Worlds of Paul Jessup

Tarel’s memory was a funny thing. He could remember many moments in extreme detail, these jigsaw pieces of his life so mundane and yet held in his skull with a picture perfect clarity. Yet, profound moments, life changing moments, they fell through his thoughts like a sieve, leaving the revenants of the memory lost on the ground.

Most of the time he had spent with his sarcyst, Lamlara, was like that. She moved in and out of his mind like a stark shadow, cut out from the light of the sun. He knew she had weight, had existence, yet her memories never seemed to touch him, never seemed to move him. They never seemed to go from abstraction to permanence. They held no weight in his skull, and instead floated atop of his memories like paper on water.

Nothing. Yet he could remember so clearly sitting atop of his mother’s house when he was four, watching the people toil in the ruins while he ate an apple. He remembered the tart taste of the apple, the way the sun flickered and turned in some moments from red to a cold blue and then back to red again. He remembered each crack in the roof, each body milling about, the impressive crumbling towers right before the ruins. And the scent of daemons, running through the hills in the distance hunting for warm tasty things.