Not in Your Right Mind?
After living a life unconscious for fourteen years, a boy awakens in a bed at St. Mungo's Hospital. Except he's no longer sure who he really is.
Disclaimer: The following is a work of fanfiction, and as etiquette seems to dictate, let it be known that I don't own or claim to own anything to do with the two fictional materials I used to create this story. Nope, not a thing.
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It was no ordinary scar, that much was certain. Not even by curse standards. What marked the forehead of this patient, lying comatose in his hospital bed, was no thing that should be crevassed in the skull of a fourteen year old boy. It did not bleed, nor scab, nor weep. It was not red with blood, black with bile, or yellow with puss.
It was not mundane, having been inflicted on him, as far as anyone could tell, by a dark wizard's killing curse. But it'd sat on the boy's head for so long, that it was as much a part of his frozen form as anything else about him. As much him as his messy black hair, his sleeping emerald eyes, his round chin, or his thin nose.
It wasn't a new scar, the wound having been made when the boy was scarcely a toddler. But it had not aged, other than to grow slightly as the sleeping boy grew with it.
It wasn't lethal, yet some would say it was worse. It had not killed the child, but instead put him into this somnolent state, in which he had remained for the entirety of his life, kept alive by the strict demand of his doting parents. Despite the fact that if somehow he awoke, he would surely be incapable of living any kind of life other than that of a permanent invalid.
It wasn't understood, by the doctors and nurses of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, but it was monitored.
The scar was like a gap in space. It was not so much afflicted to to the boy's skin and skull, as it was living in the space over his forehead, just above his left eye. Light itself was pulled into the wound, turning any colour around it into a smeared shadow. Most of the time it managed to maintain a shape, and of those times when it decided to appear as anything other than a dark smudge, it was visible as a jagged precise lightning bolt. Within its core, occasionally other colours would be visible; red as of flame, green glinting brightly, white radiant beams, searing violet energies. But most of the time it was as wispy and grey as the overcast South London sky, that hung over the world outside this room.
The boy was, in a manner of speaking, sleeping. Something he'd been doing for an exceedingly long amount of time. And while he slept, he dreamt, after a fashion. And his dreams, were extraordinary.
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It started as a whisper of air, which became a rush of water, then a rumble of earth, and a final roar of fire. All of it distant, as if these sounds were echoing up from the base of a great valley. However their point of origin was within the forehead of an unconscious boy. The scar in his head was rippling like the surface of a lake in rain, and the magical shadows that clung around it were being dispersed, drawn back inside the dark scar. The sounds coming from within were barely enough to fill the room, but they were not quiet, simply far away. Then as the last trailing tails of smoke were drawn back into the boy's head, the sound suddenly stopped. What was left on his forehead, was a simple, if distinct, black lightning bolt scar.
His eyes blazed open, wild and afraid green eyes staring up at the white ceiling above him. The boy went to draw breath, but discovered that he had already been holding one in, so he tried to exhale, but in his panicked state he choked on his own breath, and began to try and breathe faster. He was about to hyperventilate.
Where was he. Why did he feel so strange. What was this splitting pain in his head. Why was everything so dull. What, was happening. He felt so dizzy, yet he had not moved an inch. He tried to marshal his thoughts normally, and when that proved ineffective, he tried something else. He took ahold of his whirling thoughts with a strong grip, and looked them dead in their roiling centre. In his mind's eye this boy rallied all the mental techniques he had at his disposal to stop himself from panicking. But this panic was not just coming from the fact that he was in a strange place, but from the fact that he was in a strange body, and the world was stranger than he had ever felt it.
The mind this boy possessed was a powerful one. A mind that was painfully in-tune with the turning of the world beneath his feet, the blowing of wind through the trees, the thrashing of lightning storms, the rushing of river rapids, and the silence of ice caverns both deep and cold. He could feel none of those things, and that frightened him. The names he knew better than perhaps any living creature, were not even a distant cry to him, and he hated that. That is why he needed to stop panicking, to listen and hear if they were truly gone, if he had somehow lost his ancient allies. Yet the name he feared lost the most, was not a name that anyone else knew. It was his name, and he could not feel it.
He wrapped his mind in stone and iron, harnessed his Alar, and calmed himself. The fear fell away from him like scales, and the body he possessed sat up straight. He was in a comfortable, yet impersonally designed bed, wearing soft nightclothes. Despite his comfort, he was not in a bedroom. It was a room with a bed in it, but that does not a bedroom make. It was a hospital room, white walled and clean, with a table across from him, two smaller bedside tables beside him, and various peculiar medical instruments dotted around. It was not a hospital room as he was used to them, but it was one nonetheless.
Before he would inspect any of his surroundings in detail though, he needed to listen for a name. The first name he had learned, the one most familiar to him, the name of the wind. There was a window in the room, and throwing off the bedcovers, the-boy-whose-mind-was-not-right marched over and tried to open it. But it would not budge. When it did not yield the boy tried harder, hurling his weight at it in an attempt to force the handle or even break it. But he was weaker than he'd had time realise, and in doing so he twisted his arm painfully and slumped against the cold glass, the window remaining defiantly shut. So hurried was he to try and force it open, that he did not take the time to see what lay outside it.
Telling himself that things were fine, the boy focused his thoughts down to a smaller scale. He did not need to be outside for the wind to come when he called. He looked at the table across from the bed, and fixed his dark green eyes on a book that sat on it, a large unopened tome.
He stared at the book for a long while, and then his mouth moved… Out came a word; soft, small, shy, scared. And the-boy-with-the-mind-whose-name-no-longer-fit called for the wind, and though it struggled and strained, the wind came to him. The book's cover flipped open slowly and the pages began to turn, under the command of a precise breeze.
The Boy, for he did not have any other name to hold to himself, walked over to the table. Looking down at the pages he saw the language was not one he had ever seen before, though it used the Aturan alphabet. Before he could try and make sense of it however, he saw in his lower periphery one of the things that had felt so unnatural just now, and he realised what a big part of the problem might be. He had the body of a teenager, a very thin and weak one at that. His nightshirt and trousers hung off him like rags on a skeleton, and as he held his hands up to look at them properly, he saw they were pale and trembling. Overcome with confusion, he leant against the table, arms shaking as he propped himself up.
Wracking his brain for any semblance of sense that he could make out of this situation, the boy clamped down on his frenzying thoughts once more, and took a deep breath. He had called the wind, all was not lost. If he could find the wind, surely he could find his own name too. For he could not feel it. He felt nauseous, dizzy, like he was standing on thin ice and slipping all the while. His name did not feel right. He needed to find out why, and that started with figuring out where he was.
The door to this room, to his surprise, opened. That fact puzzled him slightly, for some reason he had expected it to be locked. But it opened for him and he stepped out into a larger hospital ward, one lined with several hospital beds, four of which were occupied, only two of those by conscious individuals. In two side-by-side beds at the opposite end of the room, were a man and a woman, both dressed in similarly uniform pyjamas to him, and both of whom looked very haggard and worn. Yet their expressions were carefree and distant, their eyes lazily trailing around the room. As the door shut behind him with a click, the couple looked directly at him.
All at once the boy realised what kind of place he was in when he looked into their placid, glassy, eerily peaceful eyes. This was a kind of sanatorium. But as he looked back at the mad couple, the boy's assumption began to fall away. They were not mad, as He knew madness. These two were calm, unrestrained, and if his own unlocked door was anything to go by, not locked up with any severe security.
Arms held by his sides, the boy took several uncertain steps towards the two, passing by the other sleeping patients and reaching the foot of their beds. To the left there was a set of double doors, but so transfixing were their eyes that he found that he could not, in all good conscience, do them the discourtesy of looking away.
They shared gazes for a time, none of them speaking. Before the boy began. "Where am I?" His voice came out garbled, his vocal chords unused to being used at all. As such the two bedridden patients just stared at him without any recognition, the man even began to tilt his gaze away.
The boy had spoken earlier, clear enough to call the wind. He needed to focus to speak, so he tried again. "Who am I?" Again they looked disinterested.
Closing his eyes, the boy tried a third time and said. "Who are you?" When he opened his eyes again he saw them looking at him with faraway curiosity and even amusement. But he had managed to speak with his own voice, or a version of it at least since he was not speaking from his own body. Then the woman glanced at a placard attached to the foot of her's and the man's bed. Taking a close look at both notices, once again the boy found he could not read whatever language was written on it. Or rather, he could read it, but not understand it, seeing as he knew the letters but not the manner in which they were arranged nor their melody. He said as much, speaking plainly, a little of the lyricism of his own speech returning to him. "I cannot read this…" The response he received was a rolling of the head that seemed almost sarcastic. Or it could just have been an idle movement. Regardless of what it could've been, the boy answered. "Alright then, I will try." Taking up both of the card sheets he tried to pronounce the words that were written at the top of each of them. "I would say your names, if these are your names." He indicated the headings of each form. "Fhrenc Loungbotem and Aellys Loungbotem. Hello, Fhrenc and Aellys." Sadly there was little sign of recognition from them, but the boy perceived a flicker of life in their eyes, and took that to mean he had at least gotten something right. They were mad, but even the mad should not be treated as anything less than human. So he asked his first question again. "Where am I?" To which the woman let out a long breath, and looked around the room, her distant gaze settling on a sign above the double doors. A sign, that the boy could not read, though he still tried. "Jannous Theekae Wahr'd."
Shrugging in acceptance that whatever that was, he couldn't make anything out of it, the boy asked them. "Do you know who I am?" The look they gave him in return triggered a sudden spark of realisation in the boy's recently awoken mind. "Wait a second." He looked down at the placards in his hand, read the foreign language on them, looked up at the signs, then back at the two patients, before saying. "You can't understand a word I'm saying, can you?" Their response was the same as before; idle, uncomprehending movements. He sighed heavily. So he was reading too much into them after all. "Well, it was nice talking to you anyway. Bye-bye." He offered as a parting phrase, and despite the clear language and sanity barrier, before he left, the boy saw them both offer him little apologetic smiles.
Exiting the ward, the boy found himself in an equally pristine corridor, ranked with identical sets of double doors, each one bearing a different incomprehensible sign above them. Down the far end of the hall, he saw someone pushing a metal trolley disappear around a corner. Hoping that someone sane could help him, he hastened after them, his weak body surprising him by having enough strength to jog.
He rounded the corner and was met with a group of people coming towards him. They were not so close as to run into him, but as soon as they saw him they stopped dead in their tracks. Their sudden stopping caused the boy to halt in his place too, out of sheer reflex. He did not like the looks they were giving him. A girl of about fourteen with short dark red hair, looked at him with tense fear, shock radiating out from her green eyes. On her right stood a man with messy black hair, a round chin that was hanging slack jawed, and eyes that were looking right at him with a melancholy wonder, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. The woman who walked on the other side of the girl, who had long red hair and a slender, elegant face, looked on him with no expression whatsoever. Then she screamed, fainted, and the boy decided he didn't need to talk to anyone sane after all, and high tailed it in the other direction.
Back in the room he had awoken in, the boy pushed the table up against the door, and moved to the only actual exit he had seen so far. The window. But upon approaching it he could see outside, and what he saw was as foreign to him as the words on Fhrenc and Aellys' patient cards. It was a long city street, like any other he had seen in countless cities. But the buildings in the distance were taller than any tower, metal carts trawled the streets without horses to pull them, and everything from the sky to the shopfronts was different to him.
Then someone pounded on the door, and a man's voice called from the other side, shouting in a language he did not know how to listen to. The boy looked out the window once more, and then buried his face in his hands and groaned. "What am I doing."
Resigned to this strangeness, the boy-whose-name-no-longer-fit walked over to the door, where people were still hammering and shouting on the other side. He slowly shifted the table, and as it grated on the floor in it's movement, the knocking and shouting stopped. Confidently, he opened the door. On the other side he saw standing there, the man with messy hair, a nurse dressed in white, another burlier nurse dressed in a different uniform than the other, and that girl with the short red hair.
Silence hung between the two parties, so tense and tremulous it could've snapped at the slightest provocation. Then the boy spoke, not with the voice of a scared child, but with the voice of a wise and terrifying man. A voice like the rise and fall of hills and valleys, a voice like the hush of wind through long grass. A voice with the stern intelligence of a teacher, the heavy as stone authority of a master, the twisting and turning tunes of a madman, the unmistakable cadence of an Arcanist. He seized his name. "My name is Elodin. Now, explain, what, is going on." And with that he caught hold of a thread of his true name, and was at once far less afraid.
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Author's note: Sometimes I write little chapters of stories I'd like to explore more, but then I end up dropping them and never posting them up. Well after rereading The Name of the Wind, and starting a reread of Goblet of Fire (my favourite HP book), I wrote this. I do plan to continue it alongside my other running story, but I don't have the best update history. If people enjoy this I'll put some more time to it, but for now it's just something that ended up writing itself and that I didn't want to leave lying there in my files gathering dust.
- Faff