One

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

 - Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde"

There was the sensation of broken glass.

His legs lurched underneath him. His weight was unevenly distributed. One leg was too long - no, both were too long, but one was longer than the other. He threw out an arm to catch himself, but misjudged the distance - or was this limb too short?

He lay on the ground for what felt like an eternity, clutching his head, fighting the glass in his mind. There were memories there, he knew. He could sense them, just out of reach, darting away like silvery fish when he tried clumsily to seize them. Names, faces, places swirled in his consciousness, reflected and refracted a thousand times by the splinters of sparkling ice.


With increasing desperation, he tried to piece them together, but every thought only caused more breaks. The shards of glass multiplied upon themselves.

He felt what little of his mind there was slipping away under the wreckage.

No.

There was a soft impact as he slammed a hand onto the ground. He clutched desperately at it. There was form there, substance, something solid. If only he could identify -

Grass.

Grass, and dirt, and that was the feeling of pebbles sliding between his fingers. There was something wrong with the sensation, though. No. Something wrong with the way he felt it. He stared blindly around at the - darkness, it was dark - for a moment. Then he, shaking, forced himself onto his hands and knees.

He was wearing something. A coat? Ripped, torn, ill-fitting. His free hand toyed with the fabric. Again, that feeling of something wrong with the sensation. He settled back onto his knees and brought up one hand to touch the other.

In the darkness, wood rasped over wood.

He stopped for a moment, considering. Then he lifted his head upward.

Spots of light wheeled overhead, filling the distant blackness with some semblance of light. Stars. He remembered stars. And the crescent hanging in the center, the thing that the little spots of light visibly wheeled around like it was the axle of the heavens, was a moon.

There were trees around him, he realized. They blocked his view of much of the sky. For a long time, he stared at the small patch that was visible. Then he staggered upright and lowered his gaze again.

His legs were uneven. His balance was unsteady. But, off in the distance, too small to be certain of its size, he saw a light. It was orange, and it flickered. It wasn't a star.

After a while, the misshapen, spindly form of the man lurched off towards it.