--- RUNESIGHT, THE YEAR 759 ---
Once, there was a girl who looked at her life and said, “I know what this is, I know exactly how to use this.” She was a girl who knew the joys of life, she was a girl who could love and be loved, who could dream and reach for those dreams, who could put pain behind her and simply seek to live in the moments that life gave her.
Once, I used to think that might be me.
But she isn’t real.
In the darkness, an almost blissful calm embraced me. The release somehow felt right, but it was strange to be at the end of my life, where 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. I could finally be at peace even as my regrets from life piled up on top of each other, reaching higher than the silverside cliffs.
This realm held a deep familiarity to me. It was a stronger connection even than my own body that I’d left behind. I drifted in it, wondering why for quite a while before I realized it. 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 runes that floated in the air, it was like magic itself.
I sensed a tug from the depths of my soul and without thinking I followed it, moving in a way that was still somehow familiar, toward… something. At least, before I felt myself stop, unable to move any farther.
As I drifted, the world seemed to watch something. I turned my attention to it, wondering what it might be. I was dead, but I could feel as my attention was 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?” Something seemed to hear my fear, my fear of not being… quite real.
“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.
The rags around her were shaped as if they were once clothing. A dress that went past her knees, so torn and soiled with… with dried blue… p~pain~nt… that… that she wasn’t certain what color it used to be.
She hugged her knees harder, feeling tiny spikes in her exoskeleton jab at each other.
You have to move.
She remembered pain, somehow. The fear that was still gnawing at her chest drowned out her voice once again.
This is a problem.
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Flashes of memory. This same sand, white sand. Pain, terrible pain. There was also anger. anger, and violence that consumed her very soul. She remembered it, deeper than any other memory. Because it was all that she remembered.
White sand turned red with the blood of… something else. White sand turned blue with her own blood. The terrible, impossible fear that she would never see… someone… again. Someone she’d cared about. What was-? Blue and red mixed with white sand. Like paint coloring the earth. Paint. It was just paint.
She realized then that she didn’t have to think about it.
The young girl, barely eight, barely old enough to realize the concept and horror of death, hugged her knees again as fear poured over her, a fear that she didn’t understand.
--
He found her several days later.
I imagine that he didn’t know why she was there, who she was, or how she’d lived for who knows how long, wandering in the Sanarian desert, breathing in the poison of the sandfrost.
He didn’t know what to do with the young girl, I wouldn’t have either, but he crouched in front of her terrified face, his smile worried, his posture mostly calm with an undertone of fear as he saw the dried blood that covered her. She looked uninjured, but… “Hey, are you alright?”
The little Tuvei didn’t answer. She continued to stare up at him, fearful. fearful of him.
He frowned at that, always having assumed until now that he was great with kids. “You won’t be hurt. You can call me Estin, I’m a friend.”
She shuddered, not understanding why some part of her didn’t like this man. “I- I’m lost.” She felt the tears bite at the edges of her eyes, they would have come out but she didn’t have enough water for it to overflow.
Estin nodded, “Do you know where your parents might be; where you’re from?”
The girl shook her head, looking down at the white sand. Red and blue paint… she closed her mind from the image that she didn’t even remember seeing as it leapt into her head once again, still unprompted.
Estin put a hand on her shoulder. “What’s your name, kid?”
She looked up and met his eyes, that was… no that didn’t feel right. Looking into his soul like that, the runes of his being danced at the edge of her vision. She looked to the side instead, at the sky. That was much better. “I don’t know.” She whispered. She put her fists against her eyes, trying not to look helpless as a few drops of water leaked from them. He probably knew how to help, right? “You could just… call me nothing.” She mumbled against her arms, “I don’t think I have a name.”
Blood. Red and blue.
He blinked, “We can’t do that. How about… Eliax? It was my grandmother’s name.”
The little Tuvei looked up slightly, Eliax. That was a nice name, it didn’t make her mind scream like the one that had been on the edge of her tongue. “Alright.”
The man put a hand on her head and smiled, “Alright Eliax, what do you think of coming with me?”
She closed her eyes. Why did it feel like this was a terrible idea?
You know him. You knew him.
She nodded slowly.
The man ruffled her hair a bit, “I take that as a yes?”
She nodded again, more sure this time. “Yes.”
He has been kind. He will continue to be kind. It was the trust of a child who had no one else to look to. He had somehow earned that trust. Eliax wasn’t sure why.
He was smiling as she finally opened her eyes, his two large antennae bobbing up and down on his head. For the first time, Eliax noticed that one of them was cut in half. He also had a scar across one cheek, moving almost too close to one eye.
Estin took the girl’s hand and walked with her, giving her a mask to filter the toxic air from her young lungs. “The Sandfrost in the air is a fungus.” He explained. “It’s spores attack the lungs. It doesn’t kill unless you eat the mushrooms, but it makes thinking difficult until your body is used to filtering it out.”
She took the mask, a simple cloth to tie around her face. “Why don’t you have one?”
He grinned, “I’ve lived in Aubinere longer than you’ve been alive. My body processes the stuff perfectly fine.”
Eliax looked at her feet as the two of them began to walk. “Am I… weak?” She asked, her voice soft as she tried to prevent it from cracking. She failed at that, her throat was more determined than she’d expected.
Estin raised an eyebrow, his antennae bobbing to the side unevenly to mirror the expression. “How old are you, my friend?”
The girl frowned, “Eight. I’m eight.” It was… just paint. There was no blood when… when she was eight.
“Well, a kid like you shouldn’t think about that. You can only get stronger from here.”
He asked her a lot of things after that, she didn’t remember most of them, but she did know that she would get stronger. She had to get stronger. For now, she could be weak. She could be weak enough to see the stains, to feel the pain and the phantom fear that was just now beginning to finally fade. But one day she would be strong enough to erase the paint that tugged at her mind, telling her distinctly to ignore the memories. Some part of her soul felt… misaligned maybe?
He carried her when her weak legs failed her and her feet were burned by the hot… white sand. Eliax and Estin went together, toward a place where both of them might find a future to populate.
--
Estin stood beside her, letting a woman measure her feet while another woman pulled a rope across her waist, checking how loose the new clothing should be.
She stood perfectly still, eyes wide as the two women poked and prodded at her. One of them tried to comb out her terribly tangled hair, and another one shooed Estin away, assuring him that they would ‘have this all under control’ in just a matter of time.
Eliax herself was torn between terror and awe.
Awe because one of the women, a tall Tuvei with four arms and a graceful way about her, kept doing magic. She would levitate a brush in the air, she would summon things out of nowhere, and she would cast a small flame when it grew dark and begin to light the lanterns with the ghostly fire.
Terror because the other woman was human.
For some reason, it was strange to see a female human. Eliax wasn’t certain why, but she got the notion she’d never really seen one up close before. Everything she knew told her that humans were coldhearted destroyers who would protect the world one moment and destroy it the next. People who had no respect for nature.
But as time ticked by, the woman only smiled at her, led her to a tub with warm water and gently scrubbed at the dirt and grime covering her, asked her various things like her age and her name and her favorite color… Eliax couldn’t help but get over her humanness.
Eliax was washed and clothed, her hair was cleaned, trimmed, and braided, and for the first time since waking up in the sand, Eliax could say that she was finally not afraid.