The next day, in the evening, a tall, white-bearded old man in a lilac robe with many runes and symbols paid a brief visit to the Granger couple's house. He introduced himself as Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster of Hogwarts. The purpose of his visit was simple: transporting Hector to the castle itself. Usually, Hogwarts rules do not allow anyone not related to the staff to remain in the castle during summer holidays, however, cases of providing medical assistance have always been an exception.
Hector's transportation proceeded quite simply. The adults reasonably decided that the traditional method by train, fireplace, or other methods could have a detrimental effect and are quite problematic. Therefore, Albus Dumbledore decided to use his phoenix, Fawkes. He is capable of Apparating with people so gently that it has no influence on the wizard and causes no discomfort. It is absolutely safe, and Hector can be delivered directly to the Hospital Wing. Some personal items, such as clothes, albums, notebooks, and the mobile whiteboard, would be delivered separately.
Time marched on inexorably. The first of September arrived, new students came to Hogwarts, and the whole castle buzzed with Harry Potter's sorting into Gryffindor. First lessons, first impressions of practical magic, first successes and failures. On Halloween, a troll sneaked into the castle, but deaths were avoided; Potter and the youngest Weasley saved Hermione from the terrible monster in a fit of heroism, everyone is happy, except for the Head of Slytherin.
Christmas, holidays, studies again, Easter holidays, and now the time for exams had arrived, while in the dungeon under one of the rooms of the Forbidden Corridor on the third floor, a heroic drama played out, a fateful meeting of Potter and the spirit of Voldemort, who had seized the body of the stupid and power-hungry Professor Quirrell.
All this time, in a separate room of the Hogwarts Hospital Wing, resided one young man with an empty gaze of blue eyes. He emerged from this contemplative state much more often than at home. No one in the castle, except the Headmaster and the Mediwitch Poppy Pomfrey, knew that once a month Hector Granger's parents and Healer Smethwyck visited the Hospital Wing via the fireplace. One would think his sister would be expected too, but she got too carried away with new friends, studies, and adventures, forgetting about her brother. Hermione herself carefully hid from herself the fact that she was glad for the absence of the need to care for and watch over Hector.
The children left the castle for the summer holidays, and the only minor remaining at Hogwarts was Hector Granger, dutifully taking potions that came from the hand of a Potions Master quite famous both in England and on the continent—Severus Snape. They decided not to take the boy himself upon the insistent recommendations of the Healers; they feared regression, and so the Grangers dutifully visited him.
However, neither in August, nor in September at the beginning of the new school year, nor in October did they come. First, they went on a long vacation to France together with Hermione, then visited several resorts, saw various sights. Like the girl herself, the family experienced mixed feelings. On one hand, the absence of such a heavy burden as Hector pleased them. On the other, a sense of a peculiar betrayal weighed over them. But one gets used to good things quickly, and besides, the boy was under the vigilant supervision of Madam Pomfrey—a very competent Healer—at Hogwarts.
Christmas came again, but this time even fewer students remained in the castle for the holidays; everyone feared the unknown Heir of Slytherin, and a petrified student and the caretaker's cat had already taken up residence in the Hospital Wing.
Time passed, attacks became more frequent, and panic gained momentum. Now Hermione ended up in the Hospital Wing, and even one of the Hogwarts ghosts. But a thorough examination and diagnosis of the patients showed that their lives were not in danger. Of course, it was strange to many that Dumbledore, as the Headmaster of the school, did nothing, as if he knew something, or if he didn't know, he guessed.
Right before the exams, a terrible thing happened: the Heir of Slytherin kidnapped a Gryffindor first-year, and the brave Harry Potter and Ron Weasley set off on a rescue operation. True, they had to drag along one of the most negligent Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers in Hogwarts history, and in the Chamber of Secrets itself, the unsightly truth about him, the famous writer Gilderoy Lockhart, was revealed. It turned out that it was not he who performed the feats in his books, but other wizards, from whom he found out the details and erased their memories.
That same evening, Harry Potter, Ron, and Ginny Weasley ended up in the Hospital Wing. Although they were battered, and the national hero got it almost fatally, they looked pleased. True, none of them, and indeed no one in the castle, even Albus Dumbledore himself, knew that the phoenix Fawkes, helping to blind the giant basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, did not peck out the monster's eyes but tore them out, bringing them into the hands of Hector Granger. What for? Why? No one but the phoenix himself, who secretly from everyone visited the strange boy every week and always looked with curiosity, knows the answer to this question. Hector, never regaining consciousness, squeezed the basilisk eyes procured by Fawkes, and they dissolved into a turbid sludge in the boy's hands, immediately absorbing into his skin.
After the exams, when the joyful students dispersed to their homes, Hector woke up in a separate room of the Hogwarts Hospital Wing. But his gaze was no longer empty. Meaningful, alive, and... dissatisfied.
I woke up suddenly. Strange and forgotten sensations from sensory organs, from every nerve. Heaviness, as if I had hung in water for a week and was abruptly thrown onto the shore; I was pinned dead to the surface. But this was a semblance of sensory shock only for the consciousness, not for the organs and brain, and so I recovered extremely quickly. I immediately felt the lack of the sensations that had become habitual from that strange space with particles of "everything." Staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, I quickly decided to recall the dream. Yes, the life of this body presented itself to me precisely as a dream. Vague, blurred, strange, retaining few details—a dream.
Helpless, eternally "absent" in the body, for a long time unable to go to the toilet without outside help—that was exactly how I was. But even in such a vegetative state, those brief periods of clarity of consciousness allowed the body to learn everything necessary for interacting with the external world and caring for my beloved self. And my current relatives have endured quite a lot, I must note!
With great difficulty and a cramp in muscles that shouldn't even be there, I tore my head off the pillow and inspected myself. A simple light pajama suit, humanoid, human. A whole fountain of heterogeneous and contradictory emotions immediately spilled out in my head. Shards of an elf's memory were indignant at the current belonging to the lower races, shards of a dwarf complained about the weakness and frailty of the puny little body. The memory of those who were used to darkness complained about the light, and so on. Shards of numerous animals radiated a desire to eat already, in the end! Shards of sentients from developed worlds cursed the backwardness of everything around, and shards of several mages of different races and directions complained about the unfamiliarity of the energies around. Dammit, there was even dissatisfaction from shards of a different gender! And only the largest shard, one might say, the core around which the others lined up, was simply glad to inhale the characteristic hospital smell with an admixture of something strange, to see daylight, to feel the body, and simply live. It is a pity that I lost a lot and the past life gaped with holes, and other shards were unable to patch these holes. No, there were many of them, very many, enough for hundreds of such holes, but they were different.
Each shard now felt like a part of me, as if it had once been Me. Thinking this thought through immediately, I came to a logical conclusion; perhaps that is how it was. A semblance of reincarnation. Each life ended in death and arrival in that strange space where you are literally deprived of everything. Perhaps after this, you are sent into a new life, clean, without experience and memory, and then everything starts anew. By some coincidence, I turned out to be capable of absorbing either someone else's or returning my own, lost over many lives. Pity it didn't return completely.
Inspecting the space around, I noticed a small wardrobe with clothes next to the bed, a chalkboard covered in many symbols, a table with stacks of papers, a chair. The room was small and looked more like a semblance of a quarantine isolator; the walls were clearly not load-bearing.
I tried to move my limbs. The mind was quickly restoring skills. A couple of minutes, and I calmly got out of bed and changed into ordinary clothes; they turned out to be folded in a stack on the bedside table. Sweatpants, a T-shirt, socks, sneakers without laces, on elastic bands. To avoid untied laces in my past state?
A series of simultaneous contradictory sensations from different shards of the soul caused a headache, from which I sat back on the couch, beginning to massage my temples. I need to do something about this.
Memory... One should not perceive it as a set of pictures or something similar. It is a far more complex, comprehensive system of associations and response reactions to this or that external or internal stimulus. And these reactions, they are incredibly contradictory and concern absolutely everything—from the body to the surroundings and smells. They drag out associative chains, generating images and thoughts that cause only irritation with the situation. Rejection of absolutely everything and simultaneously! This problem needs to be solved, and solved immediately.
Using an elven meditative technique, I fell into the void in a fraction of a second. I only had to wish it, and a massive multi-colored cloud appeared before my gaze. The problem was found immediately: the superimposition of shard memories one upon another. There was a huge multitude of such overlays, and their cause lies in the absence of time stamps. Simply put, every shard was relevant exactly now, causing not only mush in the consciousness but also brain overload due to maximization of the load on neural connections.
Experience working with mental techniques from shards belonging to wizards in some fantasy worlds suggested a method of creating an autonomous mental block to solve my problem. Digging down to the necessary methods was not easy, for the necessary images were sometimes simply absent due to the inferiority of the shards, but I, sort of, managed. The mental block will set the stamps itself according to the following principle: from simple organism to complex, from less mentally developed to more. The last life as an ordinary human will be taken as the basis of the personality. Yes, much is lost there, but even so, it is the most complete, and simply the last one. Everything else will be an ordinary memory, like a firmly remembered dream.
Opening my eyes, I saw the following picture. Not far from my cot, on a chair sat a suspicious white-bearded old man in a lilac robe, presenting a composite image of fairy-tale wizards. Next to him stood a lady over fifty in the uniform of a sort of sister of mercy. Familiar... Something familiar, but I cannot quite grasp this information. Although, associations quite quickly began to lead me through the backstreets of images from the memory of shards, filling in the gaps from other images. What damn mush in the head; I even think with difficulty!
My surname also seems familiar to me... No, naturally I know it, for it is mine. But as if I should know something from past lives, but it is gone. Like links to empty pages on the internet.
These two people looked at me attentively but were in no hurry to do anything.
"It seems, Poppy, the boy has finally come to his senses."
"I agree, Albus. A meaningful gaze. Studying. Do you understand us, young man?"
"Unlikely, Poppy," Albus shook his head with annoyance. "After all, he was somewhat... from birth."
"I understand," I wheezed strangely, horrified at how reluctantly and clumsily my lips and tongue moved. "Like sleeping. Saw a dream..."
I had to speak in stages, in short phrases, but even so, I felt that every sound produced improved the ability to speak. Those elven techniques for accelerated learning and restoration of mental activity are useful after all. The adaptation of skills to the body is going simply incredibly fast! Or maybe the reason is different.
Elven... Elven... the most contradictory shard of a life of a thousand years. But it is as riddled and empty as it is huge. Inadvertently delving into unwinding associations by means of imagination, bodily sensations, and representation of images, I was able to catch several sensations stretching through this shard for its entire length. The sensation of a bow grip in one hand, and an arrow between fingers in the other. I felt the tension of the bowstring as if in reality, but could not even approximately recall the shape of the bow, for example, or a face. They were not there. Nothing led to them. I can recreate sensations from indirect data from other shards, but that will be precisely a recreation. Although, this is exactly the basis of memory; impulses from neuron to neuron cause their excitation and response impulses to other neurons, causing a simulation of the stimulus and a response reaction. This is, of course, far from the whole mechanism, but it is the basis of organic memory, and it seems the memory shards provoked a corresponding development of the central nervous system...
"The dream turned out to be life," I continued, returning from reflections to reality. "I remember a lot. Need practice..."
"That is wonderful news!" the white-bearded old man smiled joyfully, sparkling with half-moon glasses. "To tell the truth, we waited impatiently for you to wake up."
"Temper your ardor, Albus," the woman nearby looked at the old man with reproach. "Your verbal lace is inappropriate right now. Speak simpler."
"You are right, Poppy. Habit. Do you know who you are?" the old man addressed me now.
"Human, already thirteen years old, wizard, Hector Granger."
"Family?"
"Parents, Emma and Robert Granger. Sister, Hermione Granger. Parents are dentists. Sister should graduate from the second year of Hogwarts School."
Looking around the room around me, I added:
"This school. Strange. It seemed like a dream. Real, but a dream. Turns out, not a dream."
"Will you allow me to check your well-being?"
"Yes."
"Poppy?"
The woman needed no extra reminders; she took out her wand and, approaching me, began to wave it in the air. Curiosity flared up in me, but the human eye is not adapted to fixing radiation of the magical range, therefore I did not see any specifics. In the ordinary visual spectrum, however, I could see small waves of slight distortion of space going from the woman's wand to me. After a dozen seconds of silent manipulations, the woman stepped back to the sitting and smiling old man.
"Everything is in order, Albus, except that brain activity has dropped just a tiny bit and is still anomalously high. Lack of mass, thinness, and some complex underdevelopment of muscles. With that exception, everything is in perfect condition."
"Wonderful news. I believed that everything would work out, and in your qualifications, as well as Smethwyck's. It remains to observe for a couple of days, consolidate the result, and if there are no relapses or regression, then Mr. Granger can be discharged."
This was said more clearly for me, because by the eyes of the woman named Poppy, it was visible that she herself had drawn the same conclusions.
"Can you introduce yourselves?" I asked, looking at them.
"Ah, yes! Old age is no joy. I forgot," the old man smiled. "Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."
"Poppy Pomfrey, Mediwitch, I work in the Hospital Wing of Hogwarts. You, by the way, are located in this very wing."
"Clear. Thank you. Hector Granger. You know. Do they feed people here?"
Albus chuckled, and wishing me only good things, left my room. Mediwitch Pomfrey promised a hearty lunch in a couple of seconds, asked me to wait here, and also left. Lunch indeed appeared. Suddenly and independently, occupying an empty place on the table. Salads, meat dishes, side dishes, tea, juice, buns. Quite amusing, considering each dish requires its own approach to handling cutlery, not just rowing with a spoon. A test of skills? Possibly, but I am not against it myself.
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