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You lay cradled in a giant hand.
It's not clear how big the hand is. Your body is entirely supported, and yet you can't tell where the edges of the hands are. It's as if the hand's skin, or whatever that material is, doesn't absorb and reflect light - or at least, doesn't absorb and reflect light in a way that you can perceive.
Despite that, you sense the fingers of it. They're curled loosely around you, not quite holding you, but close enough that you know they could if they wanted to.
Or perhaps they're curled, like a corpse's hand. With nothing holding it open, with the tendons dried and shrunken, with no fluids running through the vessels, each finger curls like the legs of a dead spider. In this case, you're just a rotten little heart inside of a cold ribcage. And you're floating in some sort of void. Just some thing instead of a dead entity.
You lay there for what could be an instant, or what could be an eternity. Whether or not the hand holding you is alive, if it even can be what you call 'alive', it's almost peaceful. You had once wished for this, you yearned for this so much you could've puked.
At some point, there comes a light, a scorching thing of darkless. For about one second, it's pleasant.
Then it's decidedly not.
In an instant, all of your senses — sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste — are attacked and overstuffed to the point of bursting.
It's dizzying. It's nauseating. It's maddening.
In an instant, you lose everything, and where you are. You lose awareness of the large palm you're curled up on, you even forget that you have a body - you're reduced to a pinprick, and all it knows is pain.
Everything happens at once. It's suffocating, it's freezing, it's scalding, and you can't get up and run. Where would you go?
All good will you might have had for the hand burns and rots away with your skin. It's hold is too stable that you can't flee, but too loose that it doesn't protect you. Though, if it's unconscious or dead.. does it even know you're here?
Does anyone know you're here? Your allies - sure, they've been terrible company over the last thousand loops, but they would come for you, wouldn't they? Even though your heart is tearing itself out of your chest whenever you look at them. Even though they've lost everything that made you fall in love with them.
Stars. Stars, stars, stars-
Just kill me, you tell the light.
Just blinding kill me!!
Of course, the light doesn't listen. It rises high above you, a grave insult to the sun, and the rays reach down and stab into you. Over and over. Pricking holes in your scorched flesh that don't bleed, scoring through your strained atoms.
Your head seems to be a focal point for the light. Both it, and it's disgusting face - too expressive, too pathetic, too you. The light slides around your eyes, into your eye sockets, melting through everything in it's path, and then coalescing in the basin that used to hold your brain.
There it collected. It's petrifying, it's disorienting, it's disquieting, and it fills to the brim, and then some - your skull creaking to contain it all.. and then it bursts forth.
Pop goes the weasel! Pop goes the blinding weasel! -and you're laughing, as the fragments of your skill flail around with your heaving laughs, your mouth hands open - and falls, the jaw evaporating, and you can't stop laughing----! Your head's gone, replaced by the light. You're a ball of sunshine! A little ball of sunshine!
Unhindered by your guttural shrieks, the light continues. Your skin fizzles, and pops, swelling and shrinking and swelling and shrinking until it separates from flesh, and that too separates from the layer below, and you are laid bare - either before the Universe, or before nothing at all.
The light quickly reaches your abdominal cavity, to your useless organs. To the parts of you that hunger, that are proof of your shame and your inability to change. To the disgusting parts that want - wanting contact, wanting food, wanting——
You feel something slip from your head. It's the straps of your eyepatch, they must have burnt apart, and the whole thing falls.
You push yourself up and reach out, and the thing evades your fingers.
-No, no--!
-And in getting up, something gives, something tears, and your organs bubble out of you through a hole in your chest, pushing past your fingers and being shredded by the light. You can't hold them, they slip through your fingers. You can only watch as they fall.
With the light in your head, and now pooling in your chest where viscera used to be - you don't own your body anymore, do you? This isn't your body, it's yours and the light's - or perhaps it's entirely the light's, as you certainly haven't had a say in any of the redecoration.
And the funniest part? The light might not be alive. It could have consciously waited to arrive, or it simply comes and goes from this place in cycles. You don't know to what to point your finger at to blame for this, and so you can only blame yourself. You want to only blame yourself. Because if someone else did this to you - then what's the point of staying beside them in life, when it would hurt as much as it does now - lying on an unmoving thing, vivisected for all to see.
The light soaks through your remaining flesh, saturating it. Adding more disgusting to disgusting. The surface of your skin solidifies into a blandly human shape, faintly textured, with not a blemish or wrinkle, inhumanly smooth, like the surface of an eggshell. From inside, the pooled light peaks out through needle holes. It almost mocks the stars - you don't recognize any of these patterns.
Well, you were never a human, were you. Because what kind of human has no family to remember him, no culture to live by, just listlessly wandering the earth in the body he was spawned in, in clothes and a name he doesn't remember choosing?
You are set down in the grass an undeterminable amount of time later. Perhaps you sat under the unmoving light's scrutiny for an eternity, or perhaps that was simply an instant.
There's grass beneath you. You don't feel it. Above, leaves gently sway in the beginning breeze.
You lift your hands and look at them.
These are the hands that a child used to hold, that used to carve intricate wooden dolls to gift to others. They're now cold and unfeeling.
You move them to your face, you're not sure if you touch anything.
This is the face that used to smirk after telling a particularly clever pun. There is no longer a mouth.
Your hands can't press into the light any further.
This is the face that used to be kissed, on each cheek, in greeting. It now burns to hold.
You walk closer to the tree, and take a seat.
This is the body that used to wear a cloak made by those who must have loved it, and an eyepatch by someone who. The cloak is now ash, and the body is no longer human.
You didn't want this.
Then again, when has that ever mattered?
"Memories are a type of item you can equip," your voice says. "Each memory is specific to one character, and.."