Lunathea's First Memory

It was not often that the matron stared down into the perfect, crystal lens of her library's central floor. It's depths troubled her to fathom, though it was her who engineered them all those ages ago.

As vast as an ocean,

and too deep to believe.

A shard whose top could host a fortress, at one end, and does.

A shard whose tip is a dagger
and as thin
as a filament ———

She stared down into it, and across its great distance and many facets, it seemed to form a dark eye staring back. From wherever on it's cornea she stood, it followed her

It gave nothing. It expressed nothing. It had been made as such, shaped as a jewel unbreakable. The resemblance to an eye was startling, but illusory. Sometimes she forgot it was there, so long as she made a habit of not looking down, at least not with her eyes focused.

Tonight, she had. She had the automated servants douse all the lights and leave her to her study at the center of it all.

It was not dark. Light was scant in the void, but it did exist. It hit the edges of the shard and passed their glow upwards. A prism web softened by distance, a faint glow to all rooms.

The matron stared at the floor, seeking the eye of the abyss — defying it to look back, to judge her, to be a lens by which to understand herself.

She stared until her eyes ached, until the tears pooled on the very apex of her corneas and dripped to the floor — a ripple of salt on crystal.

The eye was not present. She saw only the vague web of light fading into shadowy, uniform depth. To perfect to even give back a reflection of brightest light. The shape of an eye was oblong and now, when she most wanted to see it, all she could discern was every perfect facet.

She decided to search for something, instead, to reconsider her interrogations of the crystal at greater depth. What did she truly hope to see, in the core of her ship?

It would be nice to know why I'm here.

Who I am.

She could not remember the thoughts of her past self. No Verin could, beyond a few hundred years. Their brains recycled their neurons beyond that distance, and anything even half of far was suspect, at worst, a funny anecdote, at best.

The matron, whose age was so great that even she was unsure of the exact year of her birth (though she had quite an educated hypothesis), would've liked to have known the woman who started this whole journey.

She knew her secondhand, by firsthand accounts. Both hands were her own, though she no longer remembered being either. She wrote fresh entries constantly, some muttered, others dictated. She wondered, sometimes, how many years it would be until she reread it. Who she would be by then.

She pondered on selves to come. On selves gone. And as she turned to the question of where this began, her eyes blurred ever so barely out of focus, and the shape of the ring went oblong, and she saw the eye.

She plummeted into it, rapt against the floor, breath catching in her throat.

It felt like drowning.

In her first memory, Lunathea was drowning.