“What? Seal? It’s... broken?” Flashes of things that were not known to me shot through my mind, revealing images and places that I had not known existed. Flashes, mere flashes, nothing more. Incoherent, illegible... Things that could not have been understood by a thousand wise men.

The more they showed, the less I knew. My mind was being consumed by an insatiable force, and I had no way to preserve that which made my existence meaningful. The memories were eaten whole, save fragments here and there, which clustered together into illogical shards of what they once were.

The fibers of my being were slowly coming into focus; my lungs gradually filled with air, needles of pain stabbing into them as if it were the first time in ages my lungs had drawn breath. My heart pounded in my chest as it began beating, and my eyes finally opened, to reveal... “What?”

There was nothing. The simple profundity of it, the contradiction in itself just opened my mind to the world, and it flowed in. The plains, and the Heavens, and the seas, they poured into my mind, opening my eyes to everything. And alone I was, on that mountain; whether there was anything, whether I was, didn’t matter. Where I was, was irrelevant. I knew there was something... Something that lingered on the corner of my mind, something mildly important. But I just couldn’t place it. It crept up the back of my skull, a cold sensation spreading through my mind, and I realized...

Mountain? I knew the word, and that it was what I looked upon. My mind had the apparent tenacity to preserve this one memory, and connected the two. But I looked around, and my mind drank its fill. I was conscious. I was alive.

A single look over the edge was all that it took to tell me that I wouldn’t survive such a fall; I needed another way down. I began to question what it was that told me that it was wrong, but my mind was elsewhere.

The situation was peculiar; even in my state, I knew that something was wrong, that I shouldn’t be here. Where should I have been? The more I looked around, the more overwhelmed I was by my situation. The clouds drifted aimlessly above me, going to only God knows where. The waves crashing violently against the mountain were gradually eating into the rock, though I knew not how long it would take. Both the sky and the sea went on forever, to...

Other places. Places that weren’t where I was. That was a good thing. I had made the connection, though I had no way to act on it. I needed a way down, or a way off; I needed a way off that damned rock. That was when the bird flew by.

It landed on the rock, and began to peck at the ground. I suppose now that it was looking for grubs, or something, but the thought didn’t cross my mind at the time. All that mattered is that I saw that it was possible to get off of the rock, because you could get on. What I hadn’t figured out yet was that the bird had flown onto the rock, which was not a viable option for me.

The second I was within inches of the bird, it took off. I began to fall backwards as the feathers flew up and over me, knocking me off-balance. What sent me into shock was the lack of earth beneath my feet; I reached out towards the edge of the cliff, only to find that I was too far out. Any grip I could get was unstable, and I plunged towards the crashing waves.

The clouds began to swirl overhead, as if circling me, waiting for my death. The closer I came to the waves, the harder they seemed to crash against one another; the winds had picked up to almost a howl, and almost seemed to slow my fall towards the water. My reality was swiftly drawing towards its end, it seemed. The things that I knew, but didn’t, flashed through my mind once more, but more rapidly, melding into one thought. One word escaped my lips as I crashed into the water, and in my last glimpse above the surface the sky opened up onto eternity, and once more the cold sensation spread through my mind...

But the water was freezing cold, and began to envelop me as I plunged deeper into the water. The cold filled my senses, slowing me, crushing me, smothering me. I could feel the water flood into my lungs, and my breathing seemed to stop. My mind began to fade out, and I went limp...

I felt it. A Betrayal. But I knew not where it came from. A stifling cold continued to pound into my skull, and I felt it begin to strain under the pressure. The Betrayal, it resonated into the core of my being. I could almost feel it, tangible, suffocating my mind, trying to silence me.

It knew what I knew. It knew that I knew about the Betrayal. It resonated understanding, and possibly even a bit of compassion, before stifling my thoughts, cutting them off. It was silent, yet reached to the corners of my reality, or what seemed to be left of it. I couldn’t think. I wasn’t sure if I was breathing.

All I could hear was the pounding of water, limitless amounts of it. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, I only knew that it seemed to permeate my consciousness. The pounding never stopped. It was incessantly pounding further and further into my mind, reaching for the core. But I wouldn’t let that happen.

It took all of my willpower to open my mouth, and I damn near killed myself forcing myself to yell a single word. “Why?!” I wanted to collapse, to just rest, to merely end this. But I couldn’t; something wouldn’t let me.

The voice came from all the corners of reality at once, booming in from all directions. Yet it came from nowhere. I couldn’t understand the thundering words, but they held some significance for something in my soul, and I listened. Le’c’ilr shær gaet, it said. The words pervaded my mind, opened my soul, bared it to the Betrayal.

The few memories that remained, I clung to, regardless of what they contained; they were my final bastion, however hollow. The Betrayal knew this, and shattered them, he reduced them to little more than barely coherent images and words that existed only on the fringes of conscious thought. They were destroyed again, and what little was left of my being anguished at this violation.

One remained. A single, solitary memory remained intact. It was all I had left, and the Betrayal knew this.