For what felt like an eternity, all I could see was a golden simmer of light surrounding me on all sides. I couldn’t even see my body. Though, I also couldn’t really tell if I was changing where I was looking or not as I only saw one thing, the golden light. Eventually, in the distance, I saw a brighter light, pure white. I tried to move towards, but I was unable. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait for very long as the light began to approach me on its own until it engulfed me completely.

As I looked around, white spots danced all around my vision like having a flashlight shown in my eyes before being quickly turned off. It took a minute for my vision to finally focus back in to the world around me and even once it seemingly had, it still felt like it hadn’t actually refocused. Everything around me was displayed in shades of faded gold. It was almost like a sepia-tone photo, but was more yellow than it was brown. When I looked down, I found I didn’t quite fit in.

My entire body glowed bright teal, the exact same color as my essence or my blood, but with a significant amount of extra glow to it. At first, I thought I was a ghost, but I was perfectly able to touch myself and when I tried to touch the ground, I didn’t go through it or anything, no matter how hard I tried.

When I picked myself and my hand up from the ground, I finally took a moment to look around and actually see where I was. There was a loose carpet of mostly covered grass lining the floor of an enormous forest all around me. The trees seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t really place it and the gold tint all around wasn’t helping at all.

When I walked up to one of the trees, I ran my hand along it, but something felt wrong. I looked down at my hand. There were no splinters or anything to cause me pain, but that was just it. There wasn’t just an absence of splinters, there was a complete absence of anything. My hands were as clean as they had been before.

I then sat down on the ground and touched the grass. As I ran my hands through the grass and other dead plants lining the ground, I found that my hand just slid across their surface. Nothing moved in response to my touch, but they also didn’t feel stiff. The grass felt as soft as any. It was bizarre, to say the least.

I stood up and began to walk around. Everything I came in to contact with, it was almost like it was there, but I wasn’t. Nothing seemed to notice my touch, but everything could push back on me. Even a strange bee-looking creature that flew past just pushed be aside. It felt no resistance though. I just got pushed out of the way.

As I continued to travel throughout the forest, I came to realize that wherever I was, it was within the World of Essence. Everything had the same magical and abnormal feel as the rest of the world did as I’d been traveling through it. Similar, but different. It was then that I realized where I had seen the trees. There were a few different varieties mixed in, but I had seen them all before. I was in the South Forest. Not the exact same place that I had been before, but still definitely the south forest, somewhere.

However, even knowing where I was begged some more questions. I still had no idea how I got here, why everything looked the way it did or even why I did. There was no one around that I could try and ask, but even if I found someone, I wasn’t sure if they would be able to see me or hear me, for that matter.

I didn’t have to wait long to receive the answer though. As soon as the thought had crossed my mind, a child appeared in my vision. I quickly sprinted towards the child and stopped short as I recognized something in the boy. At first, I thought it was just a coincidence. This boy had hair extremely similar in shape to that of the boy whose hand I’d touched just before getting here. However, once I saw his eyes, I knew they were the same person. Despite the additional age, this was the same person.

He was hiding behind a tree and kept peeking around it on all sides. He looked like he was hiding from someone, the expression he wore was not one of fear. He seemed almost smug. It more felt like he was waiting to try and ambush someone, but I couldn’t think of who someone this young would be trying to ambush.

He didn’t get the chance though. A girl dropped down from the trees above and tapped the boy on the forehead.

“Gotcha, Thyme!” she shouted, giggling as she immediately took off in to the forest at a speed much too fast for any normal child, green mist trailing behind her. She was a wind apprentice, for sure.

The boy stood up and frowned before shouting in the direction of the girl. “Sage, that’s not fair! I would’ve never thought to check above me…”

I let out a slight chuckle. The two were competing, but even through these few exchanges, the few glances I could gather easily indicated that these two were very close.

I watched as Thyme formed a glowing seal on his left ankle before taking off in the direction Sage had fled in, green lightning streaking behind him. I found it quite peculiar that essence and its related components produced their respective color. It rose even more questions about what was going on with my body. Was I somehow made of essence? Was I able to use my magic too?

There was only one way to test it. I held out my left hand, attempting to form a seal on it. To my surprise, a glowing outline of my seal appeared as it usually did. I shrugged, realizing it was probably best to not even try and question anything at this point. Most likely, I had accidentally entered an old memory of Thyme’s and was somehow more present than usually. The reason for that was completely behind me though.

Instead of trying to figure that out, I took off behind Thyme, just barely catching up and keeping pace with him. Apparently, compared to even a child, I was slow. That stung a bit.

“Don’t worry too much about it. After all, you’re using wind and he’s using lightning. I think we both now which is faster, kitten.”

I turned to my left and saw a glowing pink figure racing next to me, pink lightning streaking behind them. It only took me a few moments to realize it was Jester. Her lack of clothes other than her top hat were the big giveaway.

“How did you get here?” I asked as we whizzed along though the forest.

“I think you mean, how did we get here,” a voiced called from my right. When I turned to face it, there was another familiar figure, but this one was purple and had actual clothing on. Unlike the pink streaker next to me.

“And the answer to both is that none of us have any clue how we got here,” Jester remarked.

I sighed. I wasn’t expecting them to have answers, but I also certainly wasn’t expecting them to be here along with me. This did confirm that we were at the very least accessing Thyme’s brain somehow.

We continued to skate along for a little bit as Thyme tried to find his sister. She was either a lot faster than him or much better at hiding. At one point, we even took to the trees, but he had no such luck. Then, we heard a cry. It was high-pitched and sounded to be in great pain. Thyme immediately stopped and changed his course to where the cry had come from, so the three of us did the same.

As we had been moving through the forest, I felt like there was something else following behind the three of us, but I had scanned around us multiple times and found nothing. Even still, the feeling continued on.

I pushed it aside as we finally stopped at the source of the crying. It was Sage who was currently curled up in a ball with a very angry looking creature looming over her, her leg bleeding. The second Thyme arrived, he stopped in his tracks and got in to a fighting stance.

“Get away from my sister, you big meanie!” he shouted before unleashing a massive bolt of lightning at the beast sending it sprawling backwards.

I wanted to try and help, but I knew that I couldn’t interact with anything.

“Avien!” I heard a voice call. It was far away and seemed to come from the distance. It sounded like a girl’s voice, but when I turned around to try and find it, it was nowhere to be found.

“Avien? Are you okay? What are you looking?” Jester asked as I turned back around.

I shook my head. “Nothing… Don’t worry about it.”

When I turned back around, Thyme had taken Sage in to his arms and was seemingly trying to get his bearings, but finding it very difficult. Sage shakily lifted her arm and pointed to their left. With that in mind, Thyme took off through the forest, heading back to who knows where.

The three of us looked at each other, shrugging before making our way in the same direction, following right behind the streaks of lightning that trailed behind the boy. Eventually, we came to a small town. It was surrounded on all sides by trees and there were even a few of the massive forest extremities jutting out of parts of the town. All of the houses were strangely raised off the ground and seemed to have solid metal bases below them. Despite their bases, all of the houses were just plain houses made of wood. I couldn’t tell exactly what color there were thanks to the gold coating surrounding us.

Thyme quickly ran inside of one of the houses, cradling Sage in his arms. Unfortunately, because of the strange rules of this memory state, we couldn’t get inside the house and were forced to observe them through the windows as Sage was tended to by people I could only assume were her parents. I decided to walk around the town a bit, finding it was quite the beautifully constructed place and, as I’d thought, the house bases were designed to help combat earthquakes.

I found that a little peculiar, assuming that they were able to control or at least nullify the effect of earthquakes here. Despite that, the people seemed to be fairly calm about the frequent tremors, noting how their reinforcements had held up quite well and there hadn’t been any issues yet.

As I returned to Sage and Thyme’s house, I found Jester and Sylak both floating next to a window on the second floor. I flew up and joined them.

“What are you two looking at?” I asked.

Sylak turned to me to answer. “Well, while you randomly decided to run off, we decided to stay and see if anything interesting happened. After all, last time you saw someone’s memories, their parents were dying in a house fire, so… ya know…”

I rolled my eyes, disgusted by the implication. “So you’re hoping their house burns down and kills their parents?!”

Sylak waved his hand around, seemingly not being able to find the words, but Jester cut in to save them. “Yes. We’re both placing bets on how it happens.”

I wanted to scold them, but knew it wouldn’t do any good so I decided to just take a seat next to the window. As we watched, all they were really doing was playing board games and enjoying themselves like normal kids. Though the board games were much less normal. I could only really guess at how they were played. Then, eventually, they moved locations and decided to head outside.

That’s when things started to change. The world around us grew far darker despite the fact that it was still very much day. I could no longer hear anything. The motion around almost seemed to blur together, like a crappy slideshow. The children left the house and went to play with some other kids in a strange gymnasium-like thing, but then some of them started picking on Sage, that much was obvious. One of the other children shoved her and she fell down before running off in to the forest.

We followed close behind her and found her sobbing underneath a tree. Then Thyme appeared beside her, attempting to console her. Just then, the deafening silence was shattered by a thunderous boom which echoed all around us. The two children noted the sound as well and quickly ran back to the village, but when they returned, they were only met with rubble. Houses were collapsed everywhere and what did remain was not in good shape. Blood was splattered everywhere. The strangest part was that it had all sunken down in to a pit.

Sage and Thyme searched the entire village, trying to find their parents, but when they did find them, the sight they were met with wasn’t a pleasant on. At the place where their house had once stood, there were just a few wooden beams that remained intact. Underneath the collapsed house lay their parents, their bodies completely crushed and devoid of any recognizable kind of life.

I tried to rush forward, but my vision tunneled as it was engulfed in darkness. When I opened my eyes, I was still shaking hands with Thyme. I pulled back my hand, my eyes darting between Sage and Thyme, tears welling up in my eyes.

“I’m… so sorry…”