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Her earliest memory is her cage.
It’s a monster with iron bars for teeth and a little girl as internal organs. The purpose of a cage is to contain, and her purpose is to be consumed — this is the earliest lesson she ever learned, and the only one that has yet to be disproven.
Contained within this memory was every color she would recognize for the rest of her childhood: gray, red, black, and white.
Gray was all of her surroundings, and all of the instruments that would be put inside her; red was everything that was already there, that they manipulated when they opened her up. Black was what she saw when she closed her eyes, or her shadow in her cell, or the complete darkness when candlelight was extinguished. White was the weak and brittle color that her hair—and eventually her skin—turned.
Years would pass before she saw blue, or green, or the yellow of sunlight. Even now, they were rarely actors in her dreams.
Her second earliest memory is her name, Annabelle.
She knew this word belonged to her because her sisters and brothers would refer to her when they used it, but she did not know how she recognized them, or even how she knew the syllables were meant for her. This knowledge was something bestowed upon the girl that arrived before her, not the girl who was inaugurated in that dungeon, and certainly not the specimen who escaped it.
Most remembrances of the name were uttered by her brother, Cassian, calling out to her between the solid walls of their cages that everything would be okay—a promise she knew to be false, before she even knew what promises were.
At one point, her little brother—whose name she did not even know, and never discovered—sounded like he was crying and babbling Annabelle before an operation he would not survive.
The remaining instances were from her sister, Lysithea, who would attempt to soothe her with song, a lullaby to replace the screech of machinery in her ears. The lyrics were lost to Annabelle, years later, but the broken melody remained like an itch that could never be scratched.
Once there was no use left for voices, a conclusion that even the youngest among them reached quickly, Annabelle never heard that name again. From then on she was just a body, living in barely the literal sense. That identification was absent from even her own mind, now plagued by only two consistencies: nightmares and blessed nothingness.
A memory that occurred much later, too far along in her life to distinguish with a number, but just as significant as the first two, was the embrace of her parents as she was returned to them. She did not remember their faces or their names, and it took everything in her power not to flinch at the feeling of another warm body coursing with blood, vibrating with it, against her own.
In an onslaught of distressing sensation, and despite the ringing in her ears, her mother’s voice was clear as day when she spoke her name.
“Welcome home, Lysithea.”
It did not even occur to her to correct them.