Miscellany by Chie

Memory

6. Memory

Prompt: Renewed shall be blade that was broken

Universe: Canon divergence (set in modern day)

Genre: Angsty

655 Words

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In his dream he had been a silver-white dog, running free under the star-speckled sky. He had felt a profound sadness when he had woken up from that dream, and briefly wondered if it had truly been just a dream or something much more.

The lines had blurred long ago; he had long since lost the ability to tell a dream from a memory or himself from the disguise.

He didn’t really know who he was anymore. There was just this nagging sense of wrongness in his bones. His gut seemed to tell him that it had not always been like this, that he had been someone different. But his mind was not so sure these days. Everything felt so faded, only occasionally there were flashes, like he was on the verge of remembering something long forgotten, but the sensation always eluded his fumbling attempts to catch it.

He padded to the window and gazed down. The lights and the noises of the city made him feel weary and troubled, though he couldn’t quite tell why.

It used to be different, a voice whined from some forgotten corner of his soul, and for a moment he could almost grasp a fleeting imagery of clear air, rolling grass and endless forests. But no, that had been just the landscape in his dog dream.

Shaking his head, he turned his back to the world and walked into his small kitchen.

His hands wrapped around his tea mug. They were soft and prone to tremors. Once, they must have been steady and strong, and he had the vague sense that they had been used to grabbing something quite different, something much sharper, but that faint flicker of awareness died as soon as it had appeared. Maybe that had been just another dream.

He dressed and gathered up his things: the keys, phone, and wallet.

The morning was cold and grey as he stepped out onto the street. He started to walk towards the station, glancing at his watch to make sure he would catch the train to work. The bite of the wind was making the tips of his ears ache. Soon, there might be snow. He sighed and hurried his steps. It was a dull day, just one in that long, endless succession of mundane, ordinary days.

And yet, today was different. Something had changed. Suddenly he could feel it – there was something in the air. A sensation that seemed to pierce him, that shook something somewhere deep in his soul.

It was a weird feeling. His steps slowed, although the people around him kept hurrying to their destinations.

It was a familiar feeling. He halted completely. Standing still in the moving crowd; a lone figure gazing up at the cloudy sky.

It was pure, bright and cold. It danced right around the edges of his senses, and made his spine tingle and the little hairs stand at the back of his neck.

A single word floated to his mind, somewhere from the murky depths.

Miko.

A new gust of wind hit him, and he started to tremble. It was carrying a scent, one among millions, but this one stood out like a single drop of colour in a world of grey.

Quivering from the top of his head to his toes, he gasped for breath, greedily inhaling more of that scent, sweet and achingly familiar.

It tugged at his heartstrings, and somewhere at the back of his mind, something was waking.   

The scent filled his lungs and made him think of sun-lit days, of the heat of the battle, of the weight of the sword in his hand, of the laughter of a little girl, of the coarse swearing of someone he had once known, of an arrow aimed straight at his heart.

He didn’t know when he had closed his eyes, but now he slowly opened them. They were glowing bright gold.

He remembered everything.