NEVER FORGOTTEN
PART I
THE AWAKENING
CHAPTER I
In dim twilight a spark of life glittered, glinted like a bit of mica catching the sun, on a vast face of gray cliff above a dead gray sea. There was nothing else in the world but the vastness and the grayness of the cliff and the sea, till the spark felt the faint thrill of warmth which gave to it the knowledge of its own life. “I am alive,” the whisper stirred, far down in the depths of consciousness. Next the question came, “What am I?”
At first just that infinitesimal bright glint lived where all the rest was dead, or creation not yet begun. Then slowly the answer followed the question: “I am I. A man. I was a man. I am dead. This is the twilight between worlds. I must dream back. I must know myself as I was. Later I shall wake and know what I am.”
The soul was very still, tired after an all-but-forgotten struggle. It was beginning to remember that it had suffered infinitely. It was patient, with all the patience of eternity before it. There was no hurry. Hurry and turmoil seemed strange and remote, part of some outworn experience. Lying still, it passively waited for the dream to begin. For a moment—or perhaps years—there remained only the gray blankness of the empty world; but the spark of life grew in brightness as a star grows to visibility in the pallor of an evening sky. Then, suddenly, a face flashed into existence—a girl’s face.