Tora

It started with a groan. With the smell of decay. With the soft, damp moss and mud below her as she raised herself from the ground. The Pearlcatcher slowly, drowsily looked around.

It was sunset, judging by the golden light. Thick fog crept slowly about the ground in wispy curls. She could hear the distant chirping and shrill croaking of crickets, tree frogs, and small brush birds. The air was cool and held a high concentration of water vapor. Quiet, yet noisy. Still, yet filled with life. Indeed. She was in a swamp.

Oddly, it felt like home, though the Pearlcatcher was only just realizing that she didn't remember anything about her past. She had her vocabulary intact, and she could recognize basic facts like what a swamp was, but that was about it. For a moment, she wondered who she was, but was at least able to remember her name.

Tora. the Pearlcatcher thought. My name is Tora. She looked around the swamp again in puzzlement. But...what am I doing here?

Tora tried to remember what her home was like. Nothing. Idly, Tora scratched her head as she pondered this unusual circumstance. But then, she froze. Her hand held something. Uneasy, and with a clenched stomach, she carefully pulled whatever this thing was in front of her face. A hairy lump of flesh. Somehow, she knew it had once been a part of her, herself.

Tora shouted in alarm and chucked the fleshy mass as far into the swamp and the mist as she could. In the distance, she heard a watery plunk. So, there was a body of water nearby. Unsurprising, but that wasn't what took up most of her attention. Once she'd settled her nerves, listening to the sounds of the swamp and calming her breathing, she carefully began to feel around her head. Her stomach churned. She hurried toward where she'd heard the water to confirm what she saw. Gusting away the fog around the water's surface with her wings, she gazed at the rippling natural mirror. All she could do was stare in horror at what she saw: her body was in a state of decay. Her flesh was rotting off of her bones. Her face was basically gone. And then...the mist covered her reflection once more.

Tora sat back onto the springy moss of the water's bank, staring forward in disbelief. It didn't hurt. It wasn't even uncomfortable, this rot that she was afflicted with. Like unlocking a new room, suddenly, new information began to trickle into her mind. And so, without a doubt, she knew... She was undead.

Tora couldn't remember how she'd died. She had no memory nor clue about how she was raised from the dead either. In a bit of a stupor, she sat there, going over what little she knew about herself. She was in a swamp, and it felt comfortably familiar. Her name was Tora. She was a Pearlcatcher. She was undead. She was...alone.

Slowly, once again, Tora took in her surroundings. There was no sign of anyone else. She got up and began blowing around the fog, looking around in the mud for signs of others having been there. Surely they would have left tracks or something in this soft earth. Even with the shadows elongating and the sky darkening, though, she could tell that the only prints in the mud were her own and those of little birds, bugs, and amphibians.

Indeed. She was alone.

~~~~

Time passed.

That first night, Tora had decided that she'd needed to find a place to shelter -- a base of operations, so to speak. She'd let her instinct guide her wanderings, and had found a little hovel made of mud and swamp grasses. She'd been only a little unsure about staying there. What if it had belonged to someone else? However, it had felt so familiar that she'd dismissed most of her worries with relative ease. Sure enough, as the days and nights in the swamp went by, no one came to the earthen structure. Further, the collection of books, scrolls, trinkets, and simple furniture had felt so...home-like to her. She was fairly certain that they were actually hers.

Not needing to go out to hunt or gather, the undead Pearlcatcher instead spent most of her time reading every scrap of text that she could find in the hovel. There were surveys of the wild animals and plant life in the area -- especially the plants -- and pressed and dried samples of particularly interesting vegetation. At least, Tora thought so. Even if she hadn't been the one to put these journals together, she agreed with the author's taste.

Curiosity driving her, Tora continued poking about the hovel...until she found a secret trap door, hidden not only beneath a woven rug, but beneath a layer of mud underneath the rug.

The door creaked on its hinges -- all made of wood, it seemed -- as Tora cautiously pulled it open. There was some sort of scent within, different from the fresh-yet-muddy scents in the swamp. Even as cautious as she was being, somehow, Tora's hands knew what to do. She lit a lantern and shut the glass around it. Then, she lowered it down on a thin rope. It was difficult to see much from above, but once she heard the quiet sound of the encasement settling on the hard-packed dirt floor below, Tora carefully slipped into the opening and glided down to the little light.

As Tora looked around at the walls surrounding her -- even as she was still circling down toward the lantern -- she gaped in awe at what she saw. Ancient tapestries with peculiar writing woven into them hung between tall shelves. Books, boxes, and other unusual objects were scattered all over them. Though she wasn't entirely sure what prompted the thought, she was fairly certain that they were organized by category, rather than by item type. Now deeper into the place, she somehow recognized the scent as being musky and dusty, but with the hidden, older scent of nearly-faded incense mixed in too. A ritual.

Now standing on the ground next to the lantern, Tora paused, wondering why she was so certain that the incense scent had been from a long-completed ritual. She looked around again. There was something on the ground. A quick investigation showed her that there were globs of hardened wax and runny tallow around. Candles. It sure was beginning to feel more and more like her guess was right.

In awe, Tora turned her attention upwards again as she wandered about the hidden room. The tapestries and floor-to-ceiling shelving were simply impressive. She felt like an explorer who had found an ancient ruin, filled with strange and wonderous dangers. However, the thought made her nervous, so she reframed it as looking around a particularly spectacular museum.

Then, she looked down. Her feet had taken her to a desk, shoved up against a wall. There were little wooden drawers built into it, and resting atop it. Vaguely, they resembled a combination of an apothecary's cabinet and a kitchen's storage system. For whatever reason, her fingers went to a specific drawer and pulled it open. Inside was a cloth scrap with some sort of ancient writing on it, and an image showing a jeweled necklace. A single circle seemed to shine above it, and the vague image of dragons were drawn all around it. Tora couldn't read what the text said. However, somehow, she knew roughly what it was depicting.

This necklace contains powerful necromancy magic. She startled herself with the knowledge initially, but shook it off to try to remember more. Ah. Yes... So, this was a memory. She'd been here before. She'd deciphered the cloth scrap before. Somehow, she knew this. If worn by one who can tap into its power successfully, then that person could raise the dead. These undead beings would serve the one who raised them faithfully, bound to their master. If the master loses the necklace somehow, and someone else obtains it, then the horde will stop serving their previous master, and mill about, waiting for someone to command them again. After all, simply possessing or wearing the necklace is not enough to command its power. It takes one equally powerful to call upon it.

But what happens to the previous master? Tora wondered, turning the scrap of cloth over. There was nothing there. Alarm she didn't understand growing, she searched the drawer again. There was nothing else inside. Frantic now, she began searching the entire desk. Then all the shelves. And then she searched them all a second time. Then a third.

It's gone! Tora paused. What was gone? What had she been so desperately looking for?

Her instincts answered her. The necklace. The rest of the text.

Her eyes widened. This had been enough to unlock yet more of her memory. She had been a botanist living in the swamp, surveying nature in peace...but also, secretly, a necromancer. She was fascinated by the craft, and researched all sorts of spells and artifacts, whether they be mere myth or something more...substantial. Here, in this swamp, she came across a sunken ruin. As she explored, she discovered parallels between it and a legend she'd read about: a necromancer who had the power to raise an entire undead army, and who had nearly taken over the world with it. Tora's own ambitions were far more humble. Hers was a scholarly fascination with the craft.

According to the legend, a group of heroes faced down the necromancer and the undead army, and against all odds, had managed to fell the evil dragon. Tora's memory about the very end of the legend was hazy, but she thought that the undead horde had sunk into...the swamp.

Was that why I began researching here? Was I looking for evidence of this legend? Or did I only just happen upon the site? It felt like the latter, really. She'd consumed a lot of similar stories, all of which she'd thought of only as fiction. But this one was real.

Tora tried to remember more. However, at least regarding the legend, the rest of her memories were still blocked. So, she began to wonder about the necklace.

I'd found it. she recalled. I found it in the swamp. If it had been on a corpse or something, then the corpse had long-since rotted away. It was by itself. But then, when I cleaned it up...it was some sort of unnatural, untarnishable gold, with cut, shining rubies set into it. I found a water-tight box, too. Small canvas sheets, scrawled with information about the necklace, were inside, protected from the swamp...

Wait. Sheets? As in, more than one? Yes, she remembered that clearly...though that was the extent of it. Well, mostly. She knew they were important. She knew they somehow had to do with the ritual she had- ... Yes. She had been the one to perform the ritual in which the candles and incense had been used, right here in this room. She'd used the necklace...but how? Had she raised an undead horde? Had she used the necklace for something else?

No matter how hard Tora thought about it, she couldn't remember anything more about it. All she knew for sure was that she had to get the necklace and those cloth sheets back. It was important. Life-and-death level important...and she somehow knew that she wouldn't be able to figure out exactly why it was important until she had them back. They were the key...to unlocking what she had forgotten.

And so, Tora decided. She'd go on a quest to find her lost memories, finding whatever triggers she could, just as she'd been doing since she awoke. And, most importantly, she'd find that necklace, find those canvas scraps. If she did, she was sure she would discover how she became undead, what had happened after she'd performed the ritual, and...

The remaining thought chilled her. It was something so obvious, but that she hadn't thought about before now -- or perhaps, hadn't wanted to think about until now. Just who had taken these things, how, and for what purpose? Who else was involved in this mystery? Just who was...this mysterious threat?

One person? A whole group? How much did they know? More than Tora with her amnesia, certainly. Whoever it was, she knew they were her enemies. And another thought sat in her stomach like an unmelting ice cube... Whoever it was...had probably killed her over it.

Nocturnaliss : "Tora all the way, she's a very spooky girl and I love what you did with the skin and apparel, the hints of Thicket breaking through is also a really nice touch!"