The wilderness seems bleak, but Rakken is enthralled. His companions on the journey leak secrets and tales. It’s like they are surrounded in a veritable cloud of memories and speech, and images that flavour the air around them. He likens the experience to eating onion soup or a seafood chowder and then is overcome by confusion. He’s not sure how he knew those terms. He doesn’t remember ever having had either of those things before. Perhaps they are things from before he became what he is now. A few footsteps later he has forgotten he even thought it.
Every now and then something makes sense in a tantalising ripple from the shifting cloud’s edges. It is often without context and is thus maddening in its isolation. It feels like hearing his name being clearly called without anyone else being present, but is instead a random word or an image that is almost painful in its clarity. He muses and sings to himself under his breath as he walks behind the firehair through the woods. Tangles of knotted and twined roots beneath his feet threaten to pitch him off balance if he gets too distracted by the images.
He remembers his travelling companions memories for them: a lover’s kiss, the rustle of papers, the crunch of bone, the crackle of fire. Images of a blasted oak and a plain of bones swim in and out of those of a drunken halfling and a warm bed. He hears fragments of sentences spoken by people not present. “You’ll never amount to anything; you belong to me.” wars with “sweet child, crack their bones and boil their eyes” in voices that blend and wrap around each other at the same time.
Rakken shakes his head and stares through the wool over his eye at a squirrel in the trees. He lets a vision of hidden nuts and seeds at the base of a towering tree wipe the words and anger from his memories. As fast as the words come to him, they are being sluiced away again by the new stories and memories around him. The physical curse on him pales in comparison to what it has done to his mind. The gaps will never stay closed no matter how they are filled.
The moment of clarity is chased away as the firehair asks if he’s alright. He looks round and repeats the squirrel’s thoughts. The ogre-born is standing by a hollow lightning-blasted oak and is beckoning them both forward while stories pour forth from the gap like water.