May 22nd, 201x.
Eight months after Solaris was erased from time, and all events caused by Solaris were erased along with it.
No one involved with those events hold any memories, just a vaguely haunting sense that they're forgetting something important. It's never enough to spark curiosity, it just tugs at the subconscious late at night. It's the faint drone of whispers when silence becomes too heavy.
But the extinguishing of the flame wasn't a perfect purge. Dimensions and timelines aren't linear in the way that the lifeforms on Earth understand them to be. They cross and collide and diverge in as many varied ways as the weather turns to storm or rain or a light breeze on a late spring day. They deposit debris. They create anomalies and false memories and erase whole world's, only to birth twenty more in the same cosmic instant.
And so we find another victim of this endlessly chaotic process, sitting against an elm, bursting with green leaves and rustling in the spring breeze. He is only half formed into something recognizable, his limbs disappearing into a black mist, as if an artist had smeared a watercolor painting. He watches as a leaf breaks off from a branch up above his head. It floats to the ground, resting in between a couple of sparse grass patches.
To say this being was confused would be an understatement. One moment he was fused with his other half, existing as Solaris, an experiment made to emulate the power and grandeur of a deity, worshipped by the people of Soleanna. The next moment, he was less than half of what he used to be. Weakened, broken, disoriented, and left with an aching, empty feeling.
He reaches down weakly and brushes some brittle leaves aside. He reaches up, his hands mere clouds of liquid smoke, and touches his face. It isn't an actual face. It's two sunken crevices in an ever crumbling mass. A residual memory of once having a form. He tries to will himself into something more concrete, but he is too weak. He doesn't have the energy.
"I have a name." He thinks.
"I… my name is… Mephiles."
Yes, that's right. His name is Mephiles. Memories flood back. He remembers his brief instant of glory. His plans falling into place, his merging with Iblis to form Solaris, the absolute power that had driven him mad and erased everything else but the desire to consume time and space endlessly.
The reality of his current state becomes all too real, and he slumps into an even more unshapely mass.
He has a lot of work to do to get back his strength.