Awake

When at last he woke, the leaves had begun to turn red and gold. A few had fallen upon his sleeping form. Still half-asleep, he stretched his limbs, swept away his russet covering, and opened his eyes.

He saw the faded murals, the crumbling walls, heard the low sigh of the wind. He could feel the solid smoothness of the orb in his hands, its completeness.

It was all wrong.

He had heard tell of phantom limbs. What he felt was an amputation of the mind, of the self. His powers were almost gone; as a test he tried the simplest of spells and the effort left him trembling with weakness. Memories crowded to fill the emptiness, yet left him more hollow than ever.

He wondered if he was going mad.

He was walled off from that world he had loved so dearly, from the spirits he had loved as friends – and he had created that wall himself. He had lost everything.

In dreams, in the cocoon of sleep, he had been close to it all again, but in dreams he could do nothing but dream. There was no choice but to wake up. Here the closeness was stripped from him, and he was alone, more alone than he had ever been in his life. This was the path he must walk, through the barrenness of the world he had made himself, made for every living, thinking being.


In time he grew used to the numbness, the phantom world in the back of his mind, the loss folded deep within him. He learned to forget it for hours at a time, losing himself in the rhythm of his walk as he roamed from place to place. He ate the berries and fruits he found in forests and orchards; drank icy water from gushing streams. In the first village he came to he stole some clothes for himself from a farmer's son, roughly his size and shape. In payment he left three pieces of jade from the temple mosaic.

He found a long, stout piece of ash in an ancient wood and carved himself a staff, investing it with magical properties. In the time before he had never needed a staff, but in this new world, cut off from the most essential part of his being and still weakened from centuries of sleep, he could never have managed without one.

He grew used to this new self, this new weakness. From day to day he survived, but it was not living. It did not feel real to him, even when brambles tore at his clothes, or freezing rain stung his eyes and face. This mockery of life was more like a dream to him than the dreams he had just left. He spent his waking thoughts yearning for oblivion, for only in sleep could he come alive again.