The only thing I remembered when I awoke was that there was a lot of blood on the back of my head. I was startled. I sat up. My hand reached to the back of my head to verify the slick, dark liquid. Once I knew that that single memory was not just an imagination, I relaxed. Then I noticed that my skin was tan.

When I awoke, I was wearing light clothing. The air was warm so I thought it might be summer, though I couldn't remember the name of the season at first. Words came to me later. I only remembered blood.

For as much blood there was on the back of my head, the wound did not seem so bad. I could feel that a lot of it had dried, meaning that I had been laying where I was for some time. I was in some sort of cavern under the earth. The walls were limestone carved out with water. From somewhere above, a light shone down. The smooth walls reflected this light so that I could see well around myself.

Many footprints danced across the dusty floor of the cave. Some of them matched mine, but they were too mixed up to see where I had been. The largest cluster of them were encircling a large chunk of rock which had fallen from the ceiling years ago. There was a place on the rock that had been recently chipped off by something blunt. Drops of blood had settled into the dust beneath it. I wondered if the blood was mine.

Close to this place was an indentation in the wall where I had obviously been thrown. The stone, brittle with water, had crumbled where I had hit. When stretched down to my toes, I could feel the bruises on my back where the stone had not yielded. Beside this place was a streak of blood where I had fallen from the wall to the floor. This accounted for the tears in my clothing and the scratches down my left arm.

After a few minutes, I found the place where my head had been shoved into a rock that jutted from the wall. The rock was stained red and some of the blood was still drying. Beside that was an imprint of my body where I had fallen. More markings in the dusty sand showed that I had been kicked cruelly aside to the place where I had awoken.

I thought all of this over for a long time, studying the entire cave and searching my battered mind for memories. When none came, I edged toward a pool of water that had collected in the corner of the cavern. I held some in my hands to drink and then decided to wash my body in it, hoping to relax and relieve the ache of my injuries. I didn't let my head touch the water, though. I wanted the blood to stay there because it was my only memory.

Then everything went dark. It happened a lot back then.

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