Waking up from unconsciousness is a particularly unique experience.

The first noticeable thing is the darkness. This is not to be confused with the nothingness during unconsciousness however, because at that point the brain lacks enough awareness to actually process its own lack of awareness. No. This is the simple darkness of closed eyes and a mind in the final stages of restarting. A mind that is more concerned with ensuring that it is functioning properly and doesn’t yet have time to care about what the rest of the body is doing.

Next to return is usually the internal monologue. The mind, after all, is a very noisy thing and likes to talk. It hates long silences and, if it lacks input for more than a few seconds, is perfectly happy to chatter on on its own. Typically this is in the form of questions like, “Why is everything dark,” or, “Did I fall asleep,” or occasionally, “How much did I drink last night?”

Oddly enough, it isn’t difficult to reach the natural conclusion of, “I must be unconscious,” but this is wrong. It is waking up from unconsciousness, and there is a difference. After all, fully unconscious people are hardly known for being capable of logical deduction. Obviously, the thought after this will be, “How did that happen?” Unfortunately, the mind is busy with other things, and doesn’t have time for silly nonsense like short term memory, and the question, for now, must go unanswered.

Despite what some may think, it is not actually that frightening of an experience. Possibly because, along with the parts that hold memory, the ones that process fear have yet to be rebooted. Also possibly because if you are unconscious, that means you are still alive. And if you are still alive, then you aren’t dead. And if you aren’t dead, then things can’t be that bad, can they?

They can, actually. Most senses haven’t returned yet, and it’s entirely possible to wake up in excruciating pain, or with a few less than the recommended number of organs. Or with a hangover. But that too has yet to come. The inside of the eyelids can only be appreciated for so long however, and a new problem quickly stands to attention. It’s hard to tell if one is sitting or lying down. A feeling of pressure comes from… somewhere, but it’s vague and indistinct. Since a sense of direction is one of the first things to even remotely start working again, then knowing your exact orientation in the surrounding location must be quite important.

As sound and feeling and time return to the mind, more and more questions will begin to pop up until one must inevitably realize, “Oh. I need to open my eyes. That would probably help.”

* * * * *

The ceiling tiles were made of off-white squares, interspersed with the occasional inset light fixture. This was unimportant and did little to provide any useful information besides, “Apparently I am lying down. That’s one question answered.”

With a turn of the head, more things became clear, but only slightly. The floor was made of the same off-white squares. Some along the also off-white wall were raised and had small alcoves to function as tables or shelves, but aside from a few glass bottles and jars they were mostly empty. There were no windows, but the lighting from above was bright just enough to give everything a cold sterile feeling reminiscent of a hospital.

Rolling over to get a better look, a few things became clear that did the exact opposite of adding any clarity to the situation. Out of view previously, a series of glowing red lines started to sputter and fade away. As they did, a second set just beyond the first began to grow in intensity. They crisscrossed around themselves forming complex and dizzying patterns that the eye had trouble following. In the gaps between them were strange marks and other unrecognizable designs.

More noticeable however, and probably of more immediate importance, were the bones.

Its bones.

“Why am I a skeleton,” though the skeleton. “This is very odd.” it continued. “I’m pretty sure I wasn’t always like this. And shouldn’t I be wearing clothes? Or skin?”

It sat up to appraise itself, vaguely noting that it was on its own group of raised tiles, and reconfirmed that, yes, it was indeed a skeleton.

“I’m sure I’ve always had a skeleton, most people do after all, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to see it before. Being able to see your own bones isn’t typically considered to be a good thing. And why are they black? I know people can have dark skin, but this? This is just absurd.”

The bones were a glossless matte black that made them look rough despite their smoothness.

“Did I die from a disease or something? This color can’t be natural. And I doubt anyone with bones like this would be called the pinnacle of health. Now that I think about it… Do skeletons even get sick?”

Turning in an attempt to get a better view of itself, all previous thoughts were pushed aside when it realized that it wasn’t the only corpse in the room. Inside what was now obviously supposed to be some sort of magic circle, on another platform behind the skeleton’s own, was another body. Though this one still had its flesh.

The skeleton gave an unnecessary nervous cough, unsure how to start the conversation. Its voice was like a dozen tonal noises overlapping each other, but despite this it still sounded hollow as the sound echoed around in and out of its skull.

Seeing the naked corpse before it, the skeleton was again reminded of its own lack of clothing, but wasn’t quite sure which parts of itself needed covering. How does a skeleton even go about hiding its… everything?

“Excuse me,” asked the skeleton as politely as it could, dreading the awkward conversation to come. “Are we in a morgue? Someone’s not going to come along and try to bury us, are they? And do you know where I could find some clothes?”

The corpse however, did not respond.

Confused, the skeleton stood up and walked over to get a better look at the newfound friend-to-be. She was an elderly woman with grey hair long enough to spill off the slab and onto the floor. Her crossed arms did little to cover her naked body, but the sheer number of wrinkles were doing a good job at making up for it. There were no obvious wounds, and so the skeleton concluded that she had probably died from old age. Or some other complication that came with it. And, recently too, going by the general lack of decay. Despite being dead itself, the skeleton wasn’t automatically an expert on the subject, and admitted that it could be wrong.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” the skeleton tried again, realizing its mistake. It took a step back and gave her foot a gentle shake. Some people could be very grumpy when they first woke up, and it wanted to make sure that it was outside of easy punching range. And to wake someone up while standing over them in the nude? No. Not going to happen. Situations like this needed to be handled tactfully.

Still, the corpse remained silent.

“Um,” the skeleton thought out loud, noticing another possible mistake. “Are you dead, or are you dead dead?” it asked, not quite sure how to confirm things.

This time the woman responded by melting.

Once again reminded that it had no idea what was going on, the skeleton took another step back, so as not to interfere in… whatever it was that was happening.

The woman’s flesh sloughed off her bones like a thick multicolored soup, and without anything to hold it in place, her hair was pulled to the floor under its own weight. Fixated on the spectacle before it, the skeleton was disappointed to see that the woman’s bones were a normal, if a slightly wet white color, and that like the hair, they too collapsed when the meat and tendons left them.

“Is she not becoming like me? Then why was she here? Did something go wrong or does it just take more time?”

Concerned, the skeleton continued to watch. It didn’t know what to do. It didn’t even have the slightest clue what was happening. But it felt that whatever was happening to the old woman was important, and it needed to be here to bear witness.

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The flesh, now completely liquefied, began to bubble and froth. In a slow undulating movement, it spiraled upwards, and before the skeleton could react, leapt forwards like a snake, striking the middle of the ribcage and started spreading from bone to bone.

“Alright, now this is just getting creepy,” thought the skeleton, beginning to feel truly unnerved for the first time.

“I’m sorry if I bothered you, Ma’am, but you’ve made your point and you can stop now. I’m as confused as you are, so if you’ll just let me go, we can probably figure out an explanation all of this.”

As the ooze spread, panic set in with it. The skeleton tried to shake, pull, and brush the stuff from its bones, but everywhere it touched only served to give the fluid further hold of its body.

“This is not right. This is very not right! What the fuck? What is going on? Please let me go! What the fuck? Please!”

By the time the once-flesh had engulfed its skull, the skeleton was screaming.

* * * * *

Some time later, in the room that was not a hospital and definitely not a morgue, a girl who had once been a skeleton was curled up in a ball, shuddering and twitching. The blissful detachment from reality that had existed in her mind was gone, replaced with brains and blood and crushing existential dread. The unnatural immensity of what had just happened drowned her in wave after wave of terror, and it had been all she could do to crawl into a corner and collapse.

A hundred different thoughts assaulted her from every direction. Who was she? What was she? What was this place and how did she get here? The questions repeated themselves over and over, sometimes with different words or phrasing, but the same questions nonetheless. They were important questions, she knew, but her panic grew with each one she couldn’t answer. Each one another weight to keep her rooted in place.

Finally, after what felt like, and probably was, several hours, her mental paralysis began to give way. Her thoughts became more ordered. She had not mustered up any courage or determination. There had been no great willpower to help her face her fears. She was simply too exhausted and numb to continue on as she had been. It was pure resignation that finally broke her out of her stupor and allowed her to focus.

“Okay,” she thought. She made the word as clear as she could, hoping to use it to separate the thoughts from before from the thinking she would do now.

“Okay.”

She said it aloud this time, just to be sure.

“I’ll just think out loud. It’ll help me focus and keep my thoughts slow enough to manage. That usually seems to work.”

“Wait…”

“Usually?”

If something usually worked for her, that meant that she had done something before, and if she knew she had done something before, which she was sure she did, that meant that she had memories!

The girl’s eyes opened wide at the thought, and a smile, her first of the day, spread across her face.

“Yes! Thank you circular logic! I know I have memories, but I need to… to… I need to trigger them first? Yes.”

She looked around the room searching for some spark of inspiration, and her smile died when she saw the bones. The woman’s bones. The bones where the body had been. The body that was now… on her.

Her breath became labored as panic threatened to overwhelm her again, but before it could, another equally dark realization struck her, and the two somehow balanced each other out. The idea had seemed natural and obvious to her as a skeleton, but had been mostly ignored in favor of everything else once she had gained her… body.

She had been a skeleton.

Skeletons were dead.

She had been dead.

She reached up and felt her face. She looked down at her body. She was still naked, but at least she wasn’t bone naked any more. She didn’t feel dead. Physically she felt fine. All of this flesh had come from that woman’s body, but it didn’t look old. Even her knuckles barely had a crease to them.

“Why do I have a belly button? I wasn’t born, so why is it there?”

She blinked and shook her head, trying to clear her mind of distractions.

“Who fucking cares about a belly button? Compared to everything else that’s happened today, our belly button or lack thereof is hardly a concern. At most that just means we can take “magical clone” off the list of possibilities.”

She sighed in exasperation, getting the feeling that it would only be the first of many to come.

“Now where were we?”

“Asking ourselves stupid questions?”

“It’s better than what we’ve been doing. Or do you want to stay here in the corner forever?”

“Of course not! But talking to myself isn’t much of an improvement.”

She looked down, grimaced, and slowly stood up. Her butt was sore from sitting bare-assed on the stone floor for so long, and her muscles had gotten stiff.

Looking around the room once more, and purposefully not looking at the bones, she quickly came to the conclusion that it was creepy. A simple, off-white, rectangular room. It was spacious, considering the general lack of furniture, and big enough to overide the optical illusion of smallness that frequently accompanied an empty room. A set of double doors stood in the middle of one of the longer sides. It wasn’t overtly ominous, not counting the bones of course. It was just so… sterile and lacking in life. Her skeleton-self had been right when it compared this place to a hospital or morgue. It all felt so barren. Even the few shelves and tables were practically devoid of clutter. The small number of empty jars and flasks sitting around seemed like they were only there to give the furniture purpose.

The only thing that was even remotely normal was an open book left on a table.

Eyeballing the door warily she walked towards the table. Wandering aimless and naked around an unknown building didn’t seem like a good idea just yet, and since no one had arrived in the previous hours, she probably had some time to gather any clues at hand. Also, she wasn’t ready to leave the now comfortable creepiness of the only place she felt like she knew.

The book on the table was clearly not literature or any kind of reference manual. It was a notebook filled with neat handwriting. Several parts had been crossed out and rewritten, and little memos filled the margins. The girl knew she had never seen this language before, but somehow their meaning filled her mind. Almost immediately, she was forced to pull her head back in a failed attempt to avoid an onrushing headache. Every part of her head felt like it was being squeezed and she was now more than a little dizzy.

“Ow! The fuck was that?”

The girl continued to swear as she blinked and rubbed at her eyes, half surprised that they weren’t bleeding. Luckily, the pain and vertigo receded quickly.

“What kind of book jumps into your brain?”

She paused in her yelling to look back at the floor around the two platforms in the middle of the room. The red lines had faded without a trace, but she could distinctly remember them being there.

“The magic kind, probably,” she said with a huff.

The girl glared down at the book suspiciously, sighed, and forward again, ready to pull herself back if needed. This time however, the writing came to her more easily. She could feel her mind working overtime to process the words, but the tension in her head was mild, and felt more like the ache of exercising an underused muscle.

The first page was full of neatly written thoughts and notes about… something. It seemed to be details about some kind of an experiment or spell, but she’d probably have to start from the front if she wanted to get the full picture, and she didn’t have time for that. She was also beginning to suspect that it wasn’t the book doing the translation, but her. There were more than a few words that simply didn’t translate. Whatever written was about a topic that was far too complex for her to understand. Or maybe, whatever language she thought in didn’t have a word for the ideas that were written down.

The next page was very different from the first. Instead of the neatly organized notes and bullet points, it had the general shape of a letter. Compared to the page before, it looked to have been written hastily. The letters were larger, less precise, and little attention had been payed to keeping the words in anything resembling a straight line.

She read the first sentence, but had to stop and suppress an urge to throw the book across the room.

“No! No! Goddammit, no!” She yelled, swore again, and pointed an accusatory finger at the book. It continued to sit there, untouched and unaware of the anger suddenly being sent in its direction. “I don’t know anything, but even I know that nothing good ever starts off with a line like that!”

The girl continued to swear under her breath and began to pace around the room. Where before she had avoided looking at the bones, she now glared daggers at them, sure that she had found the source of her problems. After calming down enough to be sure that she wouldn’t do any unspeakable acts of violence to the notebook, she returned to the table and read the page in full. Then she read it again. And again.

If you are reading this, then I am dead, and my body is likely in the room with you. The spell of your creation was too large, even for me, but I have already begun, and I cannot will not let it stop now. I am old, and my own death means little at this point. It is a small price to pay for the salvation of a soul.

When I found you, you were floating adrift in the void. Your soul was lost, and broken from the cycle of reincarnation. It would have been destined for oblivion, had I not brought you back.

I am sorry I could not be around to help you and guide you further. The notebook you hold has most of the information you will need to understand what you now are. My apologies for its illegibility and incompleteness. It was never intended to be read by anyone but myself, and what I did today went far beyond my original plans. I had hoped to be able to explain this all to you in person.

As to who you are, that is for you to discover. Only you can decide that, and do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

I wish I could write more for you, but I can already feel my life reaching its end, and yours must have its chance to begin. The world calls to you, even as it bids me farewell.

Perhaps I will meet you in my next life, and we can introduce ourselves properly then.

The girl closed the book and returned to her corner.

She had her answers, but she didn’t like them. Who was she? Nobody. Just some dead person. What was she? Some crazy witch’s science project. What was this place and how did she get here? The crazy witch brought her to her house, but didn’t stick around long enough to give her a tour.

The girl groaned and rolled onto her side. The mental exhaustion had finally fully caught up with her. She knew that it wasn’t the best place to sleep, but at this point she was too tired to care and too tired to think straight.

As she closed her eyes and let the darkness take her, one final thought crossed her mind.

“So why do I have a belly button?”