In the Shadow of a Shnork

At first, just the feeling of being held, somewhere between waking and not. A quiet hum filled the edges of thought, soft and low, like roots shifting beneath the ground.

Then, breath.

A slow inhale, sudden and strange, as if it were the first one ever taken. I blinked. Once. Twice. The world seeped in—not in colour, not in shape, but in weight. A heaviness behind the eyes. Limbs that remembered motion before the mind did.

I lay still for a while, unsure whether I had returned… or begun.

The forest stretched around me in a hush of greens and browns and golds. Trees loomed tall, ancient and still; their bark patterned like old maps.

Sunlight dripped in weak lines through the leaves above, golden and dusted with motion.

I sat up slowly, sluggish but steady. My hands—green, wide-palmed, three-fingered—rested on moss. Familiar, but… not. As if they’d once belonged to someone else.

My chest rose and fell. No pain. No fear. Just a sense of newness, aching at the edges.

A whisper of breeze passed through the clearing. Leaves rustled. Far off, something called out—a bird or a beast, or both. The sound stirred nothing familiar in my memory. That was the first thing it noticed: there was nothing to remember.

No name.

No purpose.

Only a question, quietly pulsing behind the eyes:

“What am I?”

I stood, wobbling at first, then finding balance. Feet met the ground like they knew it, like they’d done it a thousand times. The forest welcomed the weight. A beetle scurried nearby. A cluster of mushrooms swayed in the shadows of a log. And in the air: a scent—rich, loamy, alive.

I turned slowly in place. I saw no paths, no marks of passage. Just wilderness, stretched out in every direction, uncaring and untouched. But inside—beneath skin and breath and heartbeat—there was something else: awareness. Like waking up with new eyes.

Not just to see the world.

To understand it.

And maybe, in time… understand myself.

I raised a hand to my chest. The heartbeat was steady, but distant, like it wasn’t entirely my own.

“I was…” I whispered, my voice rough and small. “I was something before this.”

Or maybe it hadn’t been anything at all.

Something moved behind my eyes—a flicker of past lives, or future ones—impossible to tell. I touched my head. No scars. Just skin. Soft and still warm from the ground.

Wind passed through the trees again, this time stronger. I felt the pull in my chest, not forward, not back—just outward. Like the forest was breathing too, and it had woken in sync with something older than time.

I took my first step.

The moss gave way with a gentle squish, and the shadows bent just slightly to let it pass.

No direction.

No goal.

Only the sense that something had started.

And whatever I had been before… it had changed.