…what I do remember.

Even if I actually caught more than a glance of it, an eyeful of it—it would still always lurk in the corners of my vision, nothing more than a creeping impression of something evil, black and horrible. Life-stealing, rancid, so awful, so awful.

I was just a babe, newly born. I knew nothing. Nothing. My mind was empty, and the few impressions I had gotten made no sense. The things I saw made no sense; they were just shapes flickering before me with eyes I had just only discovered in those moments. Light was new to me, the light from the crater and the lava that settled inside it (I didn’t know lava, either). Even Mother—oh Mother-- was nothing but shapes before me, scents that I couldn’t recognize as the blood that I was covered in, the fluids that came from the temple of her body. I probably saw her tears—and they meant nothing. I probably heard her laughter, too, and it was nothing but confused garbling in my baby’s brain.

Oh, Mother.

I was tired, so tired; I had laid there, exhausted with my birth, the very air I breathed something new to me, something grand that I tried to figure out. I squealed and burbled, testing the throat I found I had; I moved the lips that I had realized belonged to me, and blinked the eyes that I had found in my possession. The shape made to lift itself, and in that moment I made a new discovery, apparent in the rumble of my belly. I would know it as hunger, and something urged me upward, that standing would bring the relief I barely knew I sought.

I had stirred myself; the shadows stirred as well.

I do not know what happened—nothing made sense to me. I did not know that the shape that stood to defend me was Mother, not then; I did not know what death was, being as newly acquainted with life as I was. I did not know that my Mother had fallen at my feet, lifeless and cold; I only knew that, as I got to my feet and my heart thumped hard in my chest, that the thing I had seen was danger, pure and simple.

The very next thing I learned in my life, so young and starving, was fear.
I cried out; my tiny bleats floated along the warm currents of air, sharp and piercing, for I was hungry and so very, very afraid, and my wobbling legs could do no more than stand. The world spun blue and silver, gold and lilac; it changed around me, stretched and pulled and became a different place, a different world—but it mattered not. I cried out, not knowing what else to do, not knowing how to erase the smudge of shadow in my eyes that would haunt me forever, in the waking dreams of sleep; I did not know that I would be cursed with this fear forever, or that the only true, real moments I had known my mother was as a corpse upon the ground.

I cried; I cried and cried, not knowing who would hear me.

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