He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. There was no air. There was no anything.
He kicked a hoof and smacked the universe into motion, burrowing through what was and could have been. He felt hard packed coldness that was wet on his fur, and realized it was snow.
He breached the surface of reality and found wind and cold and open space. His lungs were suddenly in his chest and burned for air, expanding of their own accord, and filled his mouth with snow. He flailed and kicked and carved a path upwards, surrounded by confusion and hard, packed ice. His new body was dying. He felt it.
But he couldn’t die here. He wouldn’t die here. This wasn’t death, this was his new birth.
His horn pierced the surface and found itself wrapped in cold. His lungs spasmed and he forced his head still higher, grasping at the wind as if it could lend a hoof and pull him the rest of the way. He fought his way out of the tomb of unreality and into the fearsome world outside, tearing free of the snow’s grip and exposing himself to the shearing wind and biting cold. Everything was only half-lit, illuminated by sunlight filtering through a stormy, brooding sky. Even that was too bright for his eyes, and he squeezed them shut.
He didn’t know who he was, where he was, or how he was alive, and didn’t care about any of those things save that he lived. He was pure. He was whole. He was.
A unicorn. I am a unicorn, he realized, and then he remembered the life inside him that needed to be nourished.
He filled his lungs with his first breath, felt the freezing air whoosh into his mouth and over his tongue with such sweet, sharp feeling, turning his saliva to ice and tearing his throat. He didn’t care, only breathed and breathed until his lungs were fit to burst.
He put his hooves on his head, felt his mane whipping in the wind and the lids over his eyes and knew that he had a solid body once again. He remembered what it felt like to have blood rushing in his veins and a heart pounding out a rhythm of life against the utter dark. He knew again the strangeness of being confined to flesh and bone, a spirit that wrapped around a frail frame. With his body and his nerves and his skin, he remembered pain.
He screamed.
He screamed out the death of a world he couldn’t remember, screamed for the pain of dead ponies and lost memories, for a face he couldn’t see and friends he didn’t know he had. He screamed for the sake of screaming and for the joy and horror of being alive and alone. He screamed until every ounce of breath was driven from his lungs, and then he took another breath and screamed again.
Tears sprang from his eyes and burned red-hot on his cheeks, freezing before they reached his chin, and he began to sob and scream all at once. He collapsed into the snow and tried to bury the pain he felt in his chest, but it only seemed to grow the more he tried to ignore it, and there alone with nopony to console him he wept and railed against forces he couldn’t name or recognize.
Only when his body could take no more did he stop screaming, and if only to remember the sensation of movement, he trudged into the endless blizzard.
He didn’t know how long he walked, or if time was there to be measured. The hidden sun didn’t move and the snow did not abate.
He longed for shelter and found a cave bored into the side of what might have been a mountain. It was too dark to see the peak or how far it went around. With no other choice he wandered inside. By the time he left the wind, a coat of ice covered him and his skin rubbed raw. He welcomed the pain to distract him from the gaping emptiness inside him. He put his hoof to his chest and knew there was skin and bone there, but somehow he felt a yawning chasm there too, an emptiness that needed to be filled.
He walked deeper into the cave, finding his way illuminated by crystal shards growing from the walls that glowed all the colors of the rainbow. The shards became patches until the very ground was a shifting kaleidoscope of color and light. He went to the very deepest part of the cave, and there he found a wall blocking his passage, blank and smooth.
“Re… re-re-… m-m-member,” he said through chattering teeth. He put his hoof on the stone and rubbed it back and forth, trying to score some message there. He searched around the floor of the cavern and found flecks of stone, picked one up by the hoof, and dragged it over the rock. It left behind a white trail, and with that he drew.
One, two, three strokes, one six-pointed star.
He smacked the stone into the wall five times, and drew a huge scribble on top of the star.
“Remember,” he said, growling the word. “Remember, remember!”
He pounded his forehead into the cave wall, directly in the center of the star. His horn ached, longing to release something that never found its way to the tip.
In one swift movement he plucked up the stone again and scored the wall with more strange symbols and half-formed sketches. He worked in a feverish daze, taking an age, a second, an hour or a day to finish his work. One moment he was drawing and the next he was done, drenched in cold sweat and leaning against the wall. What he’d scribbled meant everything and nothing, the most and the least. It was all he could do to even remember how to breathe.
“Remember,” he whispered. “I remember me.”
He glanced back up at the wall, full of his meaningless scribbles, and touched the six-pointed star with his hoof. It began to glow.
“Now you will too.”