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Her name was Lucatiel of Mirrah. Her memories were wracked by some curse.
She knew that much.
Her more immediate memory had faded first, along with the murky depths of the past. Her childhood, her stature in Mirrah, the way out of the place she was in. Then, old events became more and more muddled, and she stopped remembering new things. She couldn’t put her life on a timeline, and she wasn’t sure how long she’d been wherever she was. Everything was coming apart, piece by piece. She could feel her entire life coming apart like a great completed puzzle gently unmaking itself. Lucatiel didn’t want the puzzle to be complete, or for it to fall apart for her to make anew. She simply wanted it to be. She didn’t want to die, or to carry on and restart. She wanted to exist; to remember; to see her past and recognise it as her own life.
To some, we don’t move ‘forward’ in time so much as we do backwards. They say that progressing through the flow of events, we walk backwards – back turned to the future, eyes facing the past. We see everything that has happened, and we may use it to inform our surroundings, and we may look to our sides to see others in our present. We never truly see the future we walk into.
Lucatiel could no longer see the past. She could look to it, and see, but she couldn’t understand what she saw. She could look to her side and see others, but she didn’t know who they were. She could look to her surroundings, but she had long since forgotten where she was.
And so, she kept walking.
There was a doorway in front of her, opening out onto a vast hall. A gigantic draconic skeleton was sprawled through much of the hall, flanked by long flights of stairs its arms and wings had crumbled over. Walking and not knowing where she was from, or going, or where she had been felt to Lucatiel like one lengthy dream. Maybe one day she’d awaken. Trouble with this dream was, it still held the occasional threat. A figure approached and made a slash at her with a sword. She took the brunt of the hit with a shield, fighting back with her own weapon with posture and elegance she had forgotten how she learned. The person went down to the ground, her blade not bloodied at all and their body crumbling into dust and fading.
Lucatiel felt sure she had once asked questions of herself in a moment like this. How did she learn to fight like that? Where did these weapons come from? But asking those questions just led down some rabbit hole of mystery, confusion and anger. Confusion had become the emotion she felt most frequently these days. Pursuing those questions she felt in those moments only led to worse things – so question it, she didn’t. Her name was Lucatiel of Mirrah. She had a sword and a shield. She knew how to fight. Her identity was simple, shallow, and an intrinsic fact. She had no purpose but to keep on moving into the future.
And so, she kept walking.
Beyond the hallway, there came a long corridor. There were monsters nearby in cages. Lucatiel didn’t like the idea of being locked in a cage. She wanted to keep on moving. She didn’t have a destination, but she had to carry out the action. It was all she had.
A great beast roared ahead – one not in a cage – and it began plodding towards her, which sped into a jog, then a thunderous charge.
Well, the action of moving was one of the things she had. She unsheathed the other.
Lucatiel sidestepped the great ogre, dashing around to its flank as it made a dive at where she had been stood moments ago. She prodded its back with her sword, drawing no blood from the thick rolls of skin. The beast’s response was simply to sit down in her direction with some force, which she moved again to the side of and let its momentum carry it onto its back. Then, she took the handle of her long sword in both hands, and with the weight of her whole body drove the blade into the side of its hefty gut. The ogre screamed and flailed its stubby limbs as she withdrew her sword, dodging this time to avoid the glutinous wave of thick blood and viscera that followed. One of its clawed paws caught her, snagging the fabric of her sleeve and slicing her arm. As the beast rolled onto its front to stand, Lucatiel moved to one end of its body and took a running start. Her sword pierced its one eye and lodged deep ogres head, and after a moment it ceased to move. Almost unscathed, she removed her greatsword from the corpse. Lucatiel tore some of the canvas from a large painting propped against a nearby wall and wiped her blade down.
Sometimes, in those moments, she felt some... rush. Could it be called self-preservation? She typically took a complete backseat when there was a threat made on her life, and let things handle themselves as if watching moments play out in a dream or theatre. She felt no compelling urge to preserve and didn’t quite know if she had a ‘self’ any more. Moving and fighting were so self-evident truths that she took no emotion from doing. Maybe that rush was something chasing her from whatever past she could no longer see. Maybe it was a part of being a human she had forgotten how to do. She remembered something. Just for a moment, she clutched onto a dying ember of who she was. Just one thing, she knew she had once said.
‘The longer I am here, the more madness I discover.’
It certainly felt true to where she found herself in this moment. Great paintings; caged and furious beasts; long corridors; a dragon’s skeleton draped across a vast open hall. New absurdities with every step.
The cut in her arm stung, and she held onto it as she looked at the corpse of the ogre. She knew what had made the cut occur. She knew when the cut had happened. She could feel that the cut had happened to her. She knew this body was hers.
And so, she kept walking.
The corridor came to an end, and she felt sun on her skin. She wanted to pause, to let the sensory experience of sunlight and warmth wash over her, but she kept moving. If it washed over her, she might drown. Perhaps she already had drowned in the action she had decided to take up. Still, she could breathe here. Doing what she was doing. She took a long drag of the fresh air. Could a drowned hollow do that?
The brief walk outdoors took her to a cage-like elevator. She kept moving, until she had entered and stepped on its plate, then waited. As the elevator’s chains began to creak and whine, the door swung closed behind her and shut on a latch. Lucatiel spun around and began to shake the door frantically. Something about the closed room was panicking her. Her eyes widened. The edges of her vision pulsed and blurred, and began to close in. Somewhere deep in her chest, beneath the armour, the battle scars, and the countless times she had died over and over, her still-beating heart began to race. She rattled the bars of her cage. She pounded them with her shield and shoulder. She braced against one side and kicked at the other. But the walls wouldn’t give, and in fact felt as though they were closing in on her.
And so, she slumped against a wall and cried.
Lucatiel took long breaths. The longest she could. She refused to drown, to be lost in the moment. Refused to lose her attachment to even the present. She looked around and held onto every thought she could muster. Her arm hurt because it had been cut fighting a beast, surrounded by cages. She was in a cage because she had walked into it. But she wasn’t in a cage by the beast, because she had come outside. She was moving upwards on noisy chains, the door to the cage having closed with the wind. She had stepped into the cage and stepped on a plate in its floor. She was in an elevator. Her actions had taken her to this moment, and she was in as much control now as she could possibly be. She rode the rush of feeling that had flooded through her body and got to her feet. Soon, the elevator would finish its climb, and she would be in more control again.
The thrill of battle and of injury breathed just as much life into her as stumbling through a panic attack in a tight space. Under her mask, seen by no one, she forced her face to wrinkle into a smile, and felt tears work their way through the creases it folded into her cheeks. She only had those creases and wrinkles when she smiled. She had met her first deaths at a fairly young age and began her descent into the curse that wracked her. Old age never got its chance to touch her, before she became one of the undead. She looked at herself, and at her murky past, and extrapolated what she could.
The elevator reached its peak, and her steadying hands found the latch that had locked her in, and after some fumbling she opened the door.
And so, she kept walking.
The elevator had carried her up to the top of a huge natural stone pillar. The sky here was dotted with soaring dragons, and she could make out where they had made their homes atop the rocky outcrops. Lucatiel could feel the blustery wind beating down on her, and she pushed on.
Stood at the cliff edge, was a figure again. For a moment she felt her sword arm prepare to re-enter its bloody reverie. Forcing herself into the front seat of her mind, she wrested the reins and approached. It was a figure she could recognise. Lucatiel removed her mask and approached her friend.
“How goes your journey?”
The other knight – a fellow bearer of the same curse – turned and saw her. Lucatiel smiled, but the bearer didn’t return the gesture. Their features were slack and pallid, their eyes a dull grey-white. They looked as though they’d seen their fair share of deaths in recent times. Lucatiel tried to speak again and reached for something she carried with her. Her friend saw this and reached for their sword, but Lucatiel put her other hand out.
“I won’t do harm. Do you not remember me?”
Lucatiel withdrew the small bundle of sticks from one of the bags on her armour. It was warm, even through her thick gauntlet. She stood close to her friend and placed the effigy in their hands, then pushed their fingers closed around it.
“My name is Lucatiel. I beg of you, remember my name. So you might your own.”
She met her fellow bearer of the curse’s eyes, and the clouded over irises were flooded with colour. Her friend blinked hard a few times and took their free hand to rub the bridge of their nose. The colour rushed back into their cheeks. Lucatiel’s fellow bearer of the curse came to, and gave her a warm smile.
“How goes your journey?”
“Much the same as yours, I’d wager. Let us proceed with caution, and go see to these dragons.”
And so, they kept walking.