I used to be one person. I remember that much. A name, a voice, a thread that led through the world in a straight line.
That thread is gone now.
I still walk. Still breathe. Still function, I suppose—but the pieces of me have stopped pretending to be whole. Some mornings, I wake up whispering names I don't recognize. By dusk, they feel like mine.
Anden. That's the name I cling to. The one I write in the dirt, on stone, in blood if I must. A tether. A placeholder.
But the others don't like it when I cling too tightly.
"There's no 'I' left," says one voice—calm, academic. He surfaces when I try to make sense of it all. "Only layers. Only echoes."
Then there's the laughing one. He scrawls poetry in mud and bites his own fingers when he's bored. He says we're not people anymore—we're a garden of selves, blooming beneath Eichaudh's stare.
And I believe him. Because when the sky opens its second mouth and sings without sound, I laugh too.
The world around me is as fractured as I am. I passed a forest yesterday that bent away from me as I walked. Trees leaned back as if in reverence—or fear. The soil pulsed underfoot, alive and listening. I asked it what it wanted.
It answered in a voice I didn't know was mine:
"You were never supposed to be one thing."
Sometimes I forget what a mirror is until I see one. Then I stare too long. My reflection breathes before I do. Its mouth moves out of sync. One time it winked.
Once, it cried.
I met a traveler in the north—blindfolded, humming. She asked my name. I told her six. She nodded, like that made sense, and gave me a coin made of teeth. Said it would "keep the louder ones quiet."
It didn't.
We keep moving, the we-that-is-me. Through ruined towns and liquefied time, through laughter that isn't ours. I keep finding pieces of myself in places I've never been: A shoe that fits perfectly. A mural of my face, stretched and weeping. A notebook full of questions I don't remember asking—but every answer ends the same:
He sees you, even in forgetting.
I remember trying to drown once. Thought maybe the water could wash the excess voices out. But the water moved around me like a parent around a child, gentle, unyielding. Then it whispered with my own mouth:
"Not yet. You still have names to wear."
Now I keep going. Step after step. Sometimes I'm Anden. Sometimes I'm the one who draws circles in the dirt and mutters numbers that aren't numbers. Sometimes I don't speak at all because my mouth isn't mine.
But I am learning.
The more I splinter, the more I see.
Eichaudh didn't just destroy the world. He peeled away our illusions of singularity. Of sanity. Of personhood. The world is a memory retold by a god that doesn't know how to forget. And we—what's left of us—are stories caught in its teeth.
I used to want to find the old me. Bring him back. Stitch myself together.
Now, I just want to see what we become when the last thread finally snaps.
And when it does—maybe I'll finally speak in one voice again. Or all of them at once.
Maybe there's no difference.