She sat before a small fire, gazing across the vast reaches of this place, a desolate realm that seemed to stretch on in all directions without end. This place seemed totally unfamiliar to her... or did it? It was becoming difficult to tell. Her memory was in ruins, yet a part of her felt that that was for the best, a vague intuition that she was better off this way. One might expect that being alone in such a place without even the comfort of memories of better times would break a person, but she wasn't alone. She was never truly alone. Nested in the darkest regions of her heart was something... difficult to explain. She didn't even fully understand it herself. It was more presence than person, yet she felt as though it was a friend, perhaps even more than a friend. It's nature was clearly dark, yet somehow it also filled her with a sort of guiding light. It's voice was powerful, and cold, yet somehow gentle and warming. She was cautious of this place, her situation, her fragmented memory, but the one thing she was certain she could rely upon was the presence.
"Eat. You need to keep your strength up to survive in this place", the voice thundered from within her mind.
She looked towards the blade embedded into the barren earth, skewering a thick cut of meat as it roasted over the crackling flame. The carved remains of a chimera laid lifeless on the ground nearby. It was the only beast she had encountered that her companion had deemed fit for human consumption, and it was worlds better than the nutritionally bankrupt food she'd been finding in the ruins.
"With no ice magic available, you won't be able to preserve any of that, so eat whatever you can now, it's hard to say when you'll be able to draw another of these away like this to fight it alone.", it said.
"Okay...", she answered in a dull monotone voice, as she pulled the sword from the ground, and sat down to eat as much as she could. The meat was tough and fatty, and the flavor left much to be desired, or at least it would have if she could recall what anything else tasted like. Regardless, it would keep her in fighting condition, which in this place, was all that really mattered.
You might expect that someone in this situation would be trying to figure out how they had gotten here, or how to get back, but that would be rooted in the assumption that they knew they had come from somewhere, or that they had somewhere to go. Such thoughts hadn't even occurred to her with her memories in their current state. As far as she knew, there was nowhere else, and nothing else here. From her perspective, this wasteland was all there had ever been, and that she, her companion, and the beasts were the only ones who were ever here.
"Zodiark... Who am I?", she asked.
It gave no answer, it only filled her with a warm sensation, perhaps it didn't know how to answer her question, or perhaps it simply thought it best not to.
She smiled, and laid down on the bedroll she had scavenged from one of the buildings. It was tattered and worn, the decaying fibers were rough on her delicate skin. She took a deep breath in through her nose, and it smelled vaguely of mildew, but somehow, this was familiar. She laid on her back, looking up at the sky. She couldn't be entirely sure what, yet she expected to see something there, but whatever it was, she didn't. Though she had no memory of right for comparison, somehow she knew this place was wrong.
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