Suddenly there's a world again. Light, air, gravity, a body with which to feel it all. Not a world he knows. Not only are the surroundings primarily made of wood and textiles with towering redwoods in the background, but the feel is strange. Oddly patchwork. Some things are impossibly crisp, others are floaty and indistinct. This is a memory, and as Need's memory isn't eidetic and the flow of time has eroded things, it's been remade and reinforced, subtly changed countless times, by frequent revisits. Not a body he knows, either. It's big and heavy, and it aches, and he's not in control of it.
:This is who I was,: she says, and there's the memory of the woman Need had been, the sense of an old warrior turned mage-smith, lay sister of a remote religious enclave, beneficiary of a fulfilling work, a peace, a community, and a slow, gentle fading towards natural death that she had never deserved. The old woman's thoughts and feelings have a different texture from the sound of the voice she projects.
She was human. She's not, now. Death and time have made her strange in a way not entirely unlike the way Cytherea was strange, when she wasn't pretending.
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Suddenly there's a world again. Light, air, gravity, a body with which to feel it all. Not a world he knows. Not only are the surroundings primarily made of wood and textiles with towering redwoods in the background, but the feel is strange. Oddly patchwork. Some things are impossibly crisp, others are floaty and indistinct. This is a memory, and as Need's memory isn't eidetic and the flow of time has eroded things, it's been remade and reinforced, subtly changed countless times, by frequent revisits. Not a body he knows, either. It's big and heavy, and it aches, and he's not in control of it.
:This is who I was,: she says, and there's the memory of the woman Need had been, the sense of an old warrior turned mage-smith, lay sister of a remote religious enclave, beneficiary of a fulfilling work, a peace, a community, and a slow, gentle fading towards natural death that she had never deserved. The old woman's thoughts and feelings have a different texture from the sound of the voice she projects.
She was human. She's not, now. Death and time have made her strange in a way not entirely unlike the way Cytherea was strange, when she wasn't pretending.