Blackness. Nothingness. Emptiness.
That had been all the Awoken could remember before this moment, here and now. She felt like there was more before it, but it was as though there was a crystalline wall in her mind, behind which her past lay. As she probed at it, thoughtfully, she realized that she could perceive beyond that boundary, but what lay beyond it was more emptiness. There were glints of fragments of what might have been memories in that crystalline wall, but they were ephemeral and slipped through her grasping mind's fingers.
She wasn't sure how long she'd laid there after taking her first breath. But she finally sat up and acknowledged the flitting drone that zipped around her. The rounded spikes of the drone's shell were a matte gray, speckled with faintly iridescent white dots, so that it almost blended in with the starry skies above it. "--rdian?" it was saying, looking at her worriedly. It spoke in a light masculine tone, a steady tenor.
"Are you speaking to me?" she asked it, but even before it answered in the affirmative, she was already looking at herself. She wore some close-fitting leather-like armor which seemed to cover everything below her neck, with lightweight pauldrons on her shoulders. A skirt with a purple-and-gold standard on one hip wrapped around her waist over her armor's trousers, and a pair of belts festooned with pouches for ammunition and other small tools accompanied this. An armored gorget covered her throat and neck, and nearby she saw a helmet which presumably could attach to this. Without donning it, she estimated that it would have covered almost her entire head, leaving a strip exposed from the bridge of the nose to the upper lip. The front of the helmet sported an emblem marked out in gold.
All of it had a touch of familiarity to it, but only in those shimmering wisps of memory in the boundary wall of her mind. There was a holster on one of her belts, and nearby there was a sidearm which she instinctively knew fitted the holster. Retrieving it, she realized that it was somewhat mangled, and probably wouldn't fire. She slipped it into the holster anyway.
The little drone had gone quiet, looking at her with an almost quizzical expression on its... well, it didn't really have a face, per say, just a single optic, so one couldn't really say it even had an expression, so it was puzzling how she could even interpret any kind of emotion it might be displaying. But now as she looked closer, she realized that it could shift the rounded spikes of its shell about its optic, not unlike eyebrows or a mouth, so in a sense it still had a kind of micro-expression that the keen could read and interpret...
