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You had been aimlessly travelling a lot for the past few years, your memories hazy and strange. It felt like there were holes in your memory where you knew certain things ought to be, but you just couldn’t remember them.
It didn’t help that there were certain things throughout your daily life that felt like constant reminders of something big missing from it, and no matter how hard you wracked your brain for answers, you came up empty-handed.
First, you saw it in the red flowers that grow in patches by the river or in the forests. Spider lilies, is what you heard they were called. Their shape reminded you of something. You saw it in a lot of red things, like the expensive dyed silks on display at Midsummer’s festivals, or the warm colors that bleed together in a roaring campfire.
If you close your eyes and think hard enough, you can almost see the shape of a person wearing red. But the image is too fuzzy and you can never look at it for as long as you’d like to before it dissolves from your mind.
You could hear it in things, too. You heard it in the tones of a violin playing through the cool evening air. You heard it, of all places, in an elvish song you hear occasionally on your travels. It’s usually sung between lovers, or between a parent and their child. You were surprised you even understood all the words; you didn’t think you even understood that dialect of elvish.
If you think back as best you can, you can hear a voice singing the melody to you, but it’s muffled as though you are underwater, and you can’t tell exactly what the voice sounds like. All you know is that it’s a voice that makes your heart ache.
You felt it in the warmth of a campfire late at night, in the comforting invisible blanket of heat that surrounded you. You felt it in the warmth of a slept-in bed, and it actually makes you homesick, as though you felt something else should be in bed next to you, but there is only warmth where you have rested your own body.
If you lay in bed and think long enough, you can almost feel the presence of someone else, like a ghost beside you, but when you turn to what you think you feel there is never anything there.
You smelled it in the smoky burn of wood from the campfire, or in the smell of overcooked food. Once, you didn’t register that your meal was burning because the smell reminded you of something and it caused you to dissociate. You smelled it in a perfume on a woman at the marketplace, and it surprised you because the smell was so familiar to you despite the fact this woman was a complete stranger.
If you linger by the campfire and take it in, you can almost see the image of a fire dancing in someone’s hand, but the image is only a thought and never truly clear. Only an imaginative one.
You tasted it in many places. You tasted it in the meals you burned, though it was more the fact it was burned made you think of this. You thought of a fire someone could hold and wield. But there was one instance in particular you remembered more than anything.
You were in a small town when a stagecoach with a cooking demonstration stopped by. You don’t really remember what was being made on that day, but you remember the taste of the food and what the cook looked like. He was a very handsome high elf, and while you were certain you had never seen him before you had the strangest feeling of deja vu when you looked at him.
As you partook of the meal he prepared and offered you free of charge, you closed your eyes and imagined a figure standing in a kitchen, making something that smelled and tasted this good. But no matter how hard you pushed your thoughts, the vision never became clear enough to identify the figure, or even the kitchen they were standing in.
All of these memories of sensations reminding you of some long forgotten thing tormented you for years.
Until the day you died.
And you awoke in a swirl of black and red, watching your body as it burned to a crisp and the grass around it became black shimmering glass.
And you remembered.
It all came back in a torrent of thoughts, and it physically hurt even though there was so little you could feel in this form.
You remembered Lup.
Her evocation magic was so obvious now in the sights, smells, and warmth of every campfire you made in her absence.
She favored the reds you saw in the expensive Midsummer’s silks, and she almost always wore a red hairpiece with a similar shape of a spider lily to tie back her long hair.
She played the violin on the day you confessed your love to all reality through music, and she sang that elvish lullaby her mother used to sing on the nights when your anxiety overwhelmed you. On those same nights she’d lay beside you in bed with only the sheets separating your bare skin, stroking your arm as she sang.
She wore a specific perfume, that came from a bottle enchanted with conjuration so it’d never run out. She, and her brother, made most of the food you ate on your century long journey across reality. That was her brother that you saw running the cooking show, and you recognized him because you saw his features in both himself and his twin so many times before.
Now you remembered her, and it hurt. You screamed into the darkness even though nobody could hear you.
This will be the last time you find yourself in a world without her.
This time, you will find her.