The ash clung to my paws like frost, but it bit like regret. I was somewhere I’d never been. It smelled like a woodland that I had never stepped foot in, yet still I remembered it in scent, in nose, in memory that doesn't belong to me. Still, I remembered what I don't know.

And still I ran.

I ran from the silence that had teeth. I breathed in the ash until I was dizzy. It spoke to me in the silence only I heard. It knew my name. It convinced me that the memories were truths I didn't know yet. I only listened, waited, stopped running, stopped trying to find a way out. I shouldn't have stopped.

I still stood in ash. I stopped claiming to know what I already did and started claiming this reality as my own. I did not run from it anymore, even when the ground bit. Even when my paws bled ink instead of blood.

But something inside grounded me—a memory not made of fear and silence and ash. I let myself remember a warmth and then asked the ash for that.

It responded in coldness and spoke in a hush that I remembered, yet didn't: “Only a call away!”

So, I sounded a call into the silence, the constantly shifting stillness, the dark blackness, and the ash.

It was met with naught..