4th of Darkfall, 412 AH
Light came from the stones in the ceiling.
I came up out of the dark in pieces. Two pale stones sat in iron cradles above me, bright against the dim room. Their glow didn't seem to be reflected light.
Whatever was in those stones produced the glow itself, stored energy or a continuous process. The other possibility was much more interesting than it had any business being, given the rest of my circumstances.
The circumstances were that my head was trying to come apart behind my right eye.
It pulsed. The pain was unlike an ordinary headache. It had a rhythm to it, a throb that arrived on a schedule and timed itself to what was probably my own pulse.
So: pain behind the right eye, probably from a blood vessel pressing against inflamed tissue. I let it be and stopped looking up at the stones, because the light made the headache worse. My vision cleared slowly, and whatever I looked at took a moment to come into focus. I probably had a concussion. Lucky me.
There was a cloth bound around my temple. I went to touch it.
The hand that came up was small.
The fingers were short, soft, tapered to neat unbitten nails. No calluses. I'd had calluses my whole adult life, from holding the same instruments in the same places for years. They were simply gone. In their place was the hand of a child.
The throb behind my eye continued, but it could wait for the moment. There was a child's hand in front of me, and I was very busy.
I ran the alternatives. The hand remained the same each time I looked at it, which made a dream less likely. Hallucination from the head trauma was still possible. So I tested what I could.
The hand had a small white scar across the second knuckle that I never had before. I closed my eyes, opened them, and the scar was still in the same place. I flexed each finger and checked its range of motion, which was about as far as I could go without proper instruments. For now, it was a real hand attached to a real arm attached, I had to assume... a real me.
That's not my hand.
I looked around the room slowly, moving my head as little as possible to keep the pain behind my eye from flaring up. Heavy shutters, dark wood, black curtains, and a charcoal-grey blanket. This wasn't my room either.
Beyond that, when I tried to remember how I'd gotten here, there was a road.
I had it for a moment and then i forgot. Gravel, the particular crunch of it under a sole. A blue sky. A loud sound in my eardrums. The certainty that it was coming for me followed. Then nothing.
Was I allowed to panic yet?
The door opened.
He came through with a basin in his hands, his attention mostly on the water. Mid-twenties, fitted dark plain clothes. He set the basin on the table by the bed. Then his attention came back to my face, and found me looking back at him.
He took one sharp breath, then hurried the rest of the way.
"Young master." He whispered.
He reached for the cup at the bedside and brought it to my mouth, one hand at the back of my head. I drank it all. Some of it ran down my mouth. He caught it with his thumb before it reached my chin.
"Thank you," I said.
It came out hoarse, barely any sound at all. His eyes widened, then settled quickly.
He sat down on the edge of the bed to inspect the bandage without moving my head.
He occasionally glanced at my face while he checked it. I didn't know him, but his actions suggested he knew me, or whoever had been inside this body before.
That was a problem. He was waiting for me to be someone, and I had no idea who. Every word out of me was a guess against a script I didn't have.
"Three days," he said. "You've slept three days." A breath. "You fell. From the garden wall. The healer feared..." He stopped, chose a different end for the sentence. "She wasn't certain you'd wake." His hand made a small motion toward the cloth at my temple.
I let none of my relief show. I can work with that.
I had none of the boy's memories. But maybe I didn't need them. A boy who fell from a wall and woke up with a head wound had room to be confused, or better yet, not remember certain things. The fall was extremely useful. Weirdly coincidental, too.
Coincidental? I had apparently died and then woken in someone else's body. Reborn? Transmigrated? Coincidence didn't feel like the right word anymore.
The man beside me was still waiting for me to answer.
"My head hurts," I said and saw it land exactly as I wanted it to. Easy.
He stood quickly. "I'll fetch the healer. She should know you're awake." He went toward the door.
At the door he stopped. Then he came back, quick and decided. He leaned over me to button my collar, two buttons at the throat, fast and practiced.
Then he was gone, and the door closed. I was alone with the light-stones once more.
I lay there for a while. Staying awake seemed like a useful first objective. My head disagreed. I closed my eyes. The dark behind them was better than the light-stones, the ache backing off another notch the moment the glow went away.
That was when I felt it.
Something else moved through my chest, separate from the heartbeat. This was under that, or around it or... in it? Slower than the heart by a long way. A slow continuous pulse, then gone, then another, less a beat than a swell, rising and easing. It welled up inside my chest from somewhere under the ribs and eased back down, with no source I could put a finger on.
I turned my attention inward and tried to follow it.
It was gone. Of course it was.
Or not gone, only too faint to fix on. The moment I searched, there was nothing there to feel, only the ordinary heartbeat and the ache behind my eye.
I held my attention loose and waited for it to come back. It didn't. Then, the moment i stopped trying, I almost had it again.
What pulses through living tissue, slower than a heart, and vanishes from perception the moment you try to measure it?
I had no explanation for it yet, but it was the first thing since I'd woken that I wanted to understand. Unlike the road, the missing three days, or the body I was in, this was here and happening now. I could observe it.
I tried once more to catch it, and then again. Somewhere in the middle of trying to find it, the fog finally won, and I fell asleep.
Whatever that was, I was going to find it.