Chapter Text
Pink and solid was the air that day, everyday. Had it always been? Pink and solid were her dreams… Did she dream, now? Definition is a byproduct of opposition. What was now, compared to what then? Could she dream, when she was never awake? When she never slept?
Clarity came in great, painful waves. At first. Eventually it only lapped at her feet, gentle, undemanding. Once, when she did have thoughts, she tried to remember something; A person whose face had gotten lost somewhere in the crystal, in the color, in time. A night spent stargazing. But in her head, there was no such thing as night. Trying to imagine darkness was like trying to imagine a new color. Her eyes hadn’t closed in… Days? Weeks? Months? There was only light, unchanging in its hue or brightness. When she tried to imagine stars, they turned into bright pink shards of crystal.
She thought there might have been pain, sometimes. A shadow siphoning her life away; something slowly creeping into her face, burrowing through her cheek… Could a color hurt her? She felt some vague alarm. Her face, her lips and eyes and skin… Weren’t they important?
Important for what, important to whom? There was no one here, not even herself. Her thoughts slipped away from her, pretty patterns replacing words. Shapes forming and shattering. Spirals spinning around themselves, circles dancing across her non-vision.
Pink and solid skies above, pink and solid ground below… Was she standing? Lying down? Hadn’t there been weight to her, once?
She’d dreamed of the horse again. Grey fur, a white mane. He talked to her. Maybe she answered. She couldn’t tell if she’d seen him, or just remembered him. But every time he was there, he made her head clearer. She loved him for it. She hated him for it.
He’d tried to warn her. To be alert. That she’d need to talk. To… talk? Could she talk?
“Anne…?”
She knew immediately that the voice was real. It cut through everything: The crystal, and the color, and her mind. The sharp clarity of it almost hurt. It made her suspect it was the only real thing she’d experienced in… In how long?
“Anne!”
She thought that might have been her name, once.
Whatever it was that was talking, it continued. It said another name. A strange feeling spread through her, warm and comforting and painful. Someone was here, someone friendly. In Pandoria? Suddenly she felt terribly afraid.
Nobody should be here. There was no leaving. She was only here because she was nobody… She was nobody because she was here.
The horse. The grey fur, the white mane. She needed to talk… A warning.
In the end, she wasn’t sure if she really talked out loud. She only knew she thought more intently, that her brain had one thought at a time, and those thoughts had the shape of words, even when she struggled to connect them.
“Why are you here…? You’re wasting… your time… Garnok… Can’t be stopped… The end is coming…!! You should not… have come here…”
Exhaustion crept up on her. Movement, beyond the crystal. There was another person, a distinctly uncomfortable presence. Her mind fled away from her… Flashing lights, noise… Maybe her crystal wasn’t all bad. It was safe…
Time must have passed, because the noise was gone, and so was the movement, and the people.
Pink and solid was the air that day. The day someone had been there, for a time. She - Anne, she had a name - tried to hold on to it. But it blurred almost as soon as she was alone again…
Thoughts into memories, memories into images, images into fog. Was she alone? It took a person to be alone.
Pink and solid was the air that day, and the next.