My second life was christened with a lungful of dust.
My eyes slammed open, and my shoulders curled inwards as the muscles in my chest bore down in an unforgiving, strangling contraction. Tiny pebbles of dirt lodged themselves in my throat, adhering to the insides of my body like flies in honey. I hacked, coughing and sputtering, trails of snot erupting from my nose, my knees retracting to my chest and my toes curling as my body violently rejected the foreign substance in my airway, leaving me dizzy as the floor I could not see rose up to meet my face.
My nose squished against the cobblestones, my cheek also flattening as the weight of my entire body crushed the left side of my face against the floor. My neck screamed in protest, my entire body bending over my head before ricocheting back onto the ground with a hard, fleshy sound. I wheezed, coughed, took a breath, coughed again. My fingers dug into the dirt between the stones as the world bled back to me in yellows, oranges, and burnt-up browns. As the world returned to a sickly kind of balance, one that seemed eerily quiet, I pulled my hand from beneath my body, lifting my head to rub away the salt water running in rivulets down my face.
I cleared my throat and spat.
The cobblestones underneath my hands were rough and unadorned, the stone cut into a hexagonal shape and hastily shoved into their places. There were scratches in the dirt between, and I looked at my filth-encrusted nails. The sight of them was surreal – I was unsure if the thin, brown hands before me were mine. I curled my fingers into my palm, pressing down hard, hard enough to come just short of drawing blood; the hands mirrored my motions exactly, and I could feel the sharp, jagged tips digging into my skin.
I pushed myself up so that the entirety of my weight was on my knees, then fell back on my haunches. Dirty locks of hair fell into my eyes, I pushed them away. My skin tingled, the feeling of a thousand little hairs stranding straight up on end.
I was afraid to look up from the floor. A quiet but nagging voice in the back of my head told me that if I did, there would be a monster waiting to devour me. Hysteria crept up my spine like a centipede with hooked claws. I held my breath. I counted to five and looked up from the floor.
The room was dimly lit by the light of a single, solitary torch that was attached to the wall with a large metal fixture. It crackled, the sound of oil-soaked linen being devoured by flame. The walls themselves were stone, the type that looks like a thousand fist-sized boulders all bound together with mortar. A wardrobe with all it's drawers missing was shoved up against the far wall, an empty lantern sitting atop it. A statue to some god or another was shoved haphazardly up against the wall opposite. I was laying on the floor beside a uncomfortable looking plank bed. That was from where I had fallen, most likely. I rubbed my face.
The act of standing gave no new perspective to the situation. I stood in the center of the room, my hands shaking, fingers digging into my palms, wondering why I was so upset. The voice in my head had been wrong – there was no monster here to attack me, to shred skin from muscle and devour me whole. So why did I feel so afraid?
Then, it dawned on me: I didn't know where I was.
