Part 2 - Brave

Later, she finds herself again. Lying, this time on a rocky floor that should feel cold, but doesn't feel of anything. Her hand flutters up to her chest, then stops.

She doesn't want to remember.

But it seems as if this newly born person is brave, so after a few deep breaths--there is enough essence in her lungs to do this now--her fingers, shaking and reluctant, reach down, touching, then flinching back, then returning to explore.

There is no wound to feel on her chest, no scar to mar the flesh, but she can feel the hole, where something important has leaked out, where something important has been stolen.

She pushes herself up and looks around. There are bones, and and chains and a door. She is new to life, and this is the only place she has ever seen, but her eyes tell her there is a blue cast to the world that seems wrong. As she breathes that vital essence in and out, there is a frost to her breath, but she still doesn't feel cold, despite the poor rags that clothe her. There is a fire here, the light less red than it should be, but it doesn't warm her.

There is a door. There is nowhere else to go.

Part 3 - Name

She doesn't like this sense of being controlled. It make her angry and sad in ways she can't express. She follows the instructions of the one who called himself "prophet" because he promised escape. What else can she do? But she doesn't have to like it.

"Vestige" he calls her. She hates this. But when she reaches inside for her own name, to throw back at him, there is a hole and there's nothing there.

Finally, she knows what was taken, when that knife reached inside, pushing her life out of the way.

Her soul.

It's why she's here, of course, in Coldharbour. Without her soul, when she died, with a knife popping her heart, she couldn't travel to Aetherius to be reborn into Tamriel. How could you be born again, truely, without a soul?

In truth, she was a vestige, a semblance of a whole. A remainder, a reminder of a life gone, once lived, now lost.

A name. A new beginning.

"I name myself," she says, and stops. The sound and quality of her own voice surprises her. She has never heard it before.

"I name myself Iceaalu Chimeran."

The name springs from her tongue without thought. She says it again, to feel the shape of it in her mouth. It feels, comfortable, known.

Though she is newly born, though not reborn, perhaps her body remembers. Perhaps it will remember other things.