Numenor

Numenor came to Rakraēt soon after it was founded – or so she's told. She does not remember what came before... Before. Was there a before?

She had been a Tundra, that much she knew. It made sense that a Tundra would seek refuge in the Icefield – but refuge from what? Numenor did not know what drove her to a solitary life among the Rakraēti. Though she didn't boast, she knew she was clever, but she was far better at guessing the future than rebuilding the past out of scraps.

Especially if the scraps were so few and far between.

“I used to train you,” Rahka told her once in passing, back when Numenor was a newly-minted Bogsneak, still confused by the change and her lack of memories. “When you were a Tundra. You had promise. It is a shame you are so small now,” Rahka added with uncharacteristic regret.

“Perhaps I shall school myself in magic instead,” Numenor retorted. “Then we will see how well your blows hit.”

Rahka laughed with delighted surprise. “You are more feisty now! I wonder if you have always been so before your sorrows befell you.”

But Numenor did not know. She supposed that was her curse, now – to not know what great tragedy made her forsake her own past.

Long ago, the Rakraēti tell her, she used to be quiet and soft-spoken, and her eyes spoke of a great sadness. One night, she went to Matsu, their frivolous leader and a great shapeshifter, and sought from him a cure against her grief. But Matsu told her no such cure was to be found if she wanted to remain as she was.

“No price is too high to pay for losing such a burden,” Numenor had said.

And so Matsu smiled his strange, eerie grin, and did his great magic in front of all Rakraēti – he changed Numenor's form from that of a Tundra into that of a Bogsneak.

“Now that your body is smaller, you will find that your troubles are also lesser,” Matsu had said, and laughed, and departed. He did as asked, yet it was not a kindness – Numenor found she could not remember anything from her past afterwards, not even the simplest of things; her age, her origins, her name.

The sorrow was gone, but so was everything else – her goals, her longing, her reasons. Her life. But it was a clean slate nonetheless, so Numenor chose to accept it as a gift. The name the Rakraēti still called her by felt wrong, so she changed it. Since her new body was small, she did not fight – she scavenged when the weather was mild enough not to get her snowed in, and otherwise spent her time with cats that she somehow managed to attract.

There were days, however, when she still wondered what had truly happened to drive her to such sorrow, before. The mystery of the lost sadness: and she wondered if the price had been too high after all, and she would never know.

Few Rakraēti know Numenor's true story. Many of them were too young to remember, and of the oldest residents but the few still remained, the rest lost to blizzards or ancient magics or cruel battles.

This time, Numenor thinks to herself, I will not be a coward. I will remember, this I vow.

But she still does not know what she lost.