She had always had vague dreams about flying. Dreams of soaring over the city from above, looking down to see the busy streets beneath her. Dreams where she dips and dives, soaring on heated thermals as the wind lifts her in the air, ruffling her feathers as it rushes past. Dreams where the people below pointed up at her, exclaiming in awe as she proudly glides above their heads, turning tricks in the air for their delight. In retrospect it should have been more obvious to her, her birdly heritage, given her dreams as well as the bird-like quirks of her behavior, though she was a little glad that she didn’t have such an inflated ego before to have made a claim to godhood on the basis of her dreams alone.

During her time at the island though most of her sleep had been deep and uninterrupted, she did have a smattering of dreams, hazy obscure things, perhaps brought about by the strangely lethargy inducing lack of clear time passage. They had mostly been of the memories her mother had shown her, her brain trying to order them, to put them into place in her mind, devoid of all senses except visual.

Now that she had returned home, she had begun dreaming more frequently again, more dreams of her childhood, only this time from a different perspective than she had seen them from her mother’s. It excited her, rather than scared her this now, to be getting a new memory back. Perhaps because it wasn’t new shocking information, she had seen it before from her mother’s antennaed eyes. She was a little worried, at first, that her brain was trying to trick her, somehow, trying to build a false scaffolding around the memories her mother had gifted. But she decided she couldn’t let that likely irrational fear usurp the joy she got from discovering new things about herself, even if they weren’t entirely the way they should be, if some of the memories were recast by time.

She saw herself playing on her own in the woods, the giant toadstools and flowers of her mother’s island, running about them as a barefooted child, and later careening through them as a swift winged kestrel. She saw more snippets of Izar and Sabea. Of games of hide and seek, capture the flag, and tag, the times she would play tricks on them, giggling obviously from behind a mushroom’s trunk. Of Sabea gently untangling her feathery hair, pulling sticks out of it, bewildered. And her own failed attempts at braiding Sabeas ground length hair, dark tresses tangling hopelessly under her inept hands, fingers caught in the starry strands. She had been so close with them, as a child, had shared with them her every small secret. She wondered how painful it must have been, to see her now. A version of her without any of those cherished shared memories.

The first time she experienced a memory while awake, besides the small light switch memory back at her human room, she was walking towards the fruit stand, going to pick a mango from the tree growing out of it. She turned to her left to speak to someone over her shoulder, as she occasionally did, the lingering muscle memory prompting her, and there was Sym, only different. Her skin had a healthy, human glow to it, her dark hair fluttering in the breeze rather than soaked and flat with the waters of her swamp. She could see Sym’s mouth move, the curl of her lips in a smile, her laughter, a lighter, more joyful sound than she had ever heard from Sym before, appearing in her head.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The memory was a wispy, slightly luminous thing, overlaid with the world she walked in. Alene took an inadvertent step backward, tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, a thick overgrown root emerging from it, and it was gone, whirling away as if it had never been there in the first place. She paused, stunned, a bit unsure of what she had just seen.

Would Sym remember this moment too, she wondered, after a moment. She had never brought Sym something from the stand before, she realized, as she continued her journey. Sym made a point to reject anything resembling care from Alene, but in the guise of the recovery of her memories, perhaps she would be more amenable to a small gift. And she would be able to ask Sym about the fruit stand, see if it was a true memory or just wishful thinking.

‘I had a memory, I think,’ she said, passing the ripe fig to Sym, careful not to drop it in the muddy eddies. ‘And what exactly does this,’ she held up the dappled fruit her hand dripping slightly from the water, eyebrow arched, ‘have to do with your memory.’ Sym looked at her flatly, holding the fruit in her hands as if it were about to detonate, sharp nails imprinting on the bruised skin. ‘I was on my way to the fruit stand, the one with all the different kinds of exotic fruits that you can’t find anywhere else in the city. Do you know it?’ Alene asked, doing her best to temper her hope, her heart pounding in her chest despite her efforts.

Sym looked up at her, distracted from her perusal of the fruit, ‘we used to go there,’ she said slowly, almost wistfully, a faint smile on her lips, her gaze softening to somewhere beyond Alene, into a past moment she now shared with the ghost girl. ‘You loved the fruit, any sort of sugary snack really.’ Sym took a bite of the fruit, her needle sharp teeth ripping into it with gusto, uncaring of the juice dripping down her chin into the water below. Alene’s heart soared, it was a true memory after all. Surely more would follow. It was finally happening.

As the days passed, more memories resurfaced, and a dark haired boy appeared as well, Hiru, Sym had said, and Iseult for the new pink haired girl, nostalgia and mourning thick in her tone. Alene walked the city, doing her best to prompt more memories to surface, directed by Sym’s recollections to locations most saturated with her living counterpart, hoping to dredge them up from the murky depths of her psyche.

Walking in the gardens where trees were draped with vines, morning glory and datura, she saw her with Sym, Isuelt, and Hiru, with the occasional addition of others, laughing in a much more manicured park, butterfly kites high in the air and patterned blankets and picnic baskets below. She saw the three racing away from her, their school uniforms fluttering behind them as they ran away to classes as she walked at a more sedate pace down a busy main street. On a corner where the coffee shop had once stood, now overgrown with coffee trees, she saw Hiru, Iseult, and Sym getting drinks together, giggling at her surprise at the texture of the foam topping it, a dollop of cream dotting the tip of her nose. Their phantoms filled the city as she wandered, dogging her every step, until she couldn’t remember how it felt not to have them. A new type of longing and loneliness filled her.