The man without a name stumbled through the trees, chasing memories. 

He didn’t run, but his breathing came ragged and short. He clutched at his sweat-soaked shirt, trying uselessly to grasp at the burning that spread out from his chest, trying to rip the feeling out of him. One of his boots had fallen off at some point, and his foot shuffled and slipped on the rain-swept earth.

Nameless. No, that’s not right. He was without one now, but he wasn’t nameless. He knew that—could almost taste his name as he went to say it, but it dissolved like cheap lies on the tip of his tongue. He tried to think of it, to conjure his name as if that would promptly explain how he ended up here. 

Pain lanced through his head. 

He stopped, groaning at the agony, half-crying, and leaned against the trunk of a broad tree as all strength left him. This was worse than death, this constant tormenting, gnawing at him, chipping at his sanity. How long had it been like this? How long had he been wandering in this damned forest?

His knees gave out, and the rough bark scraped his face as he slid down to the ground. He turned to put his back against the tree, blinking sluggishly through the pain. The forest around him was dark and shadowy, but the flashes of golden light in his vision lit up the gloom whenever his eyes focused in one place for too long. 

In those flashes, memories that weren’t his played out like a mummer’s show. A clutch of jutting roots across from him became armored bodies strewn about in a muddy field, reeking of death—the scene of a battle he’d never fought. The dense canopy above turned into the arcing ceiling of a marbled hall he’d never walked through. A fallen log a stone throw’s away was a cozy workshop he’d never been in, but he swore he could almost smell the polish on the wood of the workbench.

And the faces… Oh, the faces. Mist-like, they swam right toward his eyes as if to touch him—or taunt him. Faces of men and women he’d never met, names he’d never heard, dozens of them. And yet… and yet there was something so familiar to the sweep of that one man’s jaw, to the curve of that woman’s nose and the lilt of her muffled voice. He felt such a bone-deep connection to them. It frightened him.

Rain drizzled down softly through the leaves, and the man choked down a wet sob. He was losing himself, losing himself to these people he didn’t know. The burning in his chest flared again, like maggots carving out his insides, his very soul, reaching into the most intimate places of his being and supplanting them with the essence of another. He doubled over in pain.

But as he lay there on the foot of a tree, mouth open in a silent scream, there were two memories he was certain were his own. Two memories that the faces and the maggots could not take away, and he held on to them desperately, reciting them over and over again like a chant.

Sometime later when the burning had subsided enough, he didn’t know how long, the rain had stopped, even if the forest still smelled of it. Like the earth and sodden wood—but there was something else too, something foul lurking above it. The man shook his head, forcing himself to his feet despite the throbbing behind his eyes. 

Suddenly, gruff, incomprehensible speech sounded somewhere to his right. He flinched away. A memory of the voices again, no doubt, messing with his mind. His cheek stung. He brought a hand up to his face and winced. The bark of the tree had cut him just below the eye. A drop of blood stained his fingers when he took them away.

A twig snapped, closer this time, and he wheeled around.

It wasn’t the memories. True monsters straight from the deepest pit of the Sovereign’s hell plunged through the trees—three of them. And not the ones the man knew existed in the world’s dungeons, but monsters wearing the bodies of men. They barely paused as they saw him, spreading around like trained predators. 

The man froze, fear stabbed at his gut. The three monsters towered over him like giants as they stalked, heavy feet crunching on the forest floor. The muscles of their arms and shoulders bulged beneath piece-meal armor, a pair of vambraces here, a chest plate there. Swords and axes hung at their hips, black, cruel weapons. 

But in the half-darkness, it was their skin that stood out the most: a gritty, pale red, like rose petals that had been grounded and mixed with gravel. The biggest of them growled out something as he stopped across from the man—a taunt, by the tone. The others laughed derisively, blocking the path to either side.

The man found little solace in the tree anchoring his back. For a moment he was clueless on what to do. Would he die here to these beast-men? That would be a relief, in a way, yet something inside of him recoiled at that. Something of who he was before rejected the idea of giving up without a fight, and a different sort of burning rose up from his chest.

With it, an awareness came, an awareness of what he was capable of doing. The man suddenly knew he wasn’t helpless here. He was a Sorcerer—a chaser. A familiar power expanded out from deep inside him, tingling warmly through his body, then spreading into the ground below his feet, into the air around him. 

The monsters advanced on him, closing the trap. Wicked smiles with far too many teeth showed over rough faces. Armor clinked softly as they moved. 

It was the water underfoot that bubbled first, droplets of rainwater rising from the grass and the brush, from the wet soil and the curling roots. And in the air, humidity condensed like mist, pulling water out of whatever it could—out of dewy leaves, out of crevices in the bark, out of the man’s own breath.

He watched nearly slack-jawed, mystified by his own power. He could feel a part of him in every mote of water as they joined together, as the drops formed floating pools, swirling and twisting around his person like he was the center of a small vortex. There was so much of it, more and more as it rose all around him, and controlling the water felt as easy as breathing.

The monster opposite him let out a sharp intake of breath, and the man allowed himself a smile. They would find no easy prey in him. Breathing deeply, he let himself do what felt the most natural; his feet were set wide, arms spreading out to both sides. The water followed his movement, flowing like a snake around his arms and legs. This was the first time he had felt alive since he broke that shard, with this power coursing through his veins, begging to be let out.

Instead of being intimidated, however, the monsters seemed all the more eager for it. The bigger one growled loudly, insistent, and the others answered in kind. A different sort of smile crept up to their faces now. There was hunger there. Greed. 

It didn’t matter. The man would put them down like the animals they were.

But before he could do anything, the pain returned with force within him, from a burning candle into a raging blaze. The power swirling through him faltered, repulsed by this sharp intrusion, and he choked out a gasp. The floating water splashed down, suddenly masterless, and the man fell down with it, face crashing onto the ground. 

His whole existence became pain. He spasmed on the forest floor, eyes clamped shut, moaning like a babe as something roiled and melted his chest. His head throbbed like someone had taken a war hammer to it, and he couldn’t breathe right. Wet earth had gotten into his mouth, thick on his tongue. A jutting root dug on his neck. He tried, but he couldn’t move. The muscles all along his body were clenched until they locked.

He heard the monsters approaching through the thrumming of his blood, felt the thumping of their footsteps, the ground vibrating through his whole body. It hurt. One of them spoke something, lower this time, a grating rumble. Rough hands grabbed him by the arms and the back of his shirt, heaved him up easily as if he was a child. 

He forced his eyes to unclench, hoping to at least see his last moments of life, but the golden light from before had drowned his vision. Bright. Too bright, and he had to close them again. It wasn’t an issue. Death would be a welcomed comfort, and he didn’t have to see it to make it real.

Surprisingly, after some more growls and fumbling, the monsters started walking away, taking him along. His useless legs, still twitching, made trenches on the muck as he was dragged.

No. NO! The man wanted to scream. To shout at the monsters to kill him then and there. To end his suffering once and for all. Even though every part of his body felt like it was under boiling acid, the man wanted to summon that power again, wanted to use it to destroy the monsters and himself with them. 

But how could he? He couldn’t even control his own bowels. Warm piss ran down his legs, and he’d fouled his trousers—he could smell it. Instead of a scream, only a droning whine escaped his mouth. He could hardly breathe through the pained rictus of his teeth. 

The powerful feeling he felt not a minute ago became as distant as the memories he’d lost. He sagged in the hands of his captors. His fate was theirs now, as was his death.

And so, through the pain and the humiliation, the man without a name fell back to the two pieces of memory that were still his, of that radiant, golden shard that had unwoven his mind, and of the promise to a friend, to come on the day of the festival.