Runesight

Prologue

Once, there was a girl who looked at her life and said, "I know exactly what this is and how to use it."

I used to think I was that girl.

But she isn't real.

In the darkness, a blissful calm embraced me. The release somehow felt right, but it was strange even at the end of my life. Memories of white, bloodstained claws lingered in the back of my mind—tearing at the memories I refused to look at, but here, it was over. I was simply...dead.

This realm held a subtle familiarity deeper than my own body that I'd left behind. Drifting, I sensed a tug from the depths of my soul and without thinking I followed it, moving in a way that was somehow familiar. I felt as if I knew this place too well, I remembered catching glimpses of it as I bent space between my fingers, it was like the souls of people.

The world seemed to watch something and I turned my attention to it. I was dead, but I could see as my eyes were guided to where my body lay, throat torn, chest crushed. There was no burial, just decay. Blue blood had been spilled over the scene, painting the white sand cyan. It was...just paint. Sand and paint. Like the dyes I remembered growing up with.

The body was dead. Yet as I watched, the wounds reversed slowly, the blood in the sand washed away and eroded, the clothes on her back soiled with time as the body became vibrant. Youth reclaimed, I gazed upon a girl, eight years old— that was the age I'd been when...

"I hoped this day wouldn't come," " a voice echoed in the place that wasn't a place. The place between places.

I sought for its source, my speech came without a voice, but somehow it didn't feel strange, almost familiar instead. "Who are you?"

"You have to go back to that place of pain."

Could it even hear me? I felt a stab of fear enter my mind at the idea of simply being a ghost. "WHO ARE YOU?"

"Go." Pulling me toward my body, toward the white sand, toward the blue blood I remembered beneath the paint. "Start over." The voice said the words calmly, but I felt anything but calm. I was gone a moment later. I was...no this wasn't me, it couldn't be me. I was dead, I was simply a ghost. She was...she was dead, but as the body began to twitch, as her eyes blinked open, she couldn't really believe that for much longer.

Fear of the unknown and the unknowable, fear of not being seen or heard.

That was my last memory.

Fear.

--- ? ---

Fear.

That was her first memory.

The sand below her was rough, grating against soft, young, untested flesh. She didn't know where she was but it was bright, the sun above was warm, the rolling dunes picturesque. She inhaled slowly, taking in the scent of a fungus that lightly tickled the back of her mind.

Fear. Pure, unexplainable fear. It overwhelmed her, it pulled at her soul from somewhere deep inside; somewhere that the girl couldn't access anymore. But the fear remained, even if she didn't know why she should be afraid.

She sat up tiredly, staring at the field around her. A field of pure white sand and a sky of deep blue that was more intense than any color she could have imagined. She pulled her knees to her chest, feeling the cool of contact with herself from behind the tattered rags draped over her.

Who am I?

She felt at her body, pointed ears still there, small fuzzy antennae atop her head that she somehow knew would grow bigger with age. Small feet, three toes on each. Two hands. Two legs. One head. Long white hair that sprouted from a hard scalp.