The Imago

Something hatched when you awoke.

It's fuzzy, when you think about it. Any memory from before the forest and its faceless looming trees is gone. You were left with strange magic and a name and a love for the stars, and that was all, and surely that couldn't have been enough for you to be a person. You know you had memories, because you can sense their absence, like a hole deep inside you, but even as you touch and feel the empty space where they once were, to know the shape of what you lack, the edges blur like static fluff until you're drained.

At least, when you are awake.

The forest was home to many creatures whose names you might have learned. The strangest were those hollow little shells left dangling from branches, dancing in the wind. They weren't alive, you could tell - were they corpses? They were so fragile. You watched one fall to the ground in a stiff breeze, lost in the underbrush and forgotten.

You felt a kinship with it. But you were not a corpse, were you?

You can't remember when you saw the little inchworm spinning silk around its body into a coffin. You may have dreamt it. But there it was, a shell that was not hollow, warm and pulsing with life. Until it wasn't, and something that wasn't the inchworm wrenched itself free, spread its damp wings and forgot its bodily entombment. And the shell remained. Dead.

You can see it sometimes, in your slumber. Your memories melting down into a soup and hardening and reforming into something else that needed to escape. Your tender flesh standing between it and the infinite, crushing and claustrophobic.

You should have been dead as the cocoons. But something - someone - dripped her lifeblood into your sleeping husk and kept you breathing.

Your memories are out there. Free of the prison that is you.

Would you recognize them if you saw them? Would you want to?