Fallen Heroes

Chapter 1 (CK)

"Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never knew you had"- anonymous 

Chaos King

I opened my eyes with a start. My heart was beating ten thousand miles an hour and my breathing was ragged. The light in the room was blinding and instinctively my eyelids closed, images of a crying baby filled my head, somebody was taking the baby away and for some reason that was causing me major distress. Suddenly it was all too much and I couldn't stay in my head any longer, the replying images were too scary, too heartbreaking and I didn't even know why. I had to face the light.

After my eyes adjusted , I stared at the ceiling trying to get my bearings before I sat up. My body was unusually heavy and strange. I felt out of proportion like I had been stretched and then puffed full of air. My arms and legs were too long and my head felt like a bowling ball, too heavy and too round.

"It's nice to see you've woken up." A voice said and I whipped my head around to fast on my weak neck to see where the sound came from. It was painful but I ignored it, my heart was beating increasingly faster. I had no idea where I was and no idea how why I felt so strangely.

The body that the voice belonged to was standing at the end of the thing where I was laying with a smile on her face. I recognized her straight away, Dr Valerie Quince. She looked older than I remembered, stress lines crossed her forehead bags underneath her eyes and small trickles of grey among her dark hair. I couldn't help but feel like something inexplicably horrible had happened to her, how else would she have looked this way after such little time? I was certain that when I'd seen her last she'd been young and hopeful, when she'd sung me a lullaby as she put me to sleep last night.

"Do you remember me?" She asked.

I looked at her and realized that I wasn't sitting up like I thought. I was laying down inside a white gel like goo that didn't stick to my skin. It was then that I realized that I was naked and that my naked body looked vastly different to how I remember. I froze for a second looking at my body, then I tried to jump up out of the place where I was lying but I fell back. My arms and legs were weak, my muscles felt nonexistant.

"I know it's the last thing you feel like doing but you need to stay calm. I'm going to explain everything to you and it will all make sense. You have to stay calm though, you could get hurt if you freak out."

My chest was heaving up and down as I breathed but the air never seemed to reach my lungs. I trusted her so I tried to calm down, to slow my breathing and focus on her kind face. Her large brown almond eyes were kind and her wide smile, caring. She was short and slim with long straight black hair, she told me once that if she was regular she'd be considered Japanese.

Somehow I knew what that meant. Somehow I knew Japan was a country with Japanese people that spoke Japanese and ate Japanese food. For a second I forgot about my other problems and realized that I knew things, things that I didn't know you could know. I knew the meanings of words and how to spell them. I knew things that used to confuse me. I started to breathe fast again before I calmed myself down. I knew it was called hyperventilating now and I knew how to stop it. I tried not to think about the how and listen to what Vally had to say.

"Okay," Vally said evidently seeing that I'd gone through an internal battle and deciding that I was now ready to listen, "First things first. You can talk but you haven't spoken in a while so your voice is going to be croaky and your throat is going to hurt. It won't be long before your speech comes back properly just give it time."

I thought about this and immediately tried to say something but nothing came out but a painful squeak.

Vally smiled, "See it hurts but that's just because your vocal cords haven't been used in so long that they are out of practice. Now lay down comfortably for this next piece of information because it's going to shock you."