I remember my birth. It was quite an odd feeling, not existing one moment and then existing the next, naked in a misty lowland of dead grass and toxic air. I felt an immediate urge to run uphill at the very moment of my birth to escape the air so I did. It was bizarre being born and then wanting to run, it was as if I had existed prior but couldn’t remember existing if that makes sense, I could walk and talk and think competently with little hindrance at all but I had no prior memories of being an entity, of being an individual, of even being a collection of particles. I was just created out of nothing, by whom I still wonder to this day. I ran up hill and then when the air was clear I took my first breath and realized that I was a something. I looked around trying to think of what I was seeing, of what I was hearing and tasting and why I was cold and why had an urge to put something in my mouth and swallow it, I actually remember ripping out some grass and eating that to see what would I happen, suffice to say it tasted absolutely awful, although I swallowed it anyway just in case.
  I sat on the top of the hill for a while trying to think about one thing at a time, absolutely overwhelmed by my senses and the fact of being alive, although I didn’t appreciate it much at the time as you can expect. Naked on a cold hill trying to eat inedible grass wondering why things went dark for a moment every few seconds, I quickly discovered that it was my eyelids shutting and opening so my eyes didn’t hurt.

  After a time I got bored and stood up, looking for a direction to travel in then chose to follow a route that tended not go below the mist. I walked for a time, some urge driving me to carry on walking, to no longer see the white and the green grass, to find something warm and to find something to put in my mouth that didn’t taste awful.

  I walked for miles before reaching the cliff looking out to Watterborough, my view was of yellow sand surrounding a grey monster, I believed at the time that it was just really but my instincts thought better than to approach it before I was lower down. But then things went dark.

I woke with a pain in my chest, sharp points piercing my skin slightly all across my torso, then a voice. “Awake.”

  “I suppose.” I was astonished on my response, it was almost instinctual.

  “You are not of Watterborough.”

  “No, I am not.”

  “From where do you from?”

  I spent a moment processing the ill conceived question, “I do not know.”

  The voice sighed.