Disclaimer: I do not own Chain of Memories. Squaresoft-Enix and Disney owns it.
Here There Be Monsters
She sees everyone as a map, and every person a location.
Every one is different.
She cannot remember who or what had been her first "victim", as her little town began to call her playthings. Maybe the old family cat or her baby brother, but she was never sure. It got blurred halfway between five and six years, when Sasha, who had always been old and languid and on the verge of dying, suddenly frisked around like a kitten all over again. Or maybe it really had beenher baby brother, who suddenly began to talk and sound as if he were an old, old man, even though he was only three months old.
Or maybe they weren't any of her 'firsts' at all, just her most memorable. She remembered drawing a stick man, with whiskers and a cane, and scribbled disjointed words, and patiently watching her brother take on the form with weary eyes and a wavering voice, as she gently slotted each image in his tender, light-filled strings of cotton and wool. She also remembered tangling her hands in Sasha's fur and deeper within, touching the tangled yarn and bloody tendons and rearranging them, breaking apart the ties and re-tying them in clumsy, child-made tight knots.
It was fun, that was what she remembered.
They called her a witch, after the children she played with couldn't remember their parents or their names or suddenly changed personalities. She couldn't help it, their memories, their lives were laid out before her eyes, linked together by chains or strings or lace, or pretty strings of light.
The lights were the easiest to manipulate, and she was fascinated with how each path turned and moved and formed the facets of a person's character, and how a curious hand could change everything. When her parents finally realized that she was the cause of her brother's premature death as well as the town's misfortunes, they locked her in the basement, not to imprison her, but to protect her from the town's wrathful revenge.
They were her parents, after all. Even if they didn't like her (they feared her, with her guileless smile and beautiful cornflower blue eyes and pale gold hair, and she knew, she knew, she always knew, putting her tiny hand in theirs, she could trace their bloodlines and see what they remembered most intimately, or not remember), somewhere, deeply buried a hundred feet deep, they loved her.
"You are my daughter."
In their maps of honeycomb and linen, she knew they were lying.
She didn't know if she should have cried when she knew.
The basement they kept her in was full of old things, like maps and old toys and miscellaneous knick-knacks her parents and grandparents and great-grandparents collected from all over. She played with the toys when she was bored, but she loved the maps the most, tracing her tiny fingers over the lines for hours and hours and over and over.
And over.
She was most interested in the old maps, the ones that were made before the world was formed, where the land was wild and the unknown, presumably more dangerous places, were marked in big letters, "Here There Be Monsters". The first time she had seen one of those maps, she had stopped tracing immediately, looking at the words.
She cried then, softly, tears blotting out the ink and smearing it across the leathery paper in streaks of black. It marked a whole new beginning for her.
As she grew older, she began to learn how to draw in earnest, at first making childish doodles, that gradually culminated into crude designs of houses and buildings. She sketched landscapes and skies in crayons and colour pencils and markers. Finally, she began to make maps of her own, stylizing the ones she found around her person and changing them.
And she dreamed of making her own maps, her own lines and crossroads and paths, wandering into those places that no one has ever ventured into. The map of minds and dreams and memories, all within reach because she pinpointed their locations with the precision of an experienced cartographer.
Every cup of happiness, every bucket of hate, every thimbleful of love, nailed down to her map of memory. No one would be afraid of the recesses of the mind, because she wandered through it, picked apart the monsters and put them where they belonged, powerless to do any damage.
If only they would let her, she would show them, show them that she wasn't a monster, that she could help do something. Anything.
But the point of making those markings on those maps were to deter people from going there anyway.
She would be lying if she said she didn't know they would give her away. In her mind, her house was already marked with those black, gruesome letters, and she mused that the only ways to erase those letters were to understand the monsters within, or to take the monster away.
She just didn't think it would be so soon.
When the day came, they made her pack her things, hercrayons and colour pencils and markers and papers, and her little doll in her likeness (the only toy that was new when she was shoved unceremoniously into the basement, as if it were a suitable concession) into a small bag, and took her out into the sunlight for the very first and last time in eight years.
Her father gave her hands (still tiny, still pale,like she never grew at all)to two tall robed strangers, who took them gently but firmly, so that she couldn't pull away if she tried. She shivered as she tried to access their memories, meeting only with strings of fog and mist and darkness that trembled and broke when she tried to grasp them.
As they led her away, from the town of endless sunsets, she didn't allow herself to look back, envisioned a tiny blond-haired girl and two tall, dark strangers crossing the lines of the known to the unknown of the town's map.
Tucking away the hurt and despair into a location onto her own heart.
Here there be monsters.
Knowing that she was (had always been) one of them.
Owari
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