As his sight adjusted to the sudden glare of light, he looked around and saw a scene exceptionally different than his prior location. He was floating on a hill in a lush green meadow, bejeweled with wildflowers, and surrounded by tall trees. The sky was a brilliant robin’s egg blue, and the sun floated in the sky like a golden egg. The scene shocked him to his core. It was a dramatic change from the inky void he had floated in for what felt like eons.
Along with the scenery, he felt another change arising from within. Whispers of memories were floating up from the depths of his mind. It felt like waking up from hibernation. Previously, the vast majority of his mind had been shut down with only a small fraction observing what was going on and making decisions. Foremost of those memories was something he could not believe he had forgotten, his name.
His name was Aris Kontos. He was 25 years old, and he was from Earth. Unfortunately, that was about all he remembered. He knew he had once had a family, but he didn’t know their names or faces. He didn’t know where he lived in, or if he had always lived there. He didn’t know if he had friends, loved ones, or anything else.
His memories had sat in his mind like old clothes shoved in a wardrobe. And like abandoned things do, they faded and disintegrated until only scraps remained. He saw broken memories flash in his mind’s eye (the smell of the ocean, the touch of another’s skin, the sweet taste of fruit) and felt a deep sense of loss. Aris was left with the pieces of a human mind, his name, and not much else. He didn’t even have a body.
Aris truly looked at himself for the first time in his memory, taking in his form entirely. He was a floating sphere-like ball of undulating silver light made of countless strands of silvery spirit, making him appear like a jumbled ball of thread and yarn. However, unlike a ball of yarn, there wasn’t just one single end strand. A better comparison might be to a great ball of snakes, writhing and squirming continuously with multiple heads poking out and looking around, because Aris could see out of his strands. Every exposed piece observed the world around him, giving him an unparalleled view of every angle. It was through a few of those extended strands, sticking straight out like a pole, that he was able to see himself.
He didn’t know quite how to feel. Emotion felt very distant without a human body. His feelings were muted and washed out. For a while, he did nothing but watch his body eddy and undulate in unseen winds.
As Aris stared unblinkingly (no need to blink when you don’t have eyes), he noticed flecks of golden light all around him. He watched them float through the air and saw them flying over to a gash in space, which must have been the path he opened to get to this hill. Gradually, more and more specks gathered around the cut until before long the entire area was filled with a mist of gold. He watched carefully, wondering what was going on, and watched as the flecks pressed up against the torn edges of reality. When the flecks connected with the edges of the tear, the flecks disappeared, and the rip in space shrunk.
‘How interesting,’ Aris thought to himself, ‘it looks like they’re mending the hole. I never want to return to that soul-sucking pit of hell, so that is fine by me.’
The healing was gradual, but soon reality started stitching itself together faster and faster as the twinkling golden flecks continued to come pouring in from all directions. Before long, there was an ocean of light, and the hole was now only the size of a pinhole. Then, without even a sound, that hole also disappeared, leaving not even a ripple to note something had once been there.
It was difficult for Aris to see by that point; it was almost like he was floating in a thick ocean of gold. But he noticed something interesting. His vision was layered now. In one layer of sight, he saw nothing but gold surrounding him like a blizzard. In the second layer, there was not even a fragment of gold. He simply saw the same emerald-green meadow, the brilliant blue sky – now a bit darker as some time had passed and the sun was on its way down – and the dark forest ringing in the meadow.
Aris didn’t have to flip back and forth between the two ways of seeing. Rather, it was like looking out of eyes. He could look through one individually by closing the other eye, or he could leave them both open and let his sight combine. However, he still could switch between them both if he wanted to see something separately.
He flickered between the two layers of sight for a bit, noticing the clarity of his “normal” vision (without the golden lights). Aris thought he remembered needing glasses before (a quick flash of wire-rimmed glass popping into his mind), but now he had better-than-perfect vision. Each tendril had the sight of an eagle. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t see.
Aris did notice something concerning when he went back to his normal, combined vision. The blizzard of light was growing stronger and more concentrated; strong enough that it blocked out the sun in his golden sight.
Aris decided to look for shelter from this storm. He willed his body to move down the slope towards the distant trees, but he felt something slowing him. The light was coagulating into a thick and gummy shell, and it was darkening, quickly darkening his view.
Aris reached out to the tendrils tucked away in hidden dimensions. He slipped them into this new reality from different angles all around him – but a few feet away, just in case – all to get a better look at what was happening. What he saw was shocking. The light storm wasn’t getting stronger, the whole thing was very quickly compressing around Aris’s centralized orb. As it shrunk, the golden light faded and disappeared leaving behind a large fleshy mass.
‘…What the fuck,’ was the only thought that went through Aris’s mind. He was completely bewildered. Too much had happened within the past hour.
The blob of flesh didn’t slow down because of Aris’s confusion, it was very rapidly shaping itself. It was like Aris was watching a timelapse video of an artist shaping clay (a very random memory to retain). The large blob was first lengthened vertically. Next, slashes were made at the base of the blob, splitting it into two pillars. Then, two slashes were made on its side, forming simplified arms.
‘Is that a body?’ Aris thought in shock. A snapshot of a memory flashed through his mind. He was looking into a mirror, it looked like he was getting dressed for a day at work. He saw and remembered his olive skin, slightly tanned from the sun. He had medium-length hair, still damp and lightly curled from a shower (he remembered feeling a cool drop of water sliding down his spine. Was it a different memory?), colored a deep chocolate brown, and flecked with strands of brilliant copper. He was smiling at something, he couldn’t remember what, but he saw laughter dancing in his eyes, eyes that were such a deep brown they sometimes looked ink black. In this memory, though, sunlight streamed through an open window and struck his eyes as he laughed, making hidden layers of coffee and copper ripple and sparkle.
The memory was so clear, that Aris felt like he was still there. He wanted nothing more than to be that man again.
Grief rippled through him, darkening his mood and slowing his thoughts. He did not know what had changed, how he had gone from being a man to being this, thing. The memory eluded him, buried deep in the depths of his mind, or (more likely), gone forever. It probably decayed into nothing during his eternities of isolation, like the name of his mother and the face of his father.
Those thoughts were knife-sharp, and they cut deep into the flesh of his mind, drawing blood. Aris shut down his vision for a moment, retreating from his sight and feeling the pain and sadness of his memories instead. He didn’t want to see right now. The emptiness of his mind brought peace. He tried to focus on his breathing, only to remember he no longer had lungs. But that didn’t stop him. Instead, he focused on the memory of breathing. The inflow of air through his nose, down his throat, filling his lungs to the brim. The sensation of his chest expanding, then releasing. The gentle decompression of his chest as air gently flowed out through his mouth. He repeated the memory. In…then out. In…then out. Over, and over, and over until he felt peace again. Then, with a sigh, he opened his eyes.
Yet again, Aris experienced another change. The sub-space strands he had brought in earlier still saw everything around them, a full 360-degree field of vision, restricted by nothing. His core body on the other hand was more limited. He only saw through two holes, more specifically, two eyes.
Aris had a body again. His secondary strands saw it clear as day. The roughly shaped flesh blob was no longer rough. He was looking at a perfect replica of his old human body. Before his eyes, he watched (and felt) as his hair sprouted and grew into wild curls, riotously tangling around his ears. His entire body itched like mad.
Aris quickly moved his hands upwards, marveling at the sensation of having a body once again. He immediately began frantically scratching everywhere he could reach with his freshly sprouted nails (which also itched). He started at the top of his head, working down his neck, across his shoulders and arms, down his chest, groin, and thighs, around his legs, and down to his toes. The only area he couldn’t fully reach was his back, so he threw himself onto the grassy hill and started wriggling around (quite the odd sight to see through his secondary strands) until the itching stopped and he finally knew peace.
Aris lay there for a while, luxuriating in no longer itching. After being so long without any sensation, he closed his body’s eyes and basked in the setting sun, feeling its rays fall through the clouds and soak into his skin, warming his skin and hair with its heat.
While his body did that, he popped a few sub-space/secondary strands a little closer to his body to examine it further. It was perfect to the eyes of his strands, everything exactly as he remembered it in his brief glimpse of memory, but without any scars, blemishes, wrinkles, or calluses. He saw it all. There was just one problem. He was able to see everything so well because apparently, whatever created his body had not provided any clothing initially, and it didn’t look like anything was going to rectify the situation.
Aris sighed before slowly sitting up. He opened his eyes, looked around, and then stretched. His body felt exceptional. His muscles were stronger than ever before (from what he could remember, for what that’s worth), and they moved as smooth as silk. His eyesight was as perfect as through his tendrils (no need for glasses at all), and he could even still access the overlayed golden sight. The air was full of flecks of gold, not nearly as present as before, but they still drifted everywhere he looked like little specks of dust.
The blizzard of gold was entirely gone. He thought it was fully used up in the patching of the hole he had created, with the large remainder going towards forming his body. He had no idea what the light was or how it did what it did, but he did know one thing. It had to be magic.
He watched a fleck of light drift by his body, drifting along an unfelt current like a blundering bumblebee, so he reached out a finger and touched it. He didn’t feel anything when he made contact, but he watched as it was immediately sucked into the tip of his finger. He waved his hand around, but no matter what he did, the light stayed within him. It was also gradually flowing down towards the base of his finger, still perfectly visible to his golden sight.
He wasn’t at all worried about it. His entire body had been shaped using this light, but he was curious about what it was doing. He stretched out his arm and watched as the light floated down from his finger, into his wrist, and down his arm heading towards his chest.
Switching perspectives, he moved one of his tendrils closer to his body, so he didn’t have to crane his neck. The light had been gradually speeding up after it entered his body, almost like it was being suctioned somewhere. It quickly zipped from the base of his arm, through his upper torso, heading straight to his gut. The second it reached that point it froze in place and Aris felt a brief flash of warmth flicker through his body. It was so miniscule that he doubted he would normally notice unless he was paying very close attention.
‘How bizarre,’ Aris thought, ‘It looks like my body has a spot specifically for holding this light. Is it like a stomach? What does this body use it for; I wonder? Did my old body have this as well?’
He decided he should collect more to find out. Rather than getting up and chasing the shimmering flecks of light like a gold miner on an acid trip, he attempted to gather them using his strands—a decision that recalled a question that had been waiting to think about for ages.
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‘What the hell are these strands?’ Aris brought one of them closer to his eyes for closer inspection. He could see the strand in both of his sight methods. It wasn’t something he could turn off, but he felt there was something unnatural about being able to see them. They were silvery and pearlescent, but translucent. When he held them up to his eyes and looked directly through them, his sight was barely occluded. There was just a faint tinge of silver to the world.
Aris frowned lightly. Reaching out with his hand, he tried touching the strand, but his hand passed through it like it wasn’t even there. There wasn’t a slight catch in the air, a chill, or anything to indicate something was there.
He looked down and plucked a small blade of grass from the ground. Cupping it in his hands, he tried to pick it up with his strand, but his strand passed right through.
Trying something new, he shifted in a dozen more strands from their holding spaces. Then, he layered them on top of one another, like pages in a book, before reaching out with the twisted and combined tentacle and trying to lift the blade. For a moment, it felt like he got a hold of something, but whatever it was the tentacles touched quickly faded and disappeared, leaving him nothing to grasp. Further attempts met the same fate. No success.
Aris decided to summarize what he thought, ‘So, these are intangible and incorporeal. It doesn’t look like they can affect the world. They are a part of me, but they’re capable of doing things that a normal body cannot, like existing in multiple dimensions at once.’
Aris decided to run a few more tests, stretching out his tendrils as far as was comfortable. With a thought, the tendrils immediately went coursing out, flying in all directions in a sphere, gradually stopping approximately half a mile out in all directions, more than enough to cover the entire meadow and a decent distance into the forest. The sensation and sight were incredible.
Everything around the strands was visible, each strand acting like an extension of his body. He didn’t have to truly switch between strands and his body either. It wasn’t like he was flipping between channels on a television, the information from them all was easily amalgamated and analyzed by his mind. They weren’t all originating from him like some ghostly octopus either (or at least it didn’t look that way from what was visible. All strands eventually connected back to his core body, but some took paths through sub-dimensions to get there). He was able to send them wherever he wanted, having them slip through reality from any angle he could imagine. They warped into reality like stalks of corn, sprouting from the ground to the sky, the sky to the ground, and everything in between.
After filling the half-mile sphere with regularly spaced strands to give him full coverage, Aris absorbed the large influx of information. He saw birds in their trees, worms in the dirt, burrowing creatures, and growing plants, he saw it all.
But Aris wasn’t done. This was just what was comfortable. He reached out to the threads sitting right at the border of his sphere and sent them flying outwards. He saw 0.6 miles, then 0.7. By 0.8 he felt a slight burn, 0.9 a strain, and at one full mile, he felt he couldn’t safely go further.
Slowly, he reigned the threads in, pulling them back until most drifted within the half-mile range, with just a few sitting at 0.6 miles, lightly pushing him for possible further growth.
After Aris finished settling the strands, he noticed something important. His core was very quickly filling with light. He looked like an hourglass accumulating grains of sand. Focusing his attention inwards, he saw they were appearing out of small folds within him, twisting out of the sideways dimensions straight into his core.
Aris flicked back through his recent memories and marveled at their clarity. Each one was etched into his mind so firmly he knew he wouldn’t forget anything. He watched the explosion of his strands outward into the meadow and saw them cut through the air, all of them colliding with the flecks of gold drifting in the air. In his memories, he felt them flow through those strands, down to their base, where they shifted and folded, following the shape of the tendrils, until they were deposited directly into his core.
‘Well,’ Aris thought, ‘that answers my original question. I can use these threads to collect those gold flecks, I’m not limited to using just my body. I think I know what these silvery strands/threads are too. I think this is my soul. It holds my consciousness, it’s incorporeal, and I can use it to operate my new body. Did I die?’ Aris thought in mild disbelief, ‘I must have died, and somehow my soul got stuck in that other dimension, and now I’m here. Or maybe that was reincarnation? Was that supposed to happen? I know I’m not on Earth, there’s no golden magic there. Or maybe there is, and I couldn’t see it? Where am I? Is this Earth or something else? Is anyone else here?’
Aris felt some mounting anxiety, although it felt strangely muted still, even with his new body. He decided to add to his summary of what he now thought, ‘I’m a soul that somehow regained my body’ he thought while feeling his skin with his hands. ‘I believe I’m in an unknown world that appears to have magic. I believe the magic is powered by these golden flecks of light (since that’s what created my body). This energy is everywhere, but I don’t know its origins currently. The light is collectible by me directly (through my body), and indirectly (through my soul strands and threads). Is it collectible by other beings?’
A recent memory called Aris’s attention. He fell into the recollection of something a thread saw. It was crystal clear, as fresh in his mind as if it was happening that second, instead of being minutes old…
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A small sapling grew on the mossy forest floor. It was delicate, still young, only about 3 years old. Paper-like sage green leaves hung lightly from one of the tree’s whip-thin branches. The tree stood in a small clearing, and light was falling through a hole in the canopy. A tree had fallen a few years ago. Its body was decaying on the ground near the sapling, clearly the cause of the canopy’s gap.
A tendril floated in the center of the clearing, about halfway between the canopy and the ground. It had been placed there during Aris’s initial expansion to cover this section of the forest. It could see other soul-strands spaced evenly in every direction. Each strand was different. Some were like hairs, gossamer thin and nearly invisible. Others were more like a course thread, slightly thicker and more visible to his sight. At the top of the thickness range were soul-strands as wide as fingers, more like stalks of seaweed than strands or threads, but there were very few of these. This specific strand was in the middle of the range. It floated in the air like unspooled yarn, soaking in the sunlight and the occasional errant wisp of golden energy.
As the soul-strand watched the clearing, it noticed that a large piece of golden energy (about the size of a coin instead of the dust or seed-sized pieces the strands normally saw) had popped out near the crown of a fully-grown tree. The energy drifted away from the tree, falling as slowly as a snowflake. Gradually, it made its way towards the middle of the clearing, meandering in the currents and eddies only energy seemed to feel. As it approached the sapling, falling off-center enough that it would miss the young tree, it fell into some kind of suction patch. It was then briskly course-corrected and pulled straight into the closest leaf. The second it touched the leaf; it was absorbed and promptly disappeared from the strand’s sight.
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Recalling that memory was an interesting sensation. It took less than a second to do and it made Aris realize something fascinating. He had thousands of new memories of sights and sounds flowing in from each soul-strand every second. He was seeing birds, trees, flowers, mushrooms, decaying matter, small rodent-like creatures, insects, and everything imaginable. He heard the buzzing of flies, the musical songs of birds, the soft pitter-pat of animal paws on rotting leaves, and the gentle crumbling of dirt as something small dug underground.
The staggering part of it all was that each sight and sound felt the same as if he was seeing and hearing them with his own eyes and ears. They sat in his memory the same, and he knew everything that he saw and heard. It wasn’t sitting in the back of his mind waiting to be cataloged and processed. He didn’t have to sift through the enormous amount of information flowing in every breath. It was already done, and it was already there, already impacting every decision he made with the breadth of information he had at his fingertips.
Aris knew if he stood up and walked down the backside of his hill, he would see a boulder flecked with red ochre pigment that resembled a crashing wave. Just underneath that boulder, there was a collection of tiny bone shards from some small creature, bleached white from the sun and the wind. The bones were scattered and broken, lying on the dirt encircling the boulder where no grass grew, like toys left behind after a child’s play. He didn’t have to walk over and see them to know they were there.
Aris also knew that when he had stretched his sphere of sight to see one square mile, there had been exactly 9 birds (along with 5 pale green speckled eggs in one nest), 21 rodents (including their babies), and one particularly fluffy cat sunbathing on a rock within his range. He had also seen a vast variety of flowers, grasses, bushes, trees, mosses, and other plants (his favorite being a light pastel purple moss growing near a small burbling spring).
Having that much information at his fingertips – or the tips of his strands – was invigorating. Each memory was stored in his mind perfectly. He could feel that he would never forget anything, not even the lovely image of one of the 21 rodents which was currently shitting. ‘How lovely,’ Aris rolled his eyes.
‘Now, back to my initial question,’ he thought to himself, ‘so, other beings can, and do, collect this golden energy. Even if they’re just trees. And, just like me, they draw it into their bodies through physical contact. Once it’s in their bodies, I cannot see it; even if they’re a tree.’ This was corroborated by multiple sights of golden flecks touching birds and rodents, sinking into their bodies, and disappearing.
However, something unique to the plants and animals was some kind of golden light suction. As Aris had seen with the young tree, that large chunk of golden energy would have missed the sapling entirely on its original course. However, once it got close to the sapling (his memories showed it happened once it was within two feet of the sapling’s crown), it was drawn directly towards the tree.
The same thing happened with the birds. They would be gliding through the air, just gently coasting, and fragments of energy that would have passed them by were drawn to them, almost magnetically. Some pieces were even pulled in their wake, speeding up to catch them as they flew by before sinking into their feathers.
‘How interesting,’ Aris thought mildly.
He paused and looked up at the sky. The sun was still slowly falling, and he could see night was coming. By his best estimate, he had about five hours until sunset. Five hours to find shelter, food, and (most importantly) some clothing. Aris knew there was no one around to see him, and birds and rodents didn’t care if they were flashed by his naked ass, but he had his principles.
A breeze drifted across Aris’s back raising a wave of goosebumps. He stood up slowly, luxuriating again in the sensation of his body, before walking down the gently sloped front of the hill. As he walked, he slid some of his core soul-strands out of his body. There was a resistance in his body like it didn’t want them to come out, but it might as well have been tissue paper trying to hold back a river.
The strands that slithered out whipped around him about ten feet in all directions. They helped him inspect every part of the hill in front of him so he could select a path clear of thorns, sharp rocks, and dried animal shit. Every step he took landed on silky grass, smooth stones, or bare dirt, which was important since his new body was as uncalloused as a newborn’s. Other strands watched his back, the sky above him, and the ground beneath him (not that he could see underground since there was no light. Those strands instead listened for digging tremors and searched for any animal tunnels he might step into). As a result, Aris looked like an enraged octopus to the eyes of his more distant soul-strands.
‘I have a lot more than eight strands, though. What would that make me? A Centapus? A Miliapus? Definitely a very important thing to resolve.’ Aris smiled amusedly at the thought and looked at a drifting cloud.
One side effect of the furious flailing of his soul-strands was that Aris gathered every iota of golden light in his path. He didn’t know how to create the mysterious suction all the plants and animals had, but who needs technique when you have brute force?
‘I do. I need technique,’ Aris thought with a mental sigh, ‘I look like a lunatic. Thank heavens it doesn’t look like these animals can see my soul-strands. They haven’t flinched at them appearing in their forest.’
Aris didn’t know what to do. He studied the rippling field of grass dotted with wildflowers (no need to watch where he was stepping with his eyes. He had strands for that) and thought about what to do next. His priority was finding shelter near food and water. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty yet, but that could change quickly now that he was up and moving. After that, he needed to find something he could use as clothing. The weather felt mild, and with everything blossoming and babies being born, it must be late spring, so nights should be getting warmer, but spring was also full of storms, so he needed to be prepared for sudden bursts of bad weather.
Thinking through all this made Aris realize something interesting. He had next to no memories of who he was, but it looked like he had retained a lot of context. He knew his name, he knew how to speak, read, and write. He knew how to count, how to estimate time based on the sun, and he knew the flow of the seasons. What else was tucked away in a corner of his mind, waiting for something to spark a remembrance?
His old memories weren’t like the new ones he was creating. They were soft and intangible. If his new memories were like photographs, perfect replicas of everything that happened, automatically analyzed, categorized, and filed away for easy retrieval, his old memories were impressionistic watercolors chucked into a closet, covered in dust and spiderwebs. Who knew how reliable they were or when they’d be found?
Aris came out of his thoughts with a twitch and looked around him. He had paused at the edge of the forest. At the border of the meadow, a few small saplings were sticking out of the calf-high grass. Then, the meadow ended, and the forest began. There wasn’t a gradual transition. The trees were massive, easily five times his height, each a different variety. He didn’t remember trees very well, but in his opinion, they all looked great.
Aris smiled faintly, extended his leg, and stepped onto the thin covering of dried leaves. They crunched faintly under the soft press of his toes. He inhaled through his nose, smelling the faint smell of mulch, decaying leaves, and tree sap. The air was fresh and crisp with a slight chill to it. He exhaled, squared his shoulders, and set out to explore the forest.