Memory Bonds

The girl slowly sat up. She could feel the sand fall off her back, and hear the soft hiss as it did so. She looked around with a frown. She was fairly confident she was a girl, but that was the only information available to her.

It seemed like she was in the desert. It was hot, the sun beating down, the wind dry on her face, sand swirling up around her. The sand was all she could see in most directions. There were some hills, but they were so slight and the same color as the sand around her, so they were hard to make out. Maybe she was imagining them in entirety. Like a mirage. Yes, that was a word and concept she understood, wasn’t it?

But there was still one direction she hadn’t looked. Turning directly behind her, the girl saw a small town. A village, really. A bunch of huts with dried leaves for roofs, and windows that were just open space without any glass. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of roads either. It was only clear were people usually walked because their footprints wore the sand down and made it more compact.

The huts were in a circle. And at the center of the circle, was a well.

That was the most useful thing she’d seen so far, so the girl got up, and got to it in a few strides. She pulled a bucket out from the bottom. There was some water in it. It was warm, and some sand had drifted in, but she drank the grainy stuff anyway. Her throat was dry, and drinking the water only seemed to make that more obvious. Who knew how long she’d just been lying there in the sand?

Too long. She was hot enough she wanted to pour some of the water on herself instead of just drinking it, and her hair was stiff because sand was still stuck in it.

Before dumping the water over herself, she set the bucket down and used the liquid to see her reflection.

‘Huh. So that’s what I look like,’ she thought.

She had straight brown hair that hit her shoulders and fell in front of her face. Maybe it would look better when it was clean, but right now it looked incredibly dull. Her eyes were green. Her skin looked like . . . well, it looked like she’d been tanning out in the sun for hours. At least it wasn’t sunburn.

And the strange thing was, she had pointed ears. She moved her hair to be sure, but she’d seen the tips even before that. The species she knew of that had pointed ears were elves and gnomes. She definitely wasn’t a gnome. Too tall. But she couldn’t be an elf. Her face and eyes were too round, too wide. Elves usually had long pointed faces. Besides that, it just didn’t sound right.

A half elf.

The girl jolted. The information hadn’t even felt like a thought. It just popped in front of her. And sounded right.

She nodded to herself. Yeah, that was right.

Moving on, she looked like she might be 15 if she was fully human. Maybe 16. 14 was very unlikely. But as a half elf that would make her more like 30. . .

The girl grimaced, rubbing her forehead. She felt lightheaded, like she was about to tip over.

OK. She wouldn’t think too hard right now.

She took another sip of water to help her head, and finally splashed some on herself. She hit her arms and her head, feeling the water drip down from her hair onto her neck and dampening her shirt. It felt good right now.

Next up, she should worry about finding out where she was, and were to go from here. She’d need something to eat, and somewhere to sleep that wasn’t sand, after all. Maybe she should talk to the people here.

She frowned as she straightened up and focused back in on the buildings around her. It was weird no one had come to her, now that she thought about it. The place was small, anyone would’ve seen her standing in the middle of the village for so long.

Suddenly, she felt more nervous. She walked to the nearest hut and peered into the window. There wasn’t much furniture in there. A low table that you clearly sat on the ground to eat at, a cot, and a cabinet. It was all broken. The cot was sliced in the middle, the cabinet doors ripped off the hinges. There was a blackish lump in the corner. She couldn’t tell what it was. The girl squinted at it.

Her heart skipped a beat and she swallowed back bile. She decided she didn’t want to know. She whirled around, and proceeded to trip on the sand, falling to her knees.

When she looked up, she was in a good position to see the back of a neighboring hut. This time it was far harder to deny. There was a body lying in the back of that hut, in with some garbage. There was a slice down the middle where you could see ribs, and some green liquid was coming out of their stomach. It smelled horrid.

The girl stumbled back to her feet, scrambling back.

Despite her decision not to know, and her terror at seeing dead bodies, she ran to one more hut and peaked inside. Three people lay dead in there, this time with bullet holes in them. Two of them were children. Actual children, and not a teenager like she seemed to be.

Legs shaking, she slowly backed into the well, clasping her hands together.

The people here, all of them, they were. . .

The girl’s breaths got heavier and she began trembling so hard she felt like her knees were going to pop out.

She had to get out of here. She looked around wildly, trying to look between the huts, and away from any dead bodies.

Her eyes finally settled on something in the distance that wasn’t sand. She squinted and moved closer. Stepping between two huts, she could make out something in the distance. She couldn’t make out the colors. It was all gray. But she could see smoke, and the shapes in the distance were square and rose higher than the huts. Another, larger, town? One that wasn’t slaughtered?

(Was it slaughtered too? There was smoke. What if everyone there was dead? What if-? No. The smoke could just be a blacksmith or a factory or something.)

She wasn’t sure what was there, but she knew she didn’t want to stay here. She gripped her elbows, arms crossed over her stomach like that would stop her from throwing up. Then she started running across the sand to the closest signs of civilization.