He awoke to darkness so complete he could not tell the difference between opening his eyes and closing them. The ghostly remnants of his dreams receded quickly into the blackness taking with them a memory of light. He stood and his head cracked solidly against the rock above him. His roar of pain startled him, as if he had never heard such a sound before, and, thinking upon this, he realized that he could not remember ever hearing his own voice. Groping around him he felt the damp stone and began to walk, one halting step after the other.
There was no way to tell how long or how far he walked. He began by counting the number of times he stumbled and fell to the unforgiving stone, but he soon lost count. Several times he stopped and wondered if it would not be better to simply lose himself into the darkness, but something compelled him to continue on. When he tried to focus on this compulsion brief flickers of memories would skirt across his mind, as if trying to break free from some impenetrable fog.
Eventually he began counting his dreams to keep track of how long he had been in the darkness. . .or at least how long he had been aware of it. Occasionally the shuffle of his steps against the rock was interrupted by others groping through the dark. The first time he had heard another voice in the endless night he had began to run towards the sound, joy overwhelming him at the thought of some other soul, any other soul, sharing this eternal blindness. Then something had gripped his arm, something hairy and dank and the voice had shrieked in terror and fled, crashing blindly into the walls of the caverns until his world was again silent. After his seventh dream he began to hear the rustle of feathers and a voice that followed him repeating again and again,
“There must be more. . .there must be more.”
He soon realized it was his voice mumbling, and clenched his teeth tight. The sound of feathers, however, continued. He could not remember his name. He knew he had once had one, had once had a life somewhere. . .that was not here. Yet when he tried to remember the details faded into the fog leaving but brief flashes of memories like glinting reflections from the falling pieces of a broken glass. In those glimpses he saw things he did not understand; a king, a lamb, and falling stones.
Read the rest of A Memory of Kings, Chapter 1 here:
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