Lapsus Memoriae [Rávamë's Bane: Book 1]

Part II : Chapter 7 ~ Black, Blue & Grey

I felt the blood drain from my face at that those words. My jaw started working wordlessly in panic. Elrond didn’t even notice until I got a terrified squeak out. 

"B-but, that would need me to do a fëa link!" I stammered frantically, suddenly feeling very, very out of my depth. "I've never done one before! Not on an actual person!"

A fëa link, for lack of a better analogy, was a little bit like physic surgery. It involved a lot of big words in Quenya to understand properly, but the basic idea was that you used your own fëa, or spirit, to 'clean and bandage' a psychological wound. It was supposed to help relieve mental trauma and speed up physical recovery, and just like any kind of surgery, it's difficult and really risky. I'd learned the basics — studying under Lord Elrond, you either learned fast or you didn't learn at all — but so far I'd only had practice using it to treat wounded rabbits and battle-spooked horses. I'd never attempted one on a real, living person.

"What if I screw it up?" I breathed almost silently, more to myself than my teacher but he answered me all the same.

"You will not 'screw it up.'" He told me firmly, "He will struggle unconsciously against the pain. You must work to keep him as calm as possible."  

I didn’t move at first. I didn’t trust my hands to keep from shaking. Lord Elrond didn’t even pause in his preparation work, but looked up just long enough to give me stoney look that shot adrenaline into my blood. “You will do it now, or not at all, apprentice.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d indirectly threatened me with expulsion as his student if I chickened out of a test. There was a reason for that; it worked. Chicken or not, in two years I hadn’t backed out of a single one yet. Swallowing around the terrified lump in my throat, I obeyed. 

Carefully I reached down to rest my fingertips against the hobbit’s clammy temples and closed my eyes.Quietly, I began muttering the focusing chant I’d been practicing for months, willing my fëa to reach down through my hands as if it were a limb all its own. The focusing chant wasn’t so much about the words themselves, but the concentration and discipline behind them. Even if discipline wasn’t exactly my strong suit yet, Lord Elrond had made damn sure I knew them well enough to recite in my sleep. The dark space behind my closed eyes began to slowly fill with dim colour, my mind painting a picture of what my fëa was sensing.  

‘So far so good.’ 

Then the image began to focus, and I almost recoiled at what I saw. 

The poor hobbit’s fëa had been savaged. Not as bad as it could have been given the weapon used, but enough to make me wish I hadn’t looked. In the image my mind created for me, I could see the semi-corporeal form of the hobbit’s soul in pale glowing blue — and the black essence of the shard wrapped around him. It sprouted from the left side of his chest, where I knew the physical wound was; and had coiled around his ghostly body like pieces of ethereal electrical wire. They were digging viciously into his translucent skin, leaving dark smoking lines where it touched him, choking the light from him with every second.

Words didn’t seem adequate to describe seeing a soul being so brutalised, but spoken words didn’t really translate well when you were working as an incorporeal spirit anyway. So instead, I tried to force calm and soothing thoughts down through the link between us, trying to reassure him it was ok. I was here to help.

It had roughly the same effect as tipping gasoline onto a campfire.

The semi-corporeal form of the hobbit began shrieking and thrashing like a rabbit caught in a trap, eyes wild, and teeth bared in primal panic. I had to literally cling on to keep from being thrown out of his head entirely. I gritted my teeth and tried again; this time less forcefully, but the more I attempted to send a feeling of serenity through the link, the more he seemed to struggle. Another sharp thrash and I almost lost the connection again.

‘Oh to hell with this!’ I thought, abandoning the air of calm entirely and instead going for the coil of dark writhing wire that was still latched around his throat, strangling him. I wrapped the incorporeal hands of my will around the barbs, and started trying to pull them loose.

Sharp, freezing cold pain hit me in a wave through my link with the hobbit. I felt it like shards of ice forming behind my eyes, frozen water seeping into my blood. The feeling was so sudden and so severe that I almost let go and collapsed where I stood.

Raw stubbornness was the only thing that kept me there. There was no way in hell I was going to let myself mess this up, my first real shot at healing another’s mind, because of a sodding migraine. I schooled my focus, shoved the icy pain to the back of my awareness, and continued uncoiling the viciously sharp wires from around the hobbit’s fëa. I lost all sense of time through the link, so I have no idea how long it took to remove all the pieces. When I finally pulled the last of the wires from around his neck he rasped out a strangled breath, and the pale representations of his eyes met mine for the briefest moment. 

Then I felt the shard’s icy presents beginning to wane, and realised that my mentor must have finally found it and begun pulling it from the wound. The blood-freezing cold started to subside to a merely arctic chill, and the pain in my head began vanishing. The icy piece of wire clutched in my ghostly hands suddenly turned to smoke, and my extended consciousness was abruptly flung back into me like the snap of an elastic band. 

I shrieked and fell back against the nearby wall, the link severing with a shock of pain. My eyes flew open, and I could see again. I was completely back inside my own body, and Lord Elrond was dropping the blackened shard of the Morgal Blade into a specially prepared fire. It was instantly consumed by the flames, turning them a nauseating shade of green with a sickening hiss of thick black smoke. 

I looked down and half expecting to see the tortured ghostly form of the hobbit that I’d seen moments before. Instead, he was mercifully whole again, real, and had finally stopped struggling. He was still pale and clammy, but his chest rose and fell in steady breaths, and the wound on his chest was no longer black. 

I let myself heave a heavy sigh of relief. He was ok. I hadn’t screwed up. 

Stupid as it was I had the sudden urge to laugh out loud. My first fëa link, and I hadn’t messed it up. I had managed to helped someone.

Then something glimmered out of the corner of my eye.

I looked down to see what it was, and saw a small and gold band had tumbled from hobbit’s pocket. I hadn’t noticed while preforming the fëa link, but it must have clinked to the floor by my boot when he’d begun struggling.

Without thinking I reached down to pick it up. 

Before I could, a vice-like hand seized my wrist and jerked it back before my fingers could brush the little trinket. I looked up sharply, and found myself staring straight into the face of a wizard. And not just any wizard. 

A Grey Wizard. 

“Best not touch that, my dear.” Gandalf said with almost paternal reprimand, lifting my hand gently but firmly away and scooping the little gold ring up safely in a handkerchief. 

With a rush of shame, I instantly knew that the old wizard had likely just saved me from my own idiocy. I should have noticed it, realised what it was the moment I’d seen it. That wasn’t just any ring that I had just tried to pick up. That was the Ring. 

Then that must have meant, this hobbit was…

“Oh, shite.”

~ ❖ ~

Translations:

“fëa” = spirit (Quenya)

“hröa” = body (Quenya)