In Utero
Odri sleeps to faint memories of floating in nothing. Being weightless and comfortable, in total black. The primordial everything. She hears the faint drones, creaks, rumbles of the world beyond this place, filtered through the waters older than the land. She hears her own breathing. Her arms float on a barely-there current. This is a common thing that occurs, when she sleeps. This feeling of being somewhere faraway and waiting. It felt very different to her waking. Both were water. - When she first woke, she was in water. Among the ruins of Zelis. Still as still, among the silence of a dead place. She was tethered to the seabed by wisps so delicate, they look like they could be brushed away. Being there was not, in itself, frightening. It was peaceful. It was the waking that came full of terror. Being ousted from that gentle slumber, into sharp awareness that living was suddenly incompatible with this place. Having to scramble out of the metal shell of the building, and up into what felt like blue in all directions that would never end. Vague, tall shapes appearing out of the murk, on the edges of vision. It felt unnatural, that her breath could hold that long, that in the panic of breathing out, it did not drown her. She had broken water before she could see its edge. It was night, the moon was the only light. She coughed the water from her lungs so hard it exhausted her. And they burned with salt, but the peace of having cleared them was unlike anything she had felt in all her existence. The next thing she remembered was the roughness of shale against her back. It was a couple of hours before she remembered who she was, and what had happened. And longer still until she could accept it.