1
Consciousness came like a bolt out of the blue.
One moment, nothing. The next, a sudden rush of sound and light.
Three things stuck out, immediately. The first was noise, the dull roar of heavy rain slamming against the ground, echoing throughout everywhere.
The second was the rain itself. It was freezing, ice-cold spikes of water that chilled right down to the bone. It crashed into me, but somehow... I wasn't cold. I knew it was cold, felt the temperature of it, but I myself was somehow fine.
The third was a horrible sense of loss. It was a thick, cloying feeling, hanging in my chest like a physical weight. But... what had I lost?
My hand came up, and I froze, as, for the first time, I caught a glimpse of myself.
Black.
Deep, pitch black. My hand was not the hand of a Human, it was the hand of something else entirely. Three abyssal claws attached to a thin hand attached to a thinner wrist.
What the hell.
I tried to scream, but no sound would leave my mouth. Running my hands over my face told me two things, the first that I didn't have a mouth, or even a nose, and the second that my 'skin' felt like leather.
I picked myself up and ran.
I collapsed not even two feet away, an -my- unfamiliar body doing me no favour; Short, stubby legs with feet that ended not in toes, but in a sharp point; A body less than a tenth the size of my old one, proportioned so differently than what I was used to...
What is happening?
I pushed off the ground and moved again, taking slow steps in order to get used to the oddly proportioned body, moving quicker and quicker after each step.
This time, I made it several meters before I fell again.
For a third time, I got up. I did not fall again.
It was dark, I noticed. Very little light, hanging around only from the lanterns that seemed distant in the rain... And yet, despite that, I could see better and more clearly than I ever had in my life.
I ran, seeking shelter from the rain, from the biting cold wind, just a place to relax and think and get away from everything.
I'm not particularly sure how long I ran for, but I did find shelter, once my eyes spied a small crevice near a building, an opening to the inside.
Without hesitation, I ran inside, an empty hole with nothing but a small amount of space, but perfect for me.
It was here that I got my first good look at myself, in a shattered mirror tucked away in the corner, looking like it had been there for many years.
It had a lithe and thin body, with a sphere for a head that had a pair of antennae; a pair of long, thin arms with 3-clawed hands; short, stumpy legs with feet that lacked any digits.
In the -my- head lay a pair of luminous golden orbs, lacking an iris, whites and blacks.
The form was familiar to me.
Heartless. A mere Shadow, the weakest of them all...
I felt a sudden urge to cry.
But I couldn't.