It was like a fog. A stubborn, persistent fog. Not the sort that hovered over chilled waters at dawn, but the sort that lingered about the annals of a broken mind.
She blinked hard, like a body waking from a long slumber, and the sunlit wood came into focus. It was late afternoon. There was no conscious thought that allowed her to know this, but a brain long attuned to the fluctuations and rhythms of the natural world.
If she had the capacity to compare the sight of her hand to other hands she had seen before, she would have though her fingers were frightfully thin and brittle. But there was no recollection of hands, nor the people they belonged to. The same base instinct that told her it was close to nightfall prompted her to pluck the fronds of bittercress from the muddy soil and eat them.
Sensation remained. The yearning for warmth against the coming chill of winter. The keening pangs of hunger in her belly. The desire to scratch away the festering itch of tangled, wild hair that had gone long without a bath.
Waking was much as sleeping. One world was darker and quieter than the other. Sometimes it was hard to tell which world she walked in. Sometimes it was frightening to blink and not remember how she had gotten to wherever she was. The leaf-blanketed realm of the forest was familiar and foreign all at once.
She huddled within the fractured timbers of the old hunting shack because it kept the wind and frost at bay. Glassy, turquoise eyes stared at the large leather pack in the corner for hours on end. A narrow bag of some sort sat beside the pack. And next to that, a long, curved wooden object. They were covered in cobwebs and dried, brown leaves that had fluttered in through the holes in the roof. She knew them, but couldn't name them.
They must have belonged to someone else, long ago.
