In the void, a person opened their eyes; the nothingness around them only contrasted by the chaos of their thoughts.

They didn’t know where they were, didn’t know what they were, didn’t even know who they were. Every probe of their mind brought with it fragments of memories, pounding at their head that made them grasp at it, giving them their first sight of their arms and made them recoil in horror.

Horrible things, their limbs looked twisted and warped, patches of flesh and scale and feather and chitin, haphazardly tossed together and blending into each other in an unnatural way that made them want to scream, a single word coming to their thoughts and ringing out more than anything else.

Chimera.

A word they barely understood, holding just enough context to feel like it fit the bill. A creature made of separate, unrelated parts, combined by the whims of their maker. A construct of someone else’s design rather than a person.

Or maybe both? They managed to think, lacking too much information to be able to say for sure as they were trapped there alone, with nothing but time to sort themselves out, the few bits of memories they held passing by them in their fears.

She, for enough of those scant scraps of recollection felt female enough to make her consider herself as such, saw flashes, yet nothing more. Smiling faces in one bit, panic and bloodshed in another, scenes where she was surrounded and scenes where she was alone, with few among her memories bearing individuals of the same race as the rest, while the memories of her own body never revealed the same form twice either, painting a picture of a madness she couldn’t deny.

Then, if I don’t know what I am… can I know where I am? She wondered after hours lost in her thoughts, finding no answers within herself, even if outward seemed just as unlikely to yield any either. It truly was a void around her, after all, the seven eyes perceiving her surroundings told her as much, with her four ears picking up no noise, her electro receptors feeling no current, and her opened pores feeling no distant touch for as far as she could perceive. She was alone, and that was the end of it.

With more hours wasted despairing. Trapped as she was, nothing to give her answers, nothing to stimulate her, not even enough of her own memories to pretend she was whole, she could do nothing until doing nothing became too much. Isolated as she was, alone as she was, she didn’t even feel hunger come to drive her, yet still she needed something more, and with that, she began walking.

With movement being an awkward thing, that fact unnoticed until she started. Her five legs were wrong, made mismatched by whatever careless person had formed her, with the sizes all different and the knees a nightmare, with some having more and some having less, and the direction they faced seemingly random too. Such a failure of a body that either she had to have been her maker’s first attempt or else her creator was cruel beyond measure.

Still, as slow as it was, she got somewhat better at it, and as pointless as it felt, walking gave her purpose. Even if she had nowhere to go, the simple act of moving let her think, and in the days that passed, she set a goal for herself. Should she ever be free from that endless plane of nothingness, she wanted to get answers. Answers to who she was, if she’d ever been anything but that. Those grains of memories in her head had to have come from somewhere; she wanted to know. Answers as to the one who’d created her, cursing her with such a form, if they’d been careless or malicious, and answers as to her purpose. If she was made by the whims of some cruel being, then so be it, that was an answer, but if instead she was a failed first attempt then she wanted to know what her warped existence had been meant to lead to, what more successful attempts might have been doing without being abandoned.

Even if nothing was to come of it, just having a goal made it easier to go forward, giving her purpose in the following days until suddenly, there was a change in the distance, bringing her walk to a clumsy run to reach it until, inexplicably, she found a door.

No structure attached to it, the door was all there was. Wooden and beautiful, there was no denying that it had been made with care, but even as she walked around it, she couldn’t see anything else worth investigating. It simply was. Her singular companion in the void that at least lent hope for more. If it could exist and she could exist, then surely more did as well, didn’t it? And it wasn’t like she didn’t have time to find it. In all of her travels, she’d needed neither food nor rest, a fact that felt wrong to her, yet she didn’t have the context to be sure of. Still, she could keep going, keep wandering on her journey until she discovered something more, and she almost left to do exactly that, only a minor tugging at her heart stopped it.

With an unreliable mind, that door was the first thing she’d found since waking up and truly becoming herself. Wouldn’t it at least be right to open it? There may have seemed to be little point, but at the very least she could examine the inside of its frame and along its edges, just to be sure there were no deeper secrets waiting to be discovered, leaving her completely unprepared to see a room beyond.

What?

That was wrong. As little as she might have known, doors didn’t just lead to anything. They were connections between rooms, or from without and within, not portals.

… Right?

As sure as she felt at its wrongness, she also couldn’t deny that she knew too little to say that with any confidence. A gut feeling from someone without any context for the world she found herself in, but with a path to more opened, all she could do was step through, hoping it would give her something more and getting it as the next moment she split, walking into the room but also becoming one of the residents it held, experiencing it through her own senses but also through his.

– – –

A moleman, humble in his life and comfortable in his burrow, could hear the sounds of playing from his chair and got up to see it, his two children having come in at some point while he rested his eyes, their laughter the best thing to wake up to, with that clear enough to have been their goal. The moment he stood, they ran at their father, waiting to be picked up, which he was happy to oblige, feeling the warmth of his family in his arms.

– – –

The scene ended, and she was one again, even if ‘she’ now felt less right. For that brief moment, she’d been the moleman too, having experienced the warmth and love of his children, but now it was gone, leaving her to clumsily fall on her knees, grasping her head once more.

What am I?

She wasn’t the moleman, she couldn’t have been, but that had been so real. A piece of a life that she was sure she’d never had, lived to its fullest in that singular moment. It felt perverse, like she’d just walked into someone’s soul, and yet, it was more than any of the memories she had in herself and it left her clinging to it, the same experience that had just shaken her acting as her salvation to bring her back under control.

Whatever that had been, it was just one more thing to get an answer to, with hope of where to get them. After all, she was still in that room, watching that brief scene play again and again, with a different door on the other end of it.

A door that felt like it was meant to be there, part of the natural environment of that burrow, it looked like a far rougher wood, round in shape that once more she opened and once more she stepped through, finding a different scene behind it, again becoming two.

But this time, she was prepared for it. Not as soft as the first experience, she watched as she became a mindless animal on the hunt, the scene ending before she’d gotten her teeth in her prey but as she walked through the forest, an unexplained door was found once more, a different wood than the very first but just as beautiful, she walked through it, ready to take whatever would be coming next as her long journey began.

As days turned to weeks, she experienced fragments of a life. A father, holding their newborn; a mother, teaching her child not to get too close to dry land, lest she beach herself; an insect gathering food for the winter; a forest alone with its thoughts. She saw hundreds of memories, some from people, some not, and each one became a part of her, until ‘her’ no longer felt right. They’d only decided they were female because enough of their original memories felt so, but now anything as far as gender went didn’t feel complicated enough to match them. They were the sum of their experiences, and they were afraid.

Somewhere in all of that, moving from memory to memory and life to life, something had changed. A feeling, deep in their soul, that something was looking for them. At first it started slow, something they chalked up to paranoia or madness, a result of so many alien memories being forced together into one singular being, but before long it had become inescapable, driving them to move just a bit faster, never lingering on a memory longer than it took to experience it. Even if it was just madness, that didn’t change the fact that waiting would do nothing for them other than cause stress and worry. Besides, they could tell themself it was merely the experience playing tricks on them, the holes in what they were filling their heads with paranoia, right until the last room.

After living the brief experience of a bird, flying through the sky on golden wings, they found the next door and opened it, passing through it to the next life at the same moment a sound came from behind them. The door they’d taken to their prior room opening.

They didn’t get the chance to look back, but it didn’t matter; they didn’t want it. That feeling, that fear, it had been right all along. Something was following them, and it had nearly caught up.

All the times they’d let the memories play out ceased to matter and for the first time, after they’d split, they ignored the part of themselves living that bit of a life, making their way to the next door and ran at it, for the first time finding it locked.

No!

They kept trying, yanking and twisting the handle, not able to get through until the part of themself that had been living as a deep-sea fish finished, rejoining them and allowed them to move on to what was next, the truth of their situation revealed. Living out each life wasn’t optional. Every fragment of memory needed to be experienced before they could move on to the next, yet in that time, the thing chasing them was getting closer.

As they finally got through to the next room though they couldn’t help but look back, a thing of limbs reaching out to them, tentacles branching out like trees as hands from all of the creatures they’d been and more they hadn’t stretched towards them, threatening to make them scream before the door was closed.

In that bit of life they were a spearman, diligently training before they moved to the next as the monstrosity’s grasp came closer.

The next they were a refugee, an unseen war costing them their home and leaving them on the street before it finished, letting them see the unnatural beast’s body open up as it tried to get them, thousands of mouths opening individually at first before merging into one greater jaw as the door closed.

The next, they were a monster themselves, only thinking of violence and hunger before they died just the same, a greater power destroying their mind so completely that there was nothing left, returning to themself letting them experience the horror of the gaze locked onto them, making it clear that they were being hunted, an inescapable madness not to be contained.

The life that followed, they were old, infinitely so, yet simple in their desire, their love of water itself overwhelming and contrasted with the endless fear that came with the knowledge they’d soon be caught, that there could only be so many more rooms to go through until it wouldn’t matter but still they ran, feeling the abomination draw ever closer until finally, they could escape no longer. Finishing the life of a cobbler, working on a set of shoes, those branching, tentacled, horrible limbs wrapped around them and pulled them in, not to be escaped.

It was only then they noticed that they hadn’t had a mouth from the start, with no one to talk to and no need to eat meaning its absence had gone unnoticed right until their need to scream as they were tossed into the monster’s opened maw, falling through it as thousands of different tongues coated their body before being swallowed, feeling all the madder as they passed through one more door in the creature’s throat, revealing a final life and all of the answers they sought.

Ah, I was never a chimera, he thought in despair, knowing the truth of himself at least. All I am was just a collection of fragmented memories, not even the main body’s. Just copied lives in the end.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep