There is something wrong.
With me, maybe. With the world.
I don't remember my childhood. I know that I'm supposed to. Cyri tells me things about myself that I recognize as still being the same. I hear these stories about how quiet I was and how I looked up to him and I know that has to be true. I'm still that way. I can't tell if that's comforting or terrifying.
But then he tells me things that I don't remember. He tells me that I used to live on Jhone. That I always carried around a toy plane. That I didn't smile often because of what happened to me, but that I was still so happy. That I liked collecting smooth river rocks to give to my uncle. He tells me I look just like him. I don't remember his face.
Before my crash, he specifies when he tells me these stories. He knows I'm no longer the same little kid I used to be. He knows something was taken from me.
Before my crash, I had all these memories. I know I did -- I -- I remember the feeling of remembering them, but never the memory itself. I know I was a person. I know that crash took something from me. Now I'm nothing more than a husk, and I hate that it's replaced something within me with a dark, bitter mouth always eating away at me, taking away what I want to cling onto.
I remember when I crashed. I hate that it's my earliest memory. I was torn from the underbelly of the Wintertide and couldn't breathe in space. I fell into some... wormhole, maybe I could call it. It was dark, but I saw stars in the sky and constellations I once read about that were now extinct. There was a shattered moon above me. I wanted to curl up and fall asleep right where I floated.
I felt something reach into me. A star forced its way into me and blazed in my chest. Its thousands of hands reached in and tugged at my nerves, plucking them like harp strings, reframing my soul. It hurt like I was thrown into fire. I couldn't breathe; it stole my lungs. I got the horrifying sense that it wanted to kill me -- and-- and worst of all,
I wanted it to kill me.
I wanted it to erase me. I wanted it to erase all the horrible things that happened to me, all the horrible things that Cyri has told me about whenever I begged him to help me understand.
And it did. It erased everything.
I was numb, content to be nothing within a void of space, until I was spat back out. When I woke -- on Jhone, I think, an emergency landing -- everything hurt. Cyri stood above me. He hugged me when I woke up. For a moment, I couldn't remember his name. I couldn't remember anything. From then on, I was empty. I could tell Cyri was disappointed over something I couldn't determine. I eventually came to realize he was disappointed over the fact that I had failed.
That emptiness remained inside of me, deep and dark and all-consuming; and within that pit was something else, lurking, writhing. The void tore out my insides and replaced my guts with dead stars and dead suns and an urge to commit the same atrocities onto the world around me. It told me to alter anything I could reach, and all it took was a thought in my head and a look of my eye. It told me to move the earth and I obeyed. I obeyed. I obeyed.
I'm not myself anymore. There is a clear moment I can pinpoint where I stopped being myself, when I left one plane of existence for another. Did I replace someone else? What happened to them? Was I brought back for a reason?
I know I'm not meant to be here.
I know I have to be here anyways.