Ow, I think. Why do I hurt everywhere? What happened? And with a shock I realize I can’t remember what happened. At any time. At all. I try to open my eyes and can’t see anything. Am I dead? Am I blind? And then, as the pain subsides, I realize that I’m lying face down. Well, that would explain it. I think, embarrassed by my own overreaction. I begin to push myself up to dust my dress off and feel things sliding off me. I look around and see lots of leaves and broken branches covering the patch of soft red and blue flowers around me, and looking up, I see lots of broken branches. I wonder if I fell…
     Suddenly I hear a rustling next to me, followed by the sound of people approaching from the surrounding woods. The sound next to me is coming from a boy, no older than eighteen, who is also covered with leaves and branches. People walk out of the woods to the edge of the small patch of flowers we are in, and I see that they are all men. Men carrying weapons. Some hold shovels, pitch forks and other common items, while a few actually have swords. The ones close to me look scared to come too close, while the ones near the boy look prepared for a tough fight. I hope he can do something. I think, wishing for some way out of here. But as he gets up, pollen begins to fly around from all the flowers he moves, and he begins to sneeze, very much. The men close to him begin to laugh as his sneezes stop him from even seeing right. A few tentatively kick some flowers, releasing the pollen, causing the him to sneeze more, and relaxing, they all begin to kick flowers, releasing more and more pollen, making him sneeze even harder, and seeing that I wasn’t going to do anything, the ones close to me started to get closer. I try to back away but trip on a tear on my dress and fall backward. As they get close enough to catch us, he takes in a huge breath and lets out a gigantic sneeze, breathing fire along with it.
     The men he was facing, the men who were going to get him, begin to run away now, most burned in some way, while the others are shocked still. He takes in another breath like before, and I grab his shoulders from behind and turn him towards the others. These men realize what is about to happen, and have the sense to duck and then run away. He sneezes some more, normal sneezes, but I decide to stay behind him just in case.
     “Sorry,” he says, sounding like he has a cold, “I’m allergic to these flowers.” He then begins to walk into the woods. Looking back when he realizes I’m not following, and sounding better already, he said, “We have to go get our bags, remember?”
     I just look blankly at him, wondering who this fire breather is, and after a minute he realizes something is wrong. After he asks, I say, “I can’t remember anything.”
     “Anything?” he asks, emphasizing the single word.
     “Nothing,” I say, “before just now.”
     “Well . . . ummm,” he says, obviously unsure of what to do, “Do you feel okay? Does anything hurt or feel broken?”
     “No,” I say, running my mind through my body to feel any pain, “nothing hurts.”
     “Okay, I’d better check your head.”
     “O-okay,” I say, seeing he was asking permission.
     “Well,” he says after moving my hair around to see my scalp, “there’s no blood, I’m sure that’s a good sign. We should probably find someone who knows more about this kind of thing than me though. Hopefully news of us doesn’t spread before we get help.”
     “Why?” I ask, getting worried.
     “Because, those people figured out that you’re a witch,” he says to me. He then gets up and looks through the trees, mumbling to himself, “Just my luck that I run into trouble the first place I go.”
     Then realizing it, “But if I’m a witch, doesn’t that make me evil?”
     He turns away from the woods and to me, “No,” he says, “Nothing is pure good or evil. Where did you get that idea?”
     “I don’t know,” I say, getting confused by myself, “I just know from somewhere that witches are evil.”
“And you don’t know where you heard or saw that?” he asks, no longer paying attention to the trees, only to me.
“No, I can’t remember.” I say, beginning to get up.
“Can you remember anything else?” he says, helping me stand. “Umm,” I say, trying to think of things I know. “I can cook lots of kinds of food,” I say, looking around and brushing dirt and leaves off my clothes, “and I know that this dress is too torn up to fix. And those bushes will have blackberries in the spring.”
“And can you remember where you learned all of that?” he asks, curiosity clearly displayed on his face.
“No, I can’t. I just know them. Is that important?”
     “I don’t know,” he says with a bit of a sigh. “It’s just interesting that only your personal experiences are gone, not what you’ve learned.” And he turns and begins leading me through the trees.
     “Why is it interesting?” I ask, wondering what he is thinking and trying to follow him.
     “No reason. I’m just wondering how amnesia works. I mean, you know what blackberries are called, but can you remember your name? Or my name?”
I pause to think, “No, I can’t. What is it?”
     “Well,” he says, avoiding a low branch, “your name is Angie and mine is Diego.”
     “An-gie,” I say, rolling the name around my mouth, “it’s okay.”
     He chuckles, “That’s what you said when we first met.”
“And how was that?” I ask, trying to see where we’re going.
     “Well, I had been traveling for a while and needed a place to stay,” he begins, “and you worked at the inn. I was going for a walk outside when I caught you talking to some cats. You saw me and got scared, thinking I was going to tell everyone, but I already know about magic,” he stops walking to look around then continues in a slightly different direction, “I asked who your teacher was, and you told me that you didn’t have one, that you didn’t even know any other witches. I needed to keep traveling, and I asked if you wanted to come with me to look for one. And you agreed. But one of the other travelers at the inn heard and exposed both of us, so we had to run, and in the woods we fell, and that’s where you hit your head.”
     “And I was going to just leave? What about my family?”
He stops, not saying anything for a moment, “You told me that your family had died a long time ago.”
“Oh,” I say, letting a silence form from that. We start waling again, and I begin to really looking at our surroundings, trying to occupy my mind. There are some pine trees, I begin thinking to myself. And a lot of blackberry bushes here. The ground is really level also. I begin to look up, which is harder to do while walking than I first expected, and I almost fall. He turns back for a second, hearing the break in my pattern of crunches my steps make, but turns back when he sees I’m okay. I try to look up again, just for a second this time but can only see pieces of a blue sky through the tree branches. He slows down, looks around, stops and reaches under one of the bushes.
     “Here we go,” he says, trying to change the subject, “I knew I left our bags here.”
“We had time to pack?” I ask, wanting to think of something other than what I had just learned.
“Yeah, I had to leave right away, and it was about an hour after we talked that they started chasing us. I had to toss our bags so we could run faster.”
     “Why did you need to leave right away?” I ask, not being able to place what he told me with any memories.
“Because,” he says, putting on his bag, “I am on my way to my own teacher.”
     His own teacher? “Wait,” I say, stopping him before he starts to walk away again. “Are you a wizard?” I ask, realizing too late after I ask that he must be, after all, there’s nothing that looks human and has the kind of power that he showed earlier besides witches and wizards, although how I know that kind of scares me since I can’t remember where from.
     “No,” he says, then putting his bag back on the ground, “I’m not.”
     That threw me off. “If you’re not a wizard,” I say, looking closely at him this time, “then what are you?”