Chapter Text
Waking up in a field, almost naked, face down in the grass, was admittedly not her most dignified memory. Though, in her defence, it was her only memory at the time, so she figured she deserved some leeway on the matter.
Pushing herself up proved annoyingly difficult, a dull ache echoing through her arms and back with every motion. Her joints protested every step of the way, the discomfort spreading through the rest of her with an angry groan as she managed to get on her feet. The pale green grass tickling her shins, the quiet, salty breeze, and the lack of clothes beyond simple undergarments, left her with cold, despite the sun high in the sky.
Despite the confusion and panic threatening to overtake her thoughts, the woman instead opted to listen to the stern voice in the back of her mind, and forced herself to take stock of her situation.
Resources: What little cloth she was garbed in, which she was not anxious to use for alternative means– but she supposed it could be useful in a pinch. Location: she… wasn’t sure. She could smell salt on the air, and some distant corner of her mind told her that meant the sea was nearby. In the opposite direction was the treeline, a forest of white trees that loomed tall and proud, framed by a distant, snow-capped mountain on the far side.
Information. She… she knew her name. Alice. She was… an explorer? A warrior? With each reach for a memory, it seemed as if it pulled away just as her fingers brushed against them, retracting further into the dark. Shit, that was bad.
“Hello?” she called to the wind, her hands cupped around her mouth. The wind did not deign to respond. “Yeah, I didn't think so.”
Without much in the way of direction, Alice picked the one that seemed most promising; the forest. Forests were where wildlife and the undergrowth called home, and should lady luck smile upon her, where she could too. Working off the assumption that she had led a life prior to waking up in the field, and information wasn’t simply appearing in her thoughts spontaneously, she thanked whomever had taught her to scavenge. In a scarce few hours, she had managed to find a collection of stones, moss, and twigs, all gathered near a small, stagnant pond. While she knew better than to drink from it, it did serve as a useful landmark to keep her bearings, and allowed her to bear witness to her reflection.
The fact that her own face and form were alien to her did not cause the panic she had assumed it would, instead fueling the curiosity that burned in her gut. From what she guessed, she was on the tall side of average, somewhere around six feet tall. She looked as if she had once been muscular, body was littered with small scars she did not know the stories of, yet now she could only describe herself as sickly. Her stomach and chest were shallow, hints of her ribs jutting through the thin, pale skin.
What most caught Alice’s attention, though, was her own face. Round, almost mousy looking, though she knew the descriptor did not fit her. At least, she assumed they would have been, were it not for the sunken cheeks that matched the rest of her self, the left marked with a large scar that ran from her jaw to just below one of her tired, green eyes. Wavy, black hair rolled down to her neck, tangled and messy. She had the sudden urge to run her fingers through it, to work out the knots that no doubt filled it. Not the time, though.
Alice shook herself from her thoughts, as fascinated by the reflection as she was. Unfortunately, she had yet to find anything that she thought could act as shelter, a worrying thought that began to weigh ever heavier as the shadows grew longer around her. She had to hurry.
Oddly enough, what stood out as interesting was just how quiet it was. She had spotted the occasional bird lurking in the branches, occasionally cawing or chirping for others of their kind, but beyond that, the silence was almost eerie. In an attempt to appease the growing discomfort in her stomach, she had tried to hit one with a rock. It narrowly dodged the stone, taking flight, but she found herself surprised with her own accuracy nonetheless.
Once it became clear that there was nothing in the forest that she could catch, and seemingly nothing that had an interest in catching her, she took to calling out again. A small part of her mind informed her of the futility, that by her own logic there was not only nothing to gain by shouting, but nothing to hear it to begin with. It still made her feel a little better as she walked.
It had been roughly an hour since leaving the pond when she finally heard it. Not the idle chatter of others like her, nor the soft steps of a wild animal. No, it was something far, far more glorious to her ears: rushing water . She was not ashamed to say she broke into a sprint the instant she discerned the direction of the sound, and she was not ashamed to say she wept when she found it. The day, the only day she knew, was one of stress and focus and survival in the hope of reaching an unpromised tomorrow. She hadn’t even realised she had been holding them in, until the realization came that she didn’t need to preserve them.
Tomorrow was looking more likely by the minute.