74th of Winter, 516 AV
He sensed a tugging sensation from nowhere. His mind was clouded. The breathing, pulsing, echoing feeling had begun to fade. The winds of change were blowing strong it seemed. He could see a light. Light growing, expanding, blinding...
The tugging intensified and he felt the world fall into place around him. And what a world it was... The buildings looked odd, the people still more so...
"Hurik." He said it automatically, and in an instant he recognized it was his name. He tried to look down, and realized he didn't have a head... In fact if he focused, he could almost see in all directions! No, I definitely need a head. That is essential. Hurik thought. The tugging sensation was quietened, but still present, and he drew upon it once again. With effort Hurik formed a head, and somehow he knew it was his own head, the one he'd had before he–
'I'm dead." The thought did not so much surprise him, as did the fact that it had taken him so long to notice. A sudden surging desire to be alive again spurred on the tugging until he felt his torso, limbs, and clothing fall into place about him. Even still, a kind of mist was twisting and coiling about him, and seemed especially to encircle and thicken around the amulet that Hurik had also materialized. A family heirloom. Something of mine. I have a family? Why don't I remember my father's name? My mother's face?
The questions yielded no answers, and Hurik felt as though he could cry. Except, it seemed in a distant sense to be impractical to waste whatever it was, this mist that seemed to make up his essence. In hindsight, he could now recall that as the world had fallen into place, he too had in a way. The mists were he, and he the mists...
Hurik decided to try and move down the street, and found he could drift just above the ground at a slow pace, which unsettled him so much that he decided to go about moving the old-fashioned way. Thankfully, he met the ground with the expected resistance, and barring the streams of mist which ran all across his form, he almost felt... alive. True, he didn't have a heartbeat, or any need to breathe, but as he walked along the sidewalk, people moving around him and talking amongst themselves, he could pretend that he wasn't all that different.
The streets all seemed to go everywhere and nowhere, and so Hurik just walked, and walked, and walked. An all-together different sensation, one of burning curiosity had taken hold of him. He knew there was something he needed to find, to know, to discover. But he was damned if he knew what it was... This particular street corner was blossoming with evening lights, and Hurik paused to admire the glistening of glass reflecting beams of red, orange, yellow, and gold. All things said, it was a beautiful city. The colours reminded him of warmth, fire, and blood. A chill went down Hurik's ethereal spine.
Why was blood the first thing he thought of when it came to the colour red? He looked down and brought his amulet up to his face, and examined the garnets embossed in the piece. They too gleamed like freshly-spilt blood. Hurik rubbed his shoulder and began to look for somebody who seemed open to talking with a dead man. In a city like this one, Hurik hoped it wouldn't be a long search.