The gray mist boiled, rushing in from every direction and closing around him like a fist. When it hit his face he expected it to be cold or wet. Instead it took his vision. When he took a deep breath to steady himself he realized that he couldn't feel the misty air moving into his lungs. He couldn't smell the wet, clean scent of mist the way he remembered it. He couldn't taste the hint of water on his tongue.

Disoriented, he tried to lift his arms to steady himself, but he couldn’t feel those either. He had no sense of motion, no sense of where his arms or legs were. He wasn't falling, he knew. He probably wasn't moving in any direction, but he couldn't be sure anymore. He was just there. Locked inside his own mind.

He tried talking to himself. That would help him stay calm. That usually worked. And it did this time, too, but not for long, because when he tried to describe what he had just seen, where he had been just a few moments ago, the words began to slip away from him. He reached after them, irritated by that feeling of having a hole where a word should be. But the words kept slipping farther away.

That felt strange. And frustrating.

He wanted something clear, something stable to focus on, so he tried describing something else: the last time he had seen mist on a beautiful, crisp morning. But those words wouldn't come either. His frustration turned into worry.

Fine. He would focus on the last clear, bright thing he remembered. Whatever came to him. Anything. But as he reached, as he waited for a memory to appear, he realized that remembering was taking too long. It wasn't the words he was losing. It was the memories behind them. Familiar faces were becoming strangers. Places were becoming fuzzy, shadowy pictures.

Panic swamped him. He reached instinctively for the memories that were most dear to him as his life melted away into shreds.

He remembered red pennants emblazoned with the shell of a sea turtle. Hundreds of them were snapping in the breeze under a bright blue sky. He stood on a broad set of steps leading down to the harbor. The buildings all around him were made of gleaming white stone. Above him, the remnants of a battle fleet cast shadows on the harbor as they slowly limped down out of the sky. Every ship, shaped like a different fish and bristling with long guns on every side, was painted in white and gold. Almost all of them poured smoke out of gaping holes and the trails they left through the sky had turned the clouds a muddy black. But the crowd filling every dock in the harbor was roaring. They shouted and waved their red turtle shell flags. They wept as the first of the wounded ships touched down into the bay. It was over. The war was won. The enemy beyond the mountains had been defeated.

But who was it, he wondered, that had been beyond the mountains?

What had they done to his people? To him?

He reached for a different memory. Something smaller, simpler.

He bit down on a tender pastry. Buttery flakes stuck to his lips as he savored a jam made from raspberries and red chilis. It was a rare treat. The chilis could only be found in winter in the shade of crane willows.

But where did the crane willows grow? In which mountain pass? East beyond the village, or in the valleys on the other side of the city?

He let the fading memory go and reached blindly for something else.

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He heard the booming voice of a great serpent, crotchety in his old age. He listened to the ancient creature, his oldest friend, recite poetry to the last of its hatchlings. The hatchling was smaller than it should have been. The serpent's mate, the little one's mother, had wanted to swallow the little one up. She was young and she could try for stronger hatchlings with a younger mate, but the old serpent knew his time was ending and he would never sire another. So he kept this small one close. He fed the runt his own scales, his own flesh, his own bone, and as he watched the runt grow, he shared all the beautiful, sweet, and sorrowful things he knew.

But how had he become friends with a serpent? Why had he been allowed to listen to the old stories it knew? Had he been fed and taught in the same way?

He moved on.

He smelled summer hay in a barn. He smelled a fragrant, sweat soaked body laying next to him. They had just exhausted themselves together and now they lay resting. A companion had found them, turned red with embarrassment, and fled. They lay together the rest of the afternoon--laughing and laughing and laughing.

But when he tried to remember that laughing face, it was barely a face. Just a hazy smear. An echo.

And so was everything else he could recall. Everything has getting smaller, softer, more distant.

He saw a tower, windowless and black as a starless night, protruding from the underside of a cliff like the fang of some gargantuan beast.

He remembered that there was a cottage waiting for him at the edge of an onyx metropolis suspended in an amber sea.

He heard the mournful song of a leviathan fish, undulating through clear water like a ribbon. The leviathan was a beautiful, perfect yellow, and it was as brilliant as the sun, but the sight made him sad because it was singing him a solemn goodbye.

Everything he reached for fell away into nothingness. Everything that made him who he was, everything he’d earned through struggle and sacrifice receded like the fading edges of a dream. He was unmoored, flailing, colliding with emotional flotsam that broke into smaller and smaller pieces with every contact, every attempted recollection.

It was like drowning, he realized. And then he remembered, with a mixture of horror and perverse relief: I drowned once.

Hadn’t he? He recalled the hunger for air and he gasped–but then that horror was bleeding away as well, gone into nothingness. His gasp became a sigh.

A small portion of his mind watched this emptying out with unconcerned detachment. This was being done to him on purpose. But why, and by whom, he couldn't remember.

How could that be?

How… How could it be otherwise? The forgetting was essential for what was to come. He would need to start fresh.

He considered that strange, fleeting conviction. How could he possibly know that? How could he be certain this loss of himself was necessary?

Maybe he had done this to himself. Or maybe others had conspired against him? He had a last fleeting recollection of a presence. No, presences–many of them–watching. Accomplices to some enemy? To his own self-mutilation? Or was this loss incidental to some other happening? He couldn’t know. The knowledge had been there only moments ago, but it was receding along with everything else.

The last intuition of his former self was a conviction without context: he’d been swept clean of experience and primed for something new.

Then even that was gone.

In that last moment a voice filled his mind. It was deep, vast, commanding:

How will you be called?

A name? A name. Of course.

He couldn't know if the name that came to him had ever actually belonged to him. It may have been his and it may have belonged to a friend, a child, a lover, a passing acquaintance. But it appeared in his mind, clear and bright, and he claimed it.

“Max,” he said.

He echoed it to himself again and again and again. It was all he had, all he was.

The echo fell away into the void that had swallowed his memories.

Then the void closed in on itself.

He awoke.