She felt *new*, but that couldn't have been right.

She remembered cities forged from desert glass and how they sparkled in the desert heat; how they painted the sands with prismatic burst of color when hit just right by the blazing light of an unencumbered sun. She remembered great ships crafted of wood, their delicate hulls burning with the flames of the ignited gunpowder that they carried.

But none of it seemed natural; none of it *fit*. Had she the awareness to pinpoint the origin of those far away memories than perhaps she would have realized that she had never seen those things at all. They were all products of the books that The Other had read; the girl that shared the same pretty red head the same as the ones that had come before her.

She didn't know the rules put into gear by certain chunks of her society. The only thing that she could be sure of- if such a creature as herself was even worthy of a pronoun- was feeding. The blood meant everything and she knew that she wasn't alone. Her body was built for hunting, for predatory swaggers and sways and stalks. There was something deep inside that cheered her on. She relished in the feel and the taste of sticky red life on the tip of her tongue. She howled in delight- for she knew no words- when her teeth and her claws dealt death so viciously brutal that it hopped the spectrum back around to beautiful.

She also knew, on some level, that she had a name. The meaning of it was lost on her as was the structure of the word. She knew the sound of it, knew that a small blonde of her ilk had given it to her in the same way that dogs assign different barks to members of their pack.

Tock.

She learned how to mimic the word with a rumble of her voice box and a snap of her tongue, but it wasn't important. The only thing that she cared to remember was that she needed to feed, and soon.