"Who am I?"

Confusion. That was the first thing he felt when he woke up with a throbbing headache. Words, sentences, grammar, common facts, he could remember. Names of people and their faces, he could not recall. Even his own name and face.

With more effort than he desired to exert, he strained to raise his head to survey his surroundings. He found himself on a beach composed of nothing but coarse sand and rotting wood. To the west was a forest that stretched along the coast as far as his eyes could see, and the boundless sea to the right, with no other island and country in sight.

With what seemed to consume all his effort, he propped himself up, finding himself donned in a tattered grey pants reaching to his ankles with numerous pockets all over, a long sword sheathed in a plain undecorated wooden scabbard and a white sleeveless shirt, revealing his muscular arms, with various scars and cuts all over.

Injuries from a fight, he assumed. With every slight movement, saltwater on his soaked body would seep onto the cuts, causing them to itch even more. Without the need to deliberate on his actions further, he immediately tore off a piece of clothing from the hem of his shirt to patch over the cuts that he deemed to be potentially life-threatening, if left untreated. Infested wounds were troublesome to deal with, he remembered. Pointing his index and middle finger towards the deepest cut he could find, he muttered.

"Sui."

A slight feeling of fatigue washed over him as emerald-green mist converged from around his fingers and into the wound, causing a slight sense of relief within him. Whether it was from proving that a portion of what remained of his memory was not a figment of his imagination, or the comfort of treating his wound, he couldn't be sure. He maintained that posture for a dozen breaths of time, with the blood rapidly hardening at a visible rate. In a minute's time, in the wound's place was a scab that would have probably taken a week to form, without the aid of the most rudimentary form of healing magic.

After treating the most serious of his wounds, his mind started to wander, brooding about the situation he was in. He knew and understood what it meant to have amnesia, to not remember his name and identity, but the very notion of having them seemed so out-of-place that he wondered who and what he was like before he lost his memory.

"Is it normal to not feel a sense of loss, after having lost my identity?" He tried to focus on his memories, searching for the most recent vestige of his memory. It took less effort than he thought it would take, but he managed to recall that he was on a mission to deliver a message to a certain person in the capital of Auros. Whoever that person was and what the message was, he could not remember.

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"Priorities."

It was only now that he realized that he was thirsty, hungry, and exhausted after consuming most of his ekra to heal his wounds. "Drinkable water, food and shelter? Praise the gods if I can find them in a deserted beach. Sure, I could get fish from the sea, but you'd need tools for that, much less the energy to swim out to the sea. Wait, the sword." Remembering his sword, he looked down on his waist, gazing upon his metre-long sword that was tied to the left side of his waist with a black sash over the hem of his pants. Unsheathing it, he held it in full view under the blazing hot sun. With the feeling of having repeated the action over a thousand times, he brandished the sword with his right hand, with a sense of familiarity of being one with the sword. He raised his left hand, his fingers caressing the blade of the sword. It was a double edged sword made of damascus steel, with the tip of the blade curving upwards. The grip was fashioned out of pig leather. "Good sword," he praised. He tried to look for possible clues that could identify himself, but to no avail. There wasn't even a brand on the sword, one that every blacksmith would imprint around the pommel.

"There could be something in my pockets." He fumbled around his pockets but could only find wet sand. "Fuck!"

With a growl escaping his stomach, he remembered his current plight. Lack of food, water and shelter. He did not have the sufficient tools and skills to hunt for food in the sea. His remaining choice was to search the forest for food, and hope he would chance upon a river or a stream in the forest. It was near the sea after all.

Somehow, he knew that he could fast for a week without food and water, but that's only in the best possible scenario. There were too many variables. What lies within the forest was unknown, and he disliked the unknown the most. However, while he still had energy to spare, the smartest choice to make was to scout around the forest and raise his chances of survival.

"I have a bad feeling about this," he sighed before patting the sand off his pants and trudged into the woods.

Author's Note: Chapter's pretty short, I know. Tis' only the first chapter, so I hope to write double the length in the next chapter. Anyways, all constructive criticisms are welcome.