You open your eyes to darkness.

Not the darkness of night—night has depth, it suggests a horizon. This is the darkness of a throat. A narrow, constricted space that presses against your skin, sweating condensation. You sit up. Your palms scrape against a floor of matted earth and root, and you chart the space in fragments: the low, rib-like ceiling; walls of dark wood that bulge inward; a passage coiling away in both directions, swallowed by shadow. It is not a room. It is an artery. As your eyes adjust to the bioluminescence—a faint, sickly pulse seeping from the wood itself—you realize it is not one tunnel but a labyrinth of chambers bleeding into one another, all winding through the interior of something vast. Something that might still be breathing.

You reach for your history.

There is no fog, for fog implies a shape hidden within. There is only absence. You press at it the way you'd press a bruise, searching for the ache that confirms something is there—a face, a place, the weight of a particular morning, anything. Your hands. You look at your hands. They are familiar in the way that all hands are familiar. They tell you nothing.

Your name surfaces, or something that feels like a name. You turn it over carefully, suspiciously, the way you'd turn over a stone found in an unfamiliar place. It could be yours. It has the shape of something worn in for a long time. But you cannot be certain—cannot find the memory of someone first saying it, cannot hear it in any voice but the one inside your own head, which may or may not be a reliable source.

You know that you exist. Beyond that, everything is a locked door without a wall to hang it on.

The air tastes of damp earth and old resin. Somewhere ahead, through the coil of chambers, a grayer light suggests a way up.

You follow it. There is nothing else to do.