Okay, so I've been sort of away for the last forever but decided to pop back - might as well add another chapter of this Hero woke. He blinked. He tried to wake again, and failed.
There was no absence of any previous occurrence in his mind, as there had been before. Hero knew for sure this time that he had gone to sleep on horrendous, bone-crunching grass, and woken up in…
It was a city. It had to be a city. From where he lay, Hero could see only one street, but there was an undisputable city-ness about the whole place.
He lay on a wide, paved boulevard, with citizens – real people! Other people! – passing around him as if he did not exist. Buildings towered on all sides. He rolled onto his back, not caring how he looked stretched out in the middle of the street. Hero stared up into the sky, blue as his eyes though a good deal deeper, with not a wisp of fog in sight. He sat up, feeling for his sword as he did so – not out of a feeling of being threatened, but for simple comfort – and saw the sun ahead of him, between two hills in the distance. It was the far distance; for a long way around him there was only the city.
He stood up, spinning around unselfconsciously to take in the city, acting as he had been afraid to in the land of grass and fog, although there were people here to look where there had not been before. That, he could not explain. It had been as if every blade of grass had been scrutinising him…
The light was that of the morning sun. Hero knew it not because of any inbuilt compass or pasted memory, but out of pure human instinct. The city was alive around him, white and clean, buzzing and new, and he was a young man with a sword and an empty mind just waiting to be filled with memories. He looked again at the sun, pulling itself clear of the hills, and smiled, because Hero knew that this was how it was supposed to be.
As soon as he had stood up, people had begun to take notice of him; several boys around his age glanced his way with stares that were both menacing and totally comprehensible, and one elderly man made a deliberate detour around him. He decided that it was probably the sword.
The sunlight gleamed off the white buildings. It glittered on the surface of the puddles in the street, the only remnants of what must have been a recent rainfall.
(He wondered how it had rained without his noticing and being woken – the puddles were deep, and the sky devoid of clouds, so the rainfall had certainly been heavy. He had decided that he would steer clear of wondering how the city had appeared without his noticing and being woken, for that way lay madness.)
The young men were coming closer.
“Oh, heck,” he said, and closed his eyes. It was the sword; the sword and the leather. They must be like a magnet for aggression, even in an apparently perfect city like this.
And he knew that he could beat these boys; he knew that he could fight them off, kill them, even, but… but it didn’t seem like something that Hero would do, even if he couldn’t actually remember enough to decide on his personality.
Well, he knew what he felt now, and he didn’t feel like a fight.
At some point, however, he had drawn the sword without noticing. He noticed now; it hung listlessly from his hand, point scraping on the stone street, twitching slightly.
Hero tried not to stare as the boys approached, but just couldn’t help himself. There were six of them in all; big, bulky and tough-looking. He remembered thinking, just a moment ago, that he could beat, even kill these boys with ease, and wondered where on earth he had gotten that idea.
No matter how hard Hero stared, though, he couldn’t quite make out their features.
The boys came closer, and Hero stood still, clutching at that more-trouble-than-it’s-worth sword. He was darned to heck if he’d let go of it now. It wouldn’t change a thing, anyway, not now that they’d seen it. He wondered vaguely what they would say when they got to him. When you can’t decide on the colour of your own eyes, he thought, it’s a pretty sure thing that events will go downhill from there onwards.
Aimless pedestrians were beginning to give Hero a not-so-aimless berth.
Now the boys were next to him. Hero noted that not one of them appeared to be armed. This was not particularly comforting, however, since none of them appeared to be the slightest bit worried about the sword clasped to his chest, either.
Because he could make out their features now; oh yes. He could see the boys’ expressions, now that they loomed over him. It took him a moment to realise that the looming was a result of Hero’s having, at some point, hunched back down to the floor.
The leader – Hero knew, just knew, that he was the leader – was actually rather shorter than Hero had estimated. His hair was brown, practical; a good deal shorter than Hero’s hair, and significantly less bouncy. His nose didn’t appear to have been recently broken and then reset; it just appeared to have been broken, as did most of the other bones in his face.
Hero looked up. He looked down. He realised that he was supposed to be intimidated, or be brave, or be working out a way to run, but all that he could do was wonder how this city, this beautiful, perfect, early-morning white city had let this boy wander around with his gang. Maybe that was why Hero hadn’t been able to focus on their faces; if the boys had let the guards see them, they would have been thrown out of the city for sure. He was a little sketchy on how the boys stopped people from seeing their faces, and was considering dismissing it as another trick of the mind, but-
Hold on, hold on. This city has guards?
Hero couldn’t think when he might have found that particular fact out, but, sure enough, there was a guard only the other side of the street. The guard looked exactly as Hero had imagined him, too; chain mail glimmering, surcoat red and sword impractical.
The guard was standing very still, and staring in the other direction, down the street.
And then Hero looked up again, straight into the face of that leader. He considered shouting to the mysteriously appeared guard for assistance. He considered ducking between the legs of the leader and sprinting away – sprinting through this city that he hardly knew, pursued by a gang that (once again, he just knew) would’ve lived here all their lives. (Despite the fact that the city hadn’t been around before Hero had gone to sleep, that was – No!)
He considered everything, in short, but using the sword that had gotten him into this - that he thought had gotten into this, for there was no way of knowing what the looming gang leader actually wanted.
He stared up at the head that blocked the sun.
He thought: I bet his name’s Shark.
“Hello,” said the leader. His voice scraped a little; he was trying to make it mockingly upper-class, to match Hero’s clothes and hair and sword, but he just sounded… strange. “I’m Shark.”
And, in Hero’s mind, a little nugget of something fell into place. It wasn’t quite understanding, nowhere near developed enough for that. It was almost regression; a regression to a time that Hero could not remember for the life of him. It was like dreaming, and remembering something from outside the dream world, but not waking up.
He was sure that he didn’t know, or he knew that he wasn’t sure, but for a moment, he felt like…
Like a hero.
Like someone who could change the world.
Well, maybe not the world. Someone who could change the immediate future, perhaps.
And at that realisation, cold knowledge dropped into his head.
He reeled backwards; the action startled the gang member behind him (how had the gang member moved behind him?) into drawing a previously-hidden knife, but Hero couldn’t have helped falling even if he’d tried.
Because without warning, without even knowing how he had felt without one, Hero knew his past. He looked through all the new old memories, fuzzy and sharp, painful and comforting enough to make him cry and laugh at once, memories where he knew instinctively what they contained and memories so old that he probed them as if he were feeling his way through a crowded street in a foreign country. At night.
As he did so, he had another realisation. His past was changing.
It was barely tangible; simply a sense of memories shifting and shuffling at the edge of thought, with a sensation akin to vertigo. Hero had a feeling that this should scare him, or at least confuse him. If anything, however, it made him surer of himself, because the past didn’t matter. Let it change. Hero was Hero.
He smiled up at the gang, and said, “You’re going to go, now.”
They disappeared. They simply vanished off the street.
Hero blinked, and stared at the place they had been. He knew that something had happened, that he had made a realisation. He knew that, in some indefinable sense, he was the centre of this strange, ever-changing world. He knew that his past was shifting behind him like molten rock.
Yet, try as he might, he could not remember what that past had been.
Moreover, he had no memory of what had just happened. He had stood up from where he had lain for the night, and…
And forgotten.
There was no dropped knife on the ground behind him – why should there be? None of the other pedestrians paid him any notice, and there was no sign that anyone had stood in front of him. He had a feeling, though. Something about a shark.
Hero put his head in his hands, running his fingers through hair that nevertheless refused to lay flat. He needed a drink. He turned around, half expectant and half wary of what he might find.
There was a building – three stories high and set apart from the others – with a painted sign outside it, just across the street.
The King’s Head. Of course. It was always The King’s Head.
But, of course, Hero had never seen a pub before, let alone one called The King’s Head.
He walked over to it, and passed through the doorway.