The Fire Orchid

Echase

The memories I will tell you from now on are not mine, but they are the only ones I can use to best describe what happened after our fall. At the time I met them, I thought it was all just a sequence of meaningless dreams, a warning to me to stop spending so much time immersed in piles of books or modeling new clothes made by Pitaya Goliath after I told her about my childhood desires. All of this should make sense, but if there's one specific detail in my gift (or perhaps curse), it's a single, tiny detail that sent me into shock when I realized I'd actually said what I thought I'd said.

I can't remember clearly what happens inside my dreams. Often they were just photographs or meaningless paintings of moments that I wanted to understand, but it was impossible. It made me anxious, distressed, for someone who remembers even the most futile or unnecessary things in everyday life to discover that they can't remember their best dreams? Deep down, I can say that this was something that made me happy, since at least with my dreams I could know what it's like to have a memory that works just like other people's. It was a wonderful feeling at first, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

The sensation was wonderful at first, it made me feel so much like my sister and the other members of my family, but at the same time the feeling was cold and suffocating, something desperate and agonizing like when I felt water invading my mouth and nostrils. Everything was still very new to me, but if there's one thing I wish I hadn't known before I opened my eyes for the first time, apart from the feeling of being hunted and despised since I was a little girl, it's the sensation of feeling Death running his hands gently over your face, saying in a soft, comforting tone of voice that it's time to go to sleep, but never saying when you're going to wake up.

Well, I seem to have lost my way a little during my explanation of dreams and memories. Even today, this tends to happen whenever I'm wandering through the memories of my life, and there are so many of them that it's hard to find my way back, but a little effort is enough to get everything back on track.

As I was saying, those were the only dreams in which I could look at myself through someone else's eyes. Not just see, but I could feel what my mother was thinking, how she stood up on the riverbank with hardly any strength, left me on the soft, icy earth and managed to pull out some of the arrows stuck in my back while wondering how we got to that part of the forest alive. In fact, as she herself had realized, it was only she who had made it to that part of the river alive.

I could feel the despair running through her whole body as she looked at my little body. There didn't seem to be a single sign of life, my little belly kept getting bigger and smaller and things got even worse when she picked me up and put her ear close to my face. The icy touch, the way everything seemed so soft, the silence covered her world, just as time around us seemed to have stopped. Her heartbeat was loud as drums, her breathing completely irregular, I could feel the pain that came with each of those cries and moans as she searched for a way to bring me back.

Tears flowed from her eyes, her mind had just broken down at the same time as the despair began to be so painful that the pain from her open wounds felt like a tickle. If it hadn't been for this moment, she might have wondered where we were, how she had managed to survive such a rough drop, violent currents, strewn with rocks, a huge waterfall and, even after all that had happened, her only scars were those of the battle against her own tribe and Horihorn. Fortunately, these bursts of intense sensation didn't last long after she started pushing me with her huge fingers and fiddling with my body, with no idea what she was supposed to do. Every second wasted was like a second closer to it all being in vain, but it only took a few more little pushes with her fingertips for me to start vomiting up all that water and start crying in her arms.