward progression and sheer unstoppability, determinism, the inability to alter the course of fate or even adjust one's own actions. Lack of control. They were but an automaton, and from that was born fear. Fear of not for one's own self, but of one's own self and the deeds one would eventually inevitably commit.

The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.

She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor new to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.

Her throat ... it felt like no air could pass through it, as though it were contracting closing down on itself. There were painful stabs in her chest, her heart hurt - also much like someone were squeezing it just a notch too hard. Her mouth was opening and closing, but no sound was emitted. Her voice simply did not comply. Neither did her eyes. She kept blinking as they stung and her sight kept blurring. Finally, something wet and warm ran over her face. It could not be, could it? It could not be! At last, she could get a word from her mouth, though her voice sounded distant and detached, numb even.
"What ... what do you mean?" It could not be... She had misheard. She had definitely misheard. Or misunderstood. In any case, it was wrong! It had to be...

There was a glint of light and an unearthly glow. Something rumbled, the ground was wrong, it tilted, and she fell ... fell, fell, fell... Something snapped, and she hit a near-vertical surface; reflexively, she dug her fingers in. They had talons, and they rent the metal of the surface. She was only very slowly sliding down the surface she clung to, but yet she still felt like falling, falling, falling... The surface was hard, but it lacked temperature. She knew she had been injured, but she could not feel the pain, only the blood running down her back. Falling, falling, falling, but yet the surface before her eyes was still. She was no longer sliding down; her taloned fingers had dug in deep enough to carry her weight. The combination of falling and utter motionlessness made her nauseous and disoriented. She must not slip and fall again; that would be the end. There was not one thing more certain than that.

The axe was hefty - two feet of hard polished wooden shaft and a solid iron head. Her legs were rooted to ground, spread a bit wider than her shoulders. The axe she raised overhead, only to bring it down on the tree-trunk-segment before her, as thick as her waist and with a line through its heart already riddled with cuts from unsuccessful attempts of splitting it. The momentum the axe-head had gained from its own weight and her arms' strength was significant - it bit two inches deep, but this time, the trunk's fibres were torn apart as a crack began to crawl towards its base. The axe-head was stuck, but it was good. With a breath let out in a huff, she allowed herself a blink of an eye's worth of rest, before she raised the axe overhead again - with the entirety of the section of tree-trunk being lifted with it. Up in the air, she flipped the axe around, and then she brought it down again, the back of the axe-head hitting the surface of the base first. With its own weight, the tree-trunk pressed further onto the axe-blade upon impact, and the crack spread deeper. Another raise of the axe, another flip, and the trunk-segment split open fully, halves falling to two sides. The ground was dry hard dirt, covered in pieces of bark and wooden chips. To the right, there was a log wall, to the left grass; in the distance loomed a dark forest.

The chicken was brown - all their chickens were - and her orange eyes were fixed on her hand in what appeared to be disapproval. Chickens did not have facial expressions ... right? ... but yet she had seen ones stare at her in wide-eyed confusion, beaks slightly ajar, curious chicken doing their best to see what she held, and, as was the case with this one, apparently a disapproving chicken. Yet, she moved her hand closer still, seeing how the feathers of the already puffed-up chicken literally stood on ends till she looked almost twice the normal size. A notch closer, and the chicken's head darted forth, her beak hitting her knuckle. It hurt - not much, but enough for her to draw her hand back with a start. There was a minuscule piece of skin torn loose, barely a flake larger than pinhead, with just the faintest speck of red seeping out. But she only had to fetch the eggs...

The flames were dancing; the air of the night was cold, but the person she was resting against was warm. From somewhere, they had found an old blanket to cover their legs with. There were stars in the sky.
"My father used to know the names of many a constellation... The only one I really can find is the Great Bear. And the Northern Star." He let out something that was probably a short chuckle. "At least I'd always know which way is north on a clear starry night... Not that those occurred often."
His voice sounded so different when she had her ear resting against his chest. It was strange... Was this also how he heard his own voice? She could also hear his heartbeat, feel him breathing. It made her feel ... strange, but not in a bad way. She cared about him and, well, it ... being so close to him... It felt good, but also made her feel oddly ... nervous? No, nervous was not the correct word. On top of all, she was also tired after the long day and it was relaxing, to be like that. She felt as though she would fall asleep soon...
"Are you cold?" he asked, sounding mildly concerned.
"Mkmm..." she languidly mumbled in an attempt to reassure him. "No, I am good..."

Did this sun never raise nor truly set? Always with this twilight, always, no change, no life no nothing but her. It was a rocky field she was clambering over, rocky and unforgiving, merciless. Jagged edges and hard corners, from pebbles to massive boulders as tall as she was, all loose, spanning as far as the eye could see... There! A figure, motion, someone! At long last! She tried to hasten her clumsy clambering crawl over the unfeeling sharp rocks, pale as bleached slate but with edges as sharp as those of obsidian.
"Hey!?" Her voice was rasped and shrill, she felt thirst. The air was too dry, too riddled with dust; inhaling for the single shout nearly sent her into a coughing fit. She must catch up with them, if they did not hear her shouting...
As she tried to speed up her chase, she slipped and fell, skinned elbow leaving a bloody trail onto the rock before her face, her knee emanating white hot pain as it smack met the ground. Her eyes swelled with tears, not those of only plain, but also those of hopelessness and desperation. She must not lose this person, whoever this was... This figure who appeared and disappeared on the horizon, becoming obscured by a larger rock as they hopped down one and appearing again as they were climbing over the next.

Memories after the third awakening

Death takes a cruel toll; three memories it robbed, two were twisted and bent, but even on this darkest hour, two brief scenes were brought along, if bleak in nature...

It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.

Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, the land covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.

The liquid was incredibly viscous, but yet fully transparent and clear ... like the purest water of a crystal spring, but only until you noticed the lazy, sluggish way it reacted to her steps, barely more liquid than jelly. There was the vague feeling that she should move on and bring the bucket to some place, but perhaps from simple morbid curiosity, she carefully lowered the bucket to the ground, its weight making her hands tremble, and knelt by its side. She saw her one hand gripping the edge of the bucket, and the other plunging deep into the viscous fluid.
It was cold. Very cold, as she realized after a second. Piercing, bone-shattering cold. As soon as the knowledge sunk in, she drew her hand out, but the fluid clung to her hand and wrist in a layer nigh an inch thick, cold globs of it dripping off and falling on her feet and the wooden floor. The cold, it hurt now, hurt so much... She tried to shake it off her hand, but that only lead to more of it falling off and onto her feet. Pain, so much pain.
She blinked to combat her vision blurring from the sheer pain, but nevertheless something made her raise her hand before her eyes and observe it in the faint grayish light falling from somewhere to the right; the fluid seemed still transparent for the most part, now barely a fifth of an inch thick after most had been shaken or fallen off, but nearing her skin, she could see it becoming faintly yellowish, then orange, then red.
Blood. Her blood. It was seeping into the liquid through her skin...

It was raining; it had been a light drizzle, but now it was pouring. The sound of the raindrops hitting the ground had turned into a deep rumble. Or was it thunder she heard in the background of it? It smelled fresh ... and wet, but mostly fresh. She was running, her bare feet hitting the meadow, the blades of grass brushing against her calves, her one hand gripping the hem of her shirt, as if she were afraid that the wind might steal it, and the other pressing something against her chest. The raindrops were beating against her face; her shirt was soaked through and though. But she was smiling, and happy, and free! The rain was warm, and the day was no longer as smotheringly hot. Deep down she knew she was not supposed to be out in the rain, but it was fun, and she had the excuse of having been sent to retrieve the package from the village when the rain caught her...

She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.

Wind was whipping at their face; their chest was heaving and falling in the rhythm of powerful wingbeats. Wings, dark, wide, powerful... They could feel those moving. Feel raw, unadultered power. Strength. Determination. Very strong sense of purpose, even if what their objective was had vanished from their mind for the time being. There was, however, the faint impression that it was something ominous, something wrong, that people would be hurt, innocent people, people that they did not want to hurt... That impression was coupled with the undeniable sense of forward progression and sheer unstoppability, determinism, the inability to alter the course of fate or even adjust one's own actions. Lack of control. They were but an automaton, and from that was born fear. Fear of not for one's own self, but of one's own self and the deeds one would eventually inevitably commit.

The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.

She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor new to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.

The chicken was brown - all their chickens were - and her orange eyes were fixed on her hand in what appeared to be disapproval. Chickens did not have facial expressions ... right? ... but yet she had seen ones stare at her in wide-eyed confusion, beaks slightly ajar, curious chicken doing their best to see what she held, and, as was the case with this one, apparently a disapproving chicken. Yet, she moved her hand closer still, seeing how the feathers of the already puffed-up chicken literally stood on ends till she looked almost twice the normal size. A notch closer, and the chicken's head darted forth, her beak hitting her knuckle. It hurt - not much, but enough for her to draw her hand back with a start. There was a minuscule piece of skin torn loose, barely a flake larger than pinhead, with just the faintest speck of red seeping out. But she only had to fetch the eggs...

She was starving. She had been starving once before, had she not? ...But it had been a different time and a different place, if not a different world altogether. It was a cave, or at least she thought so; it was utterly and completely dark, damp, and filled with rocks. A hiding place. No place for the sighted; she moved by hand. Each of her motions was almost startlingly loud - the pebbles she slipped on, the rustle of her garments, the metallic crape of an axehead against some calcified mineral deposit. The air was cool, stale, and there was no sound but those made by her and water dripping, constantly, endlessly. It was maddening. There was this odd smell, smell that was not wet rock, not quite that of mold, but... But... She could not recall? Why could she not recall?
Her hands happened onto something that was not rock, something softer and more yielding. It crumbled when she touched it; it was fragile. Edible? Without much thought, she tried to scoop it up, stuff it into her mouth even if it tasted bland and felt textureless, even if some nagging feeling kept insisting it could be poisonous. Anything was better than the continued pangs of hunger ... right?

The flames were dancing; the air of the night was cold, but the person she was resting against was warm. From somewhere, they had found an old blanket to cover their legs with. There were stars in the sky.
"My father used to know the names of many a constellation... The only one I really can find is the Great Bear. And the Northern Star." He let out something that was probably a short chuckle. "At least I'd always know which way is north on a clear starry night... Not that those occurred often."
His voice sounded so different when she had her ear resting against his chest. It was strange... Was this also how he heard his own voice? She could also hear his heartbeat, feel him breathing. It made her feel ... strange, but not in a bad way. She cared about him and, well, it ... being so close to him... It felt good, but also made her feel oddly ... nervous? No, nervous was not the correct word. On top of all, she was also tired after the long day and it was relaxing, to be like that. She felt as though she would fall asleep soon...
"Are you cold?" he asked, sounding mildly concerned.
"Mkmm..." she languidly mumbled in an attempt to reassure him. "No, I am good..."

The land was bathed in an eternal sourceless light. It was a rocky field she was clambering over, rocky and unforgiving, merciless, everlasting, endless. Jagged edges and hard corners, from pebbles to massive boulders as tall as she was, all loose, spanning as far as the eye could see... Unfeeling sharp rocks, pale as bleached slate but with edges as sharp as those of obsidian. There was motion, she was sure of it, motion that should not be there. No! That was just the haze of heat playing tricks on her eyes, for rocks could not move, no. They ... those were but lifeless things, objects. And there she was wrong.
There was a rumble, like that of a landslide, and the rocks, big and small alike, went in for the kill. They went for her, rushing together, and there, in the middle of the endless field, the jagged edges tore her to pieces and ground up her bones.

Was it still there? She was breathing heavily, as if from physical exertion, and her body was covered in a light layer of sweat. Was there any use in running at all, or would it just find her by smell? The surface behind her back was cold and hard and sturdy - it would not let it through. But the sides ... it was all open, it was a canyon, she could not get out or hide but for in some small crevice, and surely it would be ... patient. It was to the left, she knew, thus she will have to go to the right. But how long till the canyon spits or she comes to an obstacle she cannot cross? Would it not be better to fight instead? The axe was ... heavy.

Current memories

Three memories were lost in the last demise, two were twisted and bent, and three remained from the last brief pseudo-life...

There was no way someone could survive anything like that; she dropped herself down the last ledge and turned to look at the corpse. He had fallen, from high above - from where she had been before she had made her own much more slower and more meticulous descent down here herself. The man's head was hanging limply to the side, a trickle of drying blood running down a rock, his one arm was out to the side at an odd angle, but otherwise he almost looked normal, save for the fact that bare sharp rocks made for a peculiar resting place. Two sensations were stronger than others: an oddly biting deep regret and the lingering realization that there ... were others? Also the feeling that she should take what could be taken; the dead had no use for anything.

It was warm and slightly musty, smelling of smoke; she was seated there, on a small rectangular stool, and her lap was covered by the woolen fabric of her skirt - horizontally striped, each stripe with its own color and pattern. One stripe - white with a chain of intricate rhombic symbols in black woven into it - especially stood out, perhaps because it was at just the right place for her eyes to fall onto. She could feel the uneven bark of the wooden stick she held in her left hand, the leathery handle of the knife in her right, and the resistance of the wood as she carved into it with the blade, a chip falling away with each skilled motion of hand. The knife's blade, longer than her hand from wrist to fingertips, glinted faintly in constantly moving yellowish-orange light.

Her stomach hurt with hunger; it was as if there was a hand squeezing it, or it was shrinking smaller, and the shrinking hurt. It was unpleasant, so unpleasant... It was cold, her hands half-numb from being outside for so long despite the thick mittens she wore, the land covered in deep snow, blinding and painful in the sunlight. The snow made a crunching sound with each step she walked. She saw herself grabbing a hold of one of the lower branches of an evergreen tree - she remembered eating the young sprouts of it during early summer when she was but a child, but now was winter, and the sprouts were wooden and the needles hard... Still, she ripped off a section of the branch, sticking it between her teeth and chewing. When you were this hungry, even the bitter taste of resin was preferable to the continued pangs of hunger.

He was standing before someone he could not see, since his head was bowed. He was kneeling, and there was a distinct sense of it being an important event of some description - especially for him personally. There were words being spoken, words of his deeds and recounting of his duties, but he could not decipher them. The time for him to speak his oath would be soon.

The liquid was incredibly viscous, but yet fully transparent and clear ... like the purest water of a crystal spring, but only until you noticed the lazy, sluggish way it reacted to her steps, barely more liquid than jelly. There was the vague feeling that she should move on and bring the bucket to some place, but perhaps from simple morbid curiosity, she carefully lowered the bucket to the ground, its weight making her hands tremble, and knelt by its side. She saw her one hand gripping the edge of the bucket, and the other plunging deep into the viscous fluid.
It was cold. Very cold, as she realized after a second. Piercing, bone-shattering cold. As soon as the realization sunk in, she drew her hand out, but the fluid clung to her hand and wrist in a layer nigh an inch thick, cold globs of it dripping off and falling on her feet and the wooden panels beneath her feet. The cold, it hurt now, hurt so much... She tried to shake it off her hand, but that only lead to more of it falling off and onto her feet. Pain, so much pain.
She blinked to combat her vision blurring from the sheer pain, but nevertheless something made her raise her hand before her eyes and observe it in the faint grayish light falling from somewhere to the right; the fluid seemed still transparent for the most part, now barely a fifth of an inch thick after most had been shaken or fallen off, but nearing her skin, she could see it becoming faintly yellowish, then orange, then red. Blood. Her blood.
It was seeping into the liquid through her skin...

She was tired, so tired... Her lower body hurt, she felt tired, weak, faint, even, but also strangely content and even ... happy? It was dark, quiet; it was night. She was half-sitting on a bed covered in not-quite white linen, and on her arms there rested a dear weight. She had looked up, and sighed gently; she did not want to move in order not to disturb the one she held. She blinked, though in darkness, it hardly mattered. All was well.

Wind was whipping at their face; their chest was heaving and falling in the rhythm of powerful wingbeats. Wings, dark, wide, powerful... They could feel those moving. Feel raw, unadultered power. Strength. Determination. Very strong sense of purpose, even if what their objective was had vanished from their mind for the time being. There was, however, the faint impression that it was something ominous, something wrong, that people would be hurt, innocent people, people that they did not want to hurt... That impression was coupled with the undeniable sense of forward progression and sheer unstoppability, determinism, nay, fatalism, the inability to alter the course of fate or even adjust one's own actions. Lack of control. They were but an automaton, and from that was born fear. Fear of not for one's own self, but of one's own self and the deeds one would eventually inevitably commit.

The yeast had raised the dough nicely; it was warm as she kneaded it, warm and soft. Despite her covering her hands in flour before she set to the task, some of the dough glued itself to her fingers as she was at the task. There was the desire to lift her hand and simply eat the dough clinging to her finger, but she ignored the temptation for the time being. Some of the dough was separated into three globs, rolled into thinner and longer strips between her hands, and then braided into a pretzel. Before that, her mother had also made pretzel-bread like this. The light was yellow-orange and danced a flickering dance. Her hair was held back by some manner of linen hat.

She was searching, frantically. On the table? No, not on the table... That had been the first place see looked, too - it was but a flat surface of wooden boards, there was no way she could have missed anything on it the first time. In the clothes chest? With shaking hands, she pulled out the clothes from the heavy wooden box, hastily casting those on the floor new to it, but alas, this action yielded no results. Why would she have put it there in the first place? Besides, she had looked there already, too. Just as hastily, she began folding the skirts and blouses, setting them back one by one. Why? Guess she could not tolerate seeing the mess even while she was still looking, and there was always the vague feeling that she could have pulled it out of the box along with the clothes, meaning that it could be on the floor and be unearthed as she puts the clothes away. Even if she was already going through the clothes chest, the illogical place for it to be in, for the second time.

The woman's eyes were flickering from side to side, then fixing on her again, wide and ... terrified. She looked malnourished, starving, and her clothes were but tattered rags. Terrified ... of her?
"I am not like these things," she insisted, a pale, muscled arm stretching out in front of herself, fingers just a notch too long and nails sturdy, grown-out and dirty. She held her palm towards the woman, and in her hand there was nothing. It was an universally reassuring gesture: See? No weapon. She was armed herself, but her weapons were remained put away; the woman had none she could see on her.
"I am not like them, I won't be a danger to you, I won't take anything from you..." This time, it was almost a plea.
There was indeed nothing she could potentially desired that the woman had. In many a sense, she was poorer than her. There was nothing to take from her ... save from her flesh and bones.
"...Not like them." She did not know who she was trying to convince - herself, or the woman.

She was starving. She had been starving at least once before, had she not? ...But it had been a different time and a different place, if not a different world altogether. It was a cave, or at least she thought so; it was utterly and completely dark, damp, and filled with rocks. A hiding place. No place for the sighted; she moved by hand. Each of her motions was almost startlingly loud - the pebbles she slipped on, the rustle of her garments, the metallic crape of an axehead against some calcified mineral deposit. The air was cool, stale, and there was no sound but those made by her and water dripping, constantly, endlessly. It was maddening. There was this odd smell, smell that was not wet rock, not quite that of mold, but... But... She could not recall? Why could she not recall?
Her hands happened onto something that was not rock, something softer and more yielding. It crumbled when she touched it; it was fragile. Edible? Without much thought, she tried to scoop it up, stuff it into her mouth even if it tasted bland and felt textureless, even if some nagging feeling kept insisting it could be poisonous. Anything was better than the continued pangs of hunger ... right?

The land was bathed in an eternal sourceless light. It was a rocky field she was clambering over, rocky and unforgiving, merciless, everlasting, endless. Jagged edges and hard corners, from pebbles to massive boulders as tall as she was, all loose, spanning as far as the eye could see... Unfeeling sharp rocks, pale as bleached slate but with edges as sharp as those of obsidian. There was motion, she was sure of it, motion that should not be there. No! That was just the haze of heat playing tricks on her eyes, for rocks could not move, no. They ... those were but lifeless things, objects. And there she was wrong.

She was breathing heavily, as if from physical exertion, and her body was covered in a light layer of sweat. The surface behind her back was cold and hard and sturdy; roughly the same adjectives could be said to characterize the axe in her hands, too. Why axe, and not sword? The axe was heftier; it simply had more weight behind it, and thus it just seemed that it would hurt more if she were to bash the something's face in with it. And ... she had had the axe for far longer. It was meant for chopping wood, not combat, but she knew how to use it. Clutching it tightly in two, she stepped out to face her foe.

The Fourth Awakening

Her eyes flickered open, blinked, focused on the rocky drop before her, and then blinked again. The rocky drop was turned sideways ... nay, she herself was lying on the side. Her sense of balance was trying to readjust itself; there was a sense of vertigo. Her left shoulder hurt, as did her left hip and thigh - she was lying on something hard, naught but a thin shirt and common pants covering her body.
Slowly, she tried to move her right hand in front of herself, looking at the pale appendage in an almost childlike wide-eyed wonder, flexing it tryingly - it could not quite be rolled into hard fist, not quite... Its pale skin was thick, hardened scar-tissue, its nails almost like talons. Human? She blinked again.

Something was missing.

The realization was startling, and suddenly her heart was pounding - there was a sense of urgency, and she sprung to a seated position, her hands grasping first blindly, and then darting for the objects the could glimpse from the corner of her eye - objects that had ever so conveniently been as if laid out behind her back. A bag, a coat and ... an axe. There, the things were there. She would not be searching in vain, as she once had.
She pulled the bag and the coat into her lap, and clutched the axe with her two hands, hugging it close. That was better. It was a familiar thing. She also remembered holding something different like that, in a dark room, something warm and heavy that was also part her... But that was a different world. Here, she only had the axe, and that was a good enough substitute. The axe followed her; it did not abandon her.
For a while she was just sitting there, swaying slightly from side to side. It was oddly comforting, and her heart slowed down its pounding and the anxious shaking that had come with it slowly subdued. The cold sweat that had broken out on her skin soon evaporated, or seeped into her clothes. The air felt colder now.

It was home now. She did not know where in it she was, but this world was her home now.

After a time she began to stir again, dropping the axe to her lap and meticulously drawing the coat loosely over her shoulders. It would not have fit in the bag. Far from it. And it was cold. The packpack, she peered into it, then pulled its strap over her shoulder. The axe, she held onto.
With the same contemplativeness she had been displaying ever since she had found her things, she drew her axe close, dragged herself up to one knee, then stood. Indeed, she was still holding the axe almost like one might a child. Her eyes, however, moved from to rocky drop she had first seen when she awoke to the sides, and then she spun around, looking at ... another rocky drop. It was a canyon. The walls did not look scalable, meaning only two ways were left. It was dry, but all rivers did lead to a sea... The question was - which way was the ground inclined?
She blinked again. There was a belt on her waist, attached to it a familiar knife and a sword -lying on top of its scabbard was probably partly why her hip hurt - that did not belong to her.

There had been a dead man. And regret. And need.

Dry creek at the bottom of a canyon. Not a good place - no food, no water, no nothing. No cover from rain, no hiding place from beasts. Home was where water and food and shelter were.
She remembered hunger, and it had not been a good feeling. It was painful and gnawing. With it came desperation. Desperation was not a good feeling, either.
Both of those were things she wanted to avoid. Fighting, she wanted to avoid, too, unless she had to. But sometimes she had to, and the axe was reliable...

"I am not like these things," she had insisted, but she had also had the feeling that she was not being believed.

(...Beware, I do tend to type a lot every now and then?)

...Also, don't try to take her axe. Bad idea.

(I didn't mean to make it that important. It just happened.)

Mahz's Dev Journal

Oh dear, *everything* is unread now. I agree that the "new" signs are a bit distracting as they are now - I'd suggest removing the borders around them to make them slightly more subtle (especially since borders tend to artefact a lot when you're zoomed out beyond a certain level, predominantly on some mobile devices - they flickeringly disappear and appear in parts as you scroll the site, and often only appear partially otherwise).

Also, a very odd glitch regarding Co-GMs: Suddenly, a RP that didn't have Co-GMs has two of them. The kicker? These are completely random people that to my knowledge have no connection to the RP, and the GM hasn't even been online since yesterday (the Co-GMs appeared after that).
Edit: Random Co-GMs have disappeared again. GM hasn't still been online.
Edit2: A new random Co-GM has appeared.
Edit3: New random Co-GM is gone. Original two random Co-GMs are back.
Edit4: Gone again. A fourth random Co-GM has appeared. Is someone with sufficient power deliberately messing with the RP?
Edit5: All gone for the moment.
Edit6: More random Co-GMs. Screenshotting for the sake of record-keeping.
Edit7: One more dropped in and disappeared.
Edit8: Some more disappearances and appearances. Giving up on reporting here. Going to take a few more screenshots, just in case.

Edit9: Just noticed that there is something odd going on with this thread, too - it goes between 1x1 and being "full" and having a whole bunch of different tags, to Casual, to Free...

Are tags broken?

The Prophecy

...Jack? Why are there random people that at least I've never seen before marked as Co-GMs for the thread? Since you've not been online since yesterday, and they only appeared randomly today, I assume it must be some manner of site glitch. Might want to remove them, though, just in case.

Edit: Well, and now they're gone again...
Edit2: And various Co-GMs keep coming and going... Going to screenshot some of them and try to see whether there is a reasonable explanation to whatever is going on here.
Edit3: Appears to be calmed down now. Haven't seen any for over half an hour now.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Honestly, they look fine to me. At some point I'd like to see a high contrast theme made to separate this out a bit. No offense to @Shienvien, but the higher contrast buttons and colors often get too glaring.

Given that I have heightened contrast/hue sensitivity, I'd probably be the first person to point it out if the buttons went too far in the other direction... This is also why I'd advocate not going for white text for adjustment, and opting for gray-on-black (not white-on-black!) instead. The proposed button color-scheme, in my mind, would be no more contrast than the text on the general background.
- I do *not* want a high contrast theme, and in fact might be unable to use one. I just want the text on the buttons to be somewhat comfortably readable on "light" screens when the brightness and contrast have been turned down.

And, @Mahz, is it absolutely necessary to have one-click access to both the OP and Latest Unread Post?

Presently I find myself going between the OP and last page often enough. I am inclined to believe both are fairly useful, at least to some users.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I personally would perhaps prefer if the buttons were black or near-black and the text color kept the same (as I think I've suggested a couple of times in the past - on lighter screens with minimal brightness the background is a bit lighter than would be optimal even for white text, and darker overall look is nicer, no?), but maybe it'll work out this way, too.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Why the continued light-grey on medium-grey on all buttons, though? Still not exactly the most comfortable color scheme for reading text. o.õ

Else, good work. Go to last read is indeed a rather important addition, especially regarding fast-moving threads.