Rowan opened her eyes groggily at the sound of the alarm, shooting the clock a tired, slightly offended glance before sitting up. She’d blinked back into her apartment (or had her atoms painstakingly reassembled after disintegration, she still couldn’t be entirely certain) in a state of complete exhaustion and immediately collapsed into her bed. Her chest still ached slightly, throat burning for reasons she didn’t quite understand. She wasn’t sure if she had been screaming, everything after picking up that sword was shrouded in a crackling electric haze. She still felt as though climbing out of bed would be a herculean labor, maybe her “unstable” starseed made this more difficult for her than it was for other people. Maybe her mind was just not strong enough to handle the strain.

Despite the paralyzing fatigue that pervaded the entirety of her being, the previous night’s sleep had been fitful as she struggled in vain to calm the turbulence in her mind. She couldn’t even describe what she’d experienced as “memories.” They were more like impressions, senses, waves of disjointed emotion that belonged to someone else. Someone else who was somehow her and, it followed, countless other someones stretching back longer than she cared to consider right now. At least it seemed she wasn’t at risk of encountering their memories. A small shining mercy in all of this fog. The fog. She could hardly face the thought of that tower across the water. She already knew it was undeniably a part of her, more so than anything in the crumbling city she’d glimpsed from below, but the why remained a terrifying void. It was impossible for her to know how it was for other people but she couldn’t stop herself from wondering if hers were somehow…defective. But then, who could say how reliable these memories actually were? She wished that she could deny what she already knew, but she felt it down to her atoms. She had lived every staggered, shredded moment in ages long past. She didn’t know how the pieces fit together, assuming they fit together at all.

She ran her hands over her hair, left uncharacteristically loose and unruly after a restless night unbraided. Under normal circumstances the prospect of gently detangling the mass of red would be an inconvenience, a reason to grumble and chide herself for neglecting such a small task. After a night like the one she’d had, however, the thought was a welcomely mundane distraction. She reluctantly rose from her bed, grimacing as the cold struck her bare legs on her way to the bathroom. She hadn’t showered the night before and was sure she smelled faintly of that alien sea. She wondered what it looked like before it lost everything, if it had ever borne the sparkling blue she imagined it might. It could have even been beautiful in a way that didn’t resemble the bleak desolation she’d encountered. Like everything else she’d encountered since her first exposure to this strange new reality the unfortunate answer was that, at least for now, there was no way to know.