Cold wind brushed against Lymur's face as he began waking up.
That was the first thing, actually. The cold against his face, seeping through the back of his shirt, with the damp earth beneath him doing absolutely nothing to help.
His eyes opened slowly, though what greeted him was little more than a blank, blue sky and swaying branches of tall trees.
His head throbbed—painfully so. He felt drunk so he laid there for a moment as he tried to understand why everything felt so distant, so strange. There was this pain behind his eyes, and when he tried to sit up, the forest tilted to the side. He stopped halfway, pressing a hand against the ground until the spinning of his vision calmed.
"...What...?"
His voice was hoarse, and it sounded barely even louder than a breath. Even so, he pushed himself upright and remained still for a while, letting the dizziness pass. Damp earth clung to his palm and fallen leaves crunched softly beneath his fingers while the smell of soil and moss filled his nostrils.
He was in a forest—that much he could understand. But the rest—
"Ugh..."
Something felt wrong. Like he was supposed to remember things but he struggled to figure out exactly what. He tried in one moment, but to no avail. Then in another, and another, and another. Lymur couldn't make sense of the turmoil inside his head, and that frustrated him. His thoughts were scrambled and at this point, he didn't even know who he was.
"Am I... am I... am I...?"
Frustration grew as the minutes passed. Lymur pressed a hand to his temple and shut his eyes. The pressure inside his skull grew sharper as if his thoughts themselves were resisting him. No matter how hard he tried to recall how he ended up face-up in the ground with dead leaves in his hair in the middle of nowhere, he couldn't.
There were little visions, though—of blue light and endless skies and someone with golden eyes sitting on a throne—but they faded before he could make sense of them.
"Alright."
He exhaled slowly and let the effort go.
For now, forcing it wouldn't do anyone good, least of all him.
Instead, he looked around.
The forest stretched endlessly in every direction. Tall tree trunks formed thick brown pillars all around him, their leaves blocking most of the sky above. Rays of pale sunlight slipped through the gaps and drew swaying patterns across the ground.
What a peaceful sight—or it should've been.
He was still in an existential battle with himself as he struggled to take hold of his own identity when all of a sudden, he sensed weird tensions in the air.
Lymur tilted his head.
Not a sound, no, not exactly. More like something that tugged at the edges of his perception, and the closer he paid attention to it the more certain he became that whatever it was, it wasn't good.
"That's not nothing, is it? Am I in trouble?"
He pushed himself to his feet, brushed the dirt off his hands, and started walking toward it. He couldn't have explained the decision even if he tried. It just felt like the obvious thing to do, the same way breathing was obvious. The density of trees grew as he moved deeper into the forest and a few minutes later, he started picking up something else. It was fading fast, like a fire's ember going out.
He began to slow down when the trees began to thin and he stumbled upon a cave's entrance. It was then that a strange smell reached him before anything else did. Blood, and something that burned, and underneath both of those something that he had no name for. He made his way into the cave and his eyes adjusted abnormally fast into the darkness.
"Where does this even lead to?" He questioned himself even knowing there was only one path to an answer. "I really hope this isn't some booby trap or whatever."
When he finally came out of a particularly long tunnel, his brain took a moment to process what he was seeing, because at the center of the cavern lay a creature the size of a small building. It had silver-white scales, but they were cracked and darkened, with feathered wings torn and a bloodied neck stretched out flat against burned stone. The ground around it had been carved apart like something had violence occured in this space before he arrived.
It was a dragon. A dead dragon, to be precise.
And standing near the body, back mostly to him, was a man—or the silhouette of a man—in dark robes, with very little resemblance to a human at all. Tall, calm, and looking like he'd just finished running an errand. The man turned, revealing his ashen gray skin and slightly light shade of long hair. Two inhuman horns protruded from the sides of his head, taking on an S-shape. Red eyes found Lymur across the cavern and looked him over in about two seconds flat.
"A lesser?" It muttered in a deep, low voice.
Lymur scratched his cheek and glanced at the dragon awkwardly. "Hey, man, uhm, did something happen here?"
The man didn't answer. He just casually raised one hand the way you'd wave off a fly, but the force that followed was not casual at all. It hit Lymur like a wall and a cannonball at the same time. The ground exploded under him, carving itself into a long ugly trench of dirt and stone beneath his body before it finally dumped him in a crater somewhere in a dark corner.
The gray man was probably already walking away.
Lymur lay there for a second. Then he sat up, looked at the crater around him, and felt a slow irritation work its way up through his chest. He stood upright, walked back, and found the man mid-turn with his back already toward the exit.
"I'm still really confused about basically everything right now," Lymur said, brushing a clod of stone debris off his shoulder, his unexpected voice bringing the man's walk to a stop. "So I'd appreciate it if people I just met didn't punch me around."
The man turned back slowly, and for the first time since Lymur had walked into the cavern, something changed in those red eyes—a small crease between the brows, something that might have been disbelief if the man seemed capable of it. He looked Lymur over again. Not a scratch, not even a torn sleeve.
"What are you? Are you human?" he asked, slower this time.
Lymur opened his mouth. Closed it, really looking like he genuinely wondered as well. "...Good question. I honestly have no idea."
The man moved and the ground cracked under his foot as he crossed the distance and swung, and the fist that came for Lymur's skull had the kind of force that didn't leave bruises so much as it rearranged geography. Lymur's body moved on its own — half a step, just enough — and the blow went past his cheek close enough to feel the air of it. His own hand came up without thought, palm open, and caught the man in the ribs.
The sound it made was almost quiet. The result, however, was anything but. The man blew backward through the far end of the cavern and into its walls like he'd been struck by something much larger than one open hand, and the crash that followed made the ceiling tremble, threatening to collapse.
Lymur stood where he was, breathing normally, and felt his pulse kick up a notch, though not from fear. It was something warmer that he didn't quite have a name for yet.
"How'd you like that, bitch?" He taunted.
The man came back out of the debris with dark mana rising off him like smoke off a fire, killing intent flooding the cave in a wave. He was angrier now, faster, and the next series of clashes was a different thing entirely. He wasn't testing anymore, wasn't being lazy, and Lymur was the one to feel the difference.
"Tsk. I am a Scythe, you dull creature — " The gray man shouted in between exchange of blows, but he was cut-off by an uppercut from Lymur.
Each attack came harder than the last, combinations that kept changing, and there was a part of Lymur's brain that was still foggy and uncertain and operating mostly entirely on instinct. But instinct, it turned out, was doing him just fine. His body moved through the fight like it already knew all the answers, like muscle memory from something he couldn't consciously access yet, each strike and counterstrike feeling truer than the last as the fight went on.
Every hit he landed sent the man skidding or crashing through another wall of the cavern. Every time the man recovered and came back, he was a little worse off, and Lymur could feel the extent of the gap between them, how wide it was, how it wasn't closing no matter how much the gray man pushed. He laughed at some point — he swore hadn't meant to, it just came out — and it felt right anyway and that surprised him.
"Ahahahaha~! Hey," He called out to the man as he ducked under another jab. "Any idea why I'm laughing? I'm nervous but I'm laughing and I don't know why!"
The man didn't reply.
The next clash ended with the man half-buried in the ground, one arm braced against the shattered ground. Lymur was a few feet away, barely winded, and tilted his head, and something in the back of his mind went quiet.
Like I've done this for—
"...Lymur?"
He stopped. The word had come out of his own mouth without him deciding to say it, and he stood there for a moment with his hand drifting to his chest.
"...Right." He said it again, quieter. "Lymur. That's my name. Or was it Rimu— something? Ah, no. It really is Lymur."
The fog of his mind began to stir. He only ever remembered his name, though, and not anything else. But still, there was something like a piece of himself clicking back into place. He stayed with it, and the feeling spread, and a name rose up from somewhere beneath his conscious thought.
[■■■■■■]
Lymur blinked at the blank memory space where the name should have been. He tilted his head slightly. And then, somehow, without the word, without anything he could point to — he understood anyway.
"An Archetype," he murmured. "Of the Great Demon Lord... ■■■■■■."
The redacted name pulsed once in the back of his mind and stopped. And the pain that had been sitting in his chest since he'd woken up quietly let go.
"That's creepy. Seriously, what is this?"
He was still turning that over when the man moved again, and this time it was different. There was no charge, not even an attack. He drove both hands into the cave's floor and poured something into it — dark mana flooding outward in a wave — and the explosion that followed was massive and the smoke and debris it threw up swallowed the entire cave in an instant.
Lymur stood in the gray haze, unbothered even as he saw the sun once more, dust drifting past him. "You really collapsed the whole cave? Then again, it's no use," he said, to wherever the man was in the smoke. "You've already seen what happens when—"
He paused and reached out with his senses.
Lymur stood very still while the smoke thinned, revealing the clearing around him to be purely empty.
"...Huh." A small sound came out of him, between a laugh and a sigh. He turned slowly toward the treeline where the man's presence had vanished, and had to admit, genuinely, that was actually pretty cliche.
Not the running — that was just sensible given the circumstances — but the way it was done. All that force, all that destruction, and none of it was meant to hurt him anyway. It was a curtain and the moment Lymur's attention had wandered, the man had already left.
Fast, too, Lymur thought. The presence had dropped off his senses almost completely now, and whoever this man was, he clearly knew how to disappear. That kind of instinct, bolting clean in the middle of a losing fight and vanishing without a trace — that took a particular kind of head.
"Though I have a feeling he wasn't really going all out against me... or is that my imagination?"
He stared at the clearing a moment longer.
"Should I have stopped him?"
The man had shown up, killed a dragon, and immediately tried to kill him without a word of explanation — that wasn't a combination of traits that inspired a lot of confidence about what he was going to do next. Following him through an unfamiliar forest with a head still half-full of fog probably wasn't the answer either, but letting him walk away clean felt like the kind of decision that had consequences down the road.
Then again, Lymur looked at the ruined clearing and figured that whatever consequences the man represented, they were tomorrow's problem. He'd remember the face anyway. Or he'd try to, at least.
He exhaled, rolled his shoulders, and looked around at the surrounding forest. The smoke had nearly cleared, and somewhere beyond the trees was presumably a world with people in it who might be able to tell him where he was.
Start there, he decided. Figure out everything else after.
He turned away from the clearing and started walking.
"It feels good to be alive!"