Sea of the mind
Age beyond time, void beyond shadow.
She waded through the river of forgetfulness, spearing memories like fish. Her harpoon carved from the finest gossamer, the metal and thread of dreams, and the memory fish flopped and bled stardust and darkling dawn light in smeary swirls of colour. A hunter, a stalker, she walked fathomless depths and the shell-beaded shallows at the edges of the mind.
Schools of memories in whirling, gleaming whorls and twisting dances scattered at her advance, flashing into darkness with bursts of light that illuminated, for the briefest of moments, their attendant thoughts until the dusky river swallowed them whole.
All was silent save the slosh-slosh of her tireless walk.
She was alone. Lonely.
Her hands stained with stardust-blood, she clutched the dying memories and gave them what comfort she could before they faded into the river. Bodies dissolving into dim waters, time slipping through an unseen hourglass to pool in an unknown chamber somewhere far out of reach. Moments and people gone in a flash of steel and butterfly wings. Perhaps the hourglass would turn and the tide would go out, and her with it. Or the rushing, leaping waters with their invisible currents and tricksome eddies might surge forwards to break the shores of the mind, flood the dams and levies.
Forgetting overwriting the knowing, and everything just tiny fish in an endless ocean, gleaming fragments of what was. Shattered to pieces that she frantically tried to hold as they slip away. Maybe it would be a peace, to forget that she was forgetting, to forget what it was to remember.
The darkling waters bulged and trembled; something stirred in the star-death depths where no light lived. No shadow dared to brave the depths without the company of light, and it was a void without end or beginning from which the water came and where it flowed to. She skirted the edges, watching memory-fish leap and then -
vanish -
poof, gone as they flashed into the void. A voracious hunger, a nothing which did not know what it eats and did not care.
Mundivore.
It eats her world, great bites gluttonously taking chunks of her, of her delicate sea-shell mind and what it produced in return she had yet to see. She gathered her caught fish to her, those that did not trickle away and did not desert her, so few, and she taxidermies them with chemicals and glistening glass eyes. Mounts them on her walls, mouths agape, pale imitations of what they once were. See? The moths have gotten to that summer when she was young; the sunlight still gleams, but what of the flowers in the meadowgrass? What were their colours, or was it too late in the season and her mind filled the gaps with a brilliant burst of colours because that was all it could do?
She sits with her preserved memories and wonders if she will forget herself. Perhaps she already has.
