It is cold.

So cold.

You have never known cold like this.

You have never...

You have never known...

You...?

Your body hurts. You hurt. That is the first, last, only thing you remember. You hurt, and you are cold. But if you have always felt like this, why do you know that it is not the way you should feel? Why do you know that existence is not always pain, that there is warmth in this world? The cold stones leech away what little warmth remains in your body, and you close your eyes. You have no memories but this, you think, but somewhere deep inside, you know this is a lie. You are lying to yourself, but you don't know why. You don't know how. You don't know what the truth is, so how are you lying? But you know you are lying.

You struggle to your feet, trampling the strangely shaped glowing things that surround you, dotting the floor and crawling up the walls, dangling from the ceiling. The whole room is filled with them, different shapes and different colors, phosphorescent and...familiar. Pulsing with light, they chime a song half-forgotten, discordant and strange. Songs...music. Yes, you think, an answer to a question that remains unasked and unknown. 

You nudge a cluster of three tall mushrooms, their caps long and pointed. Their sound is low and mournful, the grinding of stone deep in the earth. A lone fungus with a flat cap is the call of a songbird; six fat, round ones jangle like bells, each one higher than the last. You prod and you poke, and you know the notes as soon as you hear them, a collection of sounds, of individual songs. Fragments only, but fragments of something bigger, something you know. Scraps of memory, as fleeting as the sounds themselves. 

Memories that murmur at the edge of your consciousness, just out of reach. A fleeting glimpse, a momentary Awareness, and then...nothing.

You know now. You know that you do not know. You know that there is a part of you that is missing. 

You play, first to Hear, then to Remember, until, with a great shudder, the single bare wall in this square room slides out of place, sinking until it seems it was never there at all. Never there, save for the gaps it left behind, an inverse frame of space along the walls, the ceiling. 

And on the other side, in the space you never knew was there, the void that is not a void, extant and not extant until you lay eyes on it, a single, enormous mass of blue-green-white-purple glowing things. They hum with their own song, without your interference, without your input. You don't play this Song; it calls you, enticing you, drawing you in. It Plays you. You take one step, hoof thumping against the dirt, and then another. You don't notice the glowing spores that fill the hoofprints you leave behind, as if a ghost has walked where...as if a ghost...as if you...as if...

Are you a ghost?

Ghost...

Ghost...

Ghost...

The mushrooms jangle discordantly as you step on, by, through them, held now by the Lure. You don't hear the jumbled sounds, the cries of fungal pain as you crush them beneath your feet. You don't notice, or you would stop, would apologize. You would take care you are not, because there is nothing now for you but the Song, the Memory. There is something to be learned from this thing, buried like you. Buried, but not dead. Never dead.

You touch it, drawn by the need to know, the desire to remember. Past, present, future...you know you have a past, but to have a future, surely you must know where you came from—

You touch it, and are subsumed.