Sleepy awareness dawns, the darkness slowly gives way to a dim red radiance that illuminates nothing. Floating suspended in fluid warmth, a thought drifted idly across the newly awakened mind.
"Who am I?"
Memories flicker just out of reach, fractured images and half-formed sounds dance at the edge of hearing.
"Where am I?"
Unseen hands grope in the gloom tracing across soft shapes the thick syrup matching body heat so well that everything seems to blur into one mass.
Time passes...
She is more aware now, more awake. Her memories more coherent she is conscious that time has passed now and that she has been drifting in and out for some time.
"Who am I?"
Images form, a young woman with long dark curls and deep brown eyes a name drifts tantalisingly out of reach. The memory splinters and something else forms, a giant black shadow blocks out the light and emerald eyes blaze from the darkness, the dreamer tastes fear as awareness fades.
The sleeper wakes.
"Laurie..."
The name unlocks a flood of memories the jumbled thoughts blurring and overlapping.
"My name is Laurie."
As if remembering her name unlocked some new level of awareness she became aware of a burning in her chest. Her lungs filled with the thick fluid still sustained her but now she felt out of breath as if she had been running hard.
Shifting in the darkness was harder now there seemed less space than there had been before the soft shapes now fully formed. Now the darkness once comforting has become confining each breath coming harder than the last.
Stretching with a purpose for the first time Laurie pushed against the hard expanse of her confining prison and scratched long grooves in the yielding material with her fingernails until it split with a soft wet sound like tearing leather.
Closing her eyes tightly against the sudden glare Laurie pushed her hands into the gap feeling cool air drying the slimy coating on her fingers. Taking a firm hold she forces the gap wider feeling the resilient matter stretch and then tear as she fell forward into the light.
Expelling a great gout of fluid she takes her first gasping breath of real air, coughing and gasping Laurie expelled the last liquid from her lungs, her eyes still tightly closed against the blinding light and exhausted she drifted slowly back into the welcoming embrace of dreams.
It wasn't a fragment of memory that woke her but rather a growing awareness of the world around her. The ground was warm and dry under her yet hard when she lay still and a gentle breeze seemed to caress her body.
From outside, for her ears assured her she was still within some enclosed space came the sound of water running and the soft movement of leaves. And the smells that assaulted her nose seemed infinite in foreign complexity filling her mouth with strange tastes. Laurie lay in silence quite awake but unwilling for the moment to open her eyes. Her memories were still broken and fragmented and she could recall no reason why but in those first few moments of wakefulness she feared to see the world around her.
A sudden hissing sound snapped her eyes open and blinking against the sudden brightness she came face to face with a snake which quickly slithered away from her in surprise across the sandy floor.
Laurie watched transfixed as the snake slithered away every scale glimmered with bronze and gold and the slightest deepening of the faint reddish tint that seemed to overlay everything in her vision. Every colour blazing in impossible richness the fine white sand she was half buried in a riot of rainbow colour as countless grains of sand reflected the light from the low tunnel into the cave. Moving her hand to steady herself Laurie caught sight of her own skin and gasped.
Once tanned and dark her skin was an impossible white and imbued with some inner radiance that made her glow from within that just outlined the faint darkness of the bones within.
Running her hands across her body she began to examine herself feeling the silky softness of her white skin, tracing her hand down her porcelain body across her chest her large nipples the faintest shade of darker pink even her long hair hung ghost white in the darkness. Shifting in the sand Laurie gasped in shock, below her waist, her long tanned legs were gone replaced by glowing white coils like a gigantic snake.
A memory hammered against her subconscious demanding attention fragments of a dream about a great black snake...
She had been working in the mansion clearing it up, the other staff had gone missing one by one until only her and the enigmatic Anjou remained. Then her nightmares became real her employer's ex-girlfriends transformed into gigantic half snake creatures, the sting of teeth at her throat and the giant black snake looking down on her...
Laurie's piercing scream of denial hurt her ears as it shredded the air at a pitch no human ear could ever have heard, in pain, she clutched her hands over her ears and screamed until she was hoarse, her long scaled body writhing in maddened denial throwing great waves of sand into the air.
Laurie only quietened when the light coming from the rough cave mouth was blocked by something moving outside.
"Laurrrrrrie" a mocking voice called softly the faintest hint of an Italian accent opened the floodgates on a fresh wave of memory.
