I stand in the doorway of what used to be a spare bedroom, what the landlord optimistically called a ‘home office’ in the listing, and what has become something closer to a war room for a conflict I can’t remember fighting. The walls are covered floor to ceiling in research that feels both intimately mine and utterly foreign, a museum dedicated to memories that don’t belong to me anymore, even though the handwriting scattered across dozens of sticky notes is undeniably my own.
Dragons.
Mountains.
Disappearances…
That follows no logical pattern except that they cluster around the Appalachian Mountains like moths drawn to a flame they can’t see but instinctively know will either illuminate or immolate them.
Red string connects photographs to newspaper clippings to hand-drawn maps with elevation markers and territorial boundaries sketched in my careful, precise lettering. Black thread links different species of supernatural creatures I’ve cataloged, organizing them by region and reported sightings with the methodical attention of someone conducting actual field research rather than chasing fairy tales through the wilderness.
The centerpiece stops my breath every time I look at it.
A photograph, grainy and slightly out of focus, captured from what must have been a significant distance, given its quality. It shows a creature in flight, massive wings spread wide against a twilight sky that bleeds purple and gold, scales catching the dying light in a way that makes them shimmer with an almost ethereal quality. The dragon’s form is unmistakable despite the blur, power and grace combined into something that shouldn’t exist outside of mythology but clearly does.
Beneath it, my handwriting in black marker.
Ice Dragon
‘Raze’
And below that, in red.
Witch’s curse.
Fire stolen.
Must help him.
I trace the words with trembling fingers, feeling the texture of permanent marker against glossy photographic paper, and try to summon even a flicker of memory about why I wrote them, what they mean, who or what Raze is to me beyond a name attached to an impossible creature.
But nothing comes.
Just the hollow ache of absence, the bone-deep certainty that I’ve lost something precious without being able to identify what it was or how to get it back.
My dreams don’t help either. They come every night now, growing more vivid and visceral with each passing evening, images that feel less like subconscious invention and more like memories fighting to surface through whatever barrier has been erected between my waking mind and the truth buried beneath.
Fire and ice.
Blue eyes cold enough to freeze blood in veins.
Heat that burns through frost like a promise.
Violence.
Ledgers.
The scent of leather, exhaust, and something wild that makes my pulse quicken even in sleep. And always, underneath everything else, the sense ofbelongingto something larger than myself, being part of a family I can’t remember joining, feeling claimed, protected, andhisin ways that shouldn’t be possible given that I can’t recall a single face, name, or moment that explains the certainty.
The car accident should have killed me.
That’s what the hospital said when I woke, disoriented and aching, with gaps in my memory large enough to drive a semi through and no explanation for how I survived weeks in the wilderness after my vehicle wrapped around a tree on a mountain road I have no recollection of crashing on.
They found the hunter’s body in the wreckage. Told me I was lucky. Said brain trauma and hypothermia explained the memory loss, that time and rest would restore what I’d forgotten, and that I should be grateful to be alive at all.
But standing here surrounded by evidence of a life I was clearly living before everything went dark, I can’t shake the conviction that luck had nothing to do with my survival, and what I’ve lost is far more significant than a few missing days or even weeks.
I’ve lost myself.
