Prologue
Way out
Prologue
"Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man's memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull."
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns
The sky was a dull gray when the young woman lying on the grass opened her eyes. Her entire body made her suffer when she got up to look at the scenery around her. Very high dark walls went around a large green area composed of trees and grass. There was nothing. No animals, no home, no town, only a lot of greenery. A low growl made the girl turn her head quickly as she tried to keep balance. Everything seemed to turn in her head to the point that maybe she was going to throw up.
When the landscape seemed to stop spinning, her gaze fell on a silhouette on the ground. It was a teenager, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old with dark skin. Another teenager had his face against the land and was maybe fifteen meters from the first boy. Another was to the right of the girl, then another and another. In total there were twenty-nine boys and only one girl. A sense of panic came over her when she noticed that the boys were beginning to wake up one by one.
''What is this place?'' Asked one.
''Where am I?'' Asked another one.
There were so many questions and so much noise that her head suddenly hurt her so much that her knees gave up under her weight as she clutched her head in her hands, trying to stop the flow of speech.
''Are you alright?'' Asked a boy who helped her getting up.
''I... I think so...'' She said with a little voice.
''What's your name?''
My name? My name is... is... What is my name? Her breath caught in her throat and her eyes widened. She had no memory, nothing. Her mind was a bottomless pit filled with darkness.
''I don't know! I don't know who I am!'' She almost scream. ''Do you? Do you know your name?''
''N...No... I'm like you.''
Other voices were raised with the same realization. Nobody knew their names, their age or even what they looked like. Through screams, sobs were heard and after some times they changed into screams of distress. The panic had burst between the teenagers. Seeing that the situation was going to degenerate, the girl runs away towards one of the forests. She had only one plan or at least this was her ideas: get out of this mess, hide and wake up from this nightmare.
When the screams were far enough from her to be only some merely murmurs, the girl suddenly stopped her run before letting her body fall to the ground, her face against the damp earth. With a slow and painful motion, she turned to look at the trees's leaves who blocked the sunlight or at least what they had of a sunlight.
''It's only a dream...'' She said in a whisper before bursting into tears. ''Please... Make it stop!''
