Blood on my Name

Tree branches rhythmically pounded on the window of room number 14 at The Rancid Rodent, and didn’t show any sign of decrescendo. Remains of dead leaves dashed about in the turbulent wind, making shadow dancers on the inn room’s musty wooden floor planks.

The Elven woman sitting on a shabby bed across the room paid them no attention nor applause for their performance, as her eyes were busy focusing on tracing lines that weren’t there, her long upright ears on sounds she couldn’t hear, and her thoughts on what she couldn’t recall. It is hard when your memories are snatched from you, or rather, she hypothesised, when your memories are locked away deep down in your mind, too far away from your own reach.

Margo was the name she carried, but not the one she owned in her memories so slippery, like the holographic suds that had cleaned out her now blank slate of mind, like the pearls that her newly gift-given name represented; a present from those who found her. What had she done? What could she do? And why was she so determined to take it all back? She leaned back into the worn bedsheets and brought her bandaged hands up to her face to examine. They still shook under the force of gravity, and it ached to keep them as still as she could. Just a week ago whenever she tried to speak to another her voice just wouldn’t give out any more than a few basic words and she would go blank with mind fog. Whatever she used to be, it certainly couldn’t have been this.

The moonlight dancers darted across to the desk beside the bed, and the metal of the ink pen shone like a flare. Like fire. Though it happened for a split second and nothing more, it was enough to draw Margo towards the ink pen once again. The desk had collected dust over the course of a few days, but she did find herself sitting at it, spending most of her recovery over the past few weeks staring at all that remained of her past. A book, bound in leather dyed blue and wood from a forest far far from this one, the cover embellished in many curved triangular fragments arranged into a twisting spiral. It was beautifully composed, as elegant as…

… the thought never came to be.

There was familiarity in the muscle memory of holding the pen steady on paper, but not in the same way that there was familiarity in flame. Flames that danced all around like the light on the surrounding walls accompanied by a ferocious storm, swirling louder and louder and larger and larger and brighter and brighter as it consumed all within the vision of those who bore witness, those who were still alive to see, to breathe, and to feel- Pain. Margo felt pain. But it wasn’t an overwhelming and searing pain like she initially thought it to be. Not this time. Margo looked down at her shaking dominant left hand which gripped tightly at the pen and let it slowly uncurl, revealing lakes of blood pooling at the creases of her palm and now the desk.

This night, like many of the others prior, was going to be a long one.