The years came back to her in bits and pieces, or not at all.

There was no sudden flood of memories, no sudden satisfying understanding. Just confusion and swimming, hazy memories.

Her fellow helpers were clearest in her mind - the most distinct, the most real. The least warped. She recalled their determination and their companionship together.

The doe was quite sure she had always been detached - more curious and pragmatic and coolly analytical. She told herself it was merely an intellectual interest that kept her rooted in place for sometimes hours, frowning and concentrating, as if force of will could manifest a memory into clarity.

And so the hurt and anger taking over her felt as alien as realising she had been controlled this whole time, an interloper in her body that quivered under her broad shoulders and seethed through her muscles as she stomped and glowered, kin who did spot her giving her a wide berth.

It was humiliating. She was, she was realising, prideful - that might have been the clearest thing she was discovering about herself. She was supposed to be knowledgeable, and yet she couldn’t remember the barest facts about herself. She didn’t know where she had come from, or what bargain she had struck.

When she reached for her past, most of it was drenched in cold blackness. Trying to force her way through it made her dizzy.

In the few months since the thrall had fallen from her, she had kept her distance from other kin, quietly observing from a distance. The halo wasn’t unique, but it still marked her, and with what little she remembered, she didn’t want to be too quick to strike up conversations with kin. The shadows and fragments of times of day made everything ever more treacherous and unfamiliar.

But there was something else in her mind. It nagged behind her eyelids like daylight does a sleeper, a whisper and a heat.

The swamp was speaking to her.

Something else about herself. She didn’t want it to, to begin with. She recognised on some instinct that it was the opposite to her former master, and freed as she was, she was proud, and she was reluctant to grovel. She didn’t need, shouldn’t need their approval. She was her own kin.

And the nagging was quiet enough to live with - like an insect, persistent but ultimately harmless. But the void where she was meant to be in her own mind was not. The dark yawned and seemed to have swallowed almost everything. She had had a name, once, and she fed it to the darkness.

Why had she done that? What had she been seeking?

What was she seeking?

She was prideful, but beyond that she was curious. Endlessly, insatiably curious. She would never be satisfied if she didn’t know. She could not live as an unknown mystery to herself. And no-one who could tell her was around to ask.

So one morning, after the days had fallen back to their usual cycle, and the surreal pockets of light were vanished, she finally accepted. She surrendered, with resentment and defiance and the certainty that this too she would live to regret. But she had to know. So she lay down in the thickest part of the swamp and gave in to the dream.

If the past was an endless fall into blackness, it seemed the future would be scorched with blinding light.

what comes after