Wake up.
Glaring light burned into his unfocused eyes, throwing him out of the total darkness he'd been drifting in for what felt like aeons. There was a faint memory dancing around the edge of his mind, something that looked like a person; there, but not. Speaking with no sound, looking with no eyes to see. A tugging somewhere in his body, an insistence of purpose.
It vanished under the unforgiving glow of day.
He squinted against the bright, attempting to raise his hand limply to block it - frustratingly, he found his body and his mind were not working in tandem. It was like nothing but his eyes were connected to anything at all, though he could certainly feel there was more of him. Really, it was more the absence of feeling that enlightened him to the rest of his body, as little sense as that made to his addled brain. As that nothingness blanketed the rest of his body, th boy could do nothing but hope that the sunbeams would stop shining down into his face.
That simple request was answered.
Soundlessly, two blurry shadows appeared above him, thankfully blocking out the sun. The boy relaxed his eyes, no longer squinting. Able to finally see, the relief he'd felt did not last long after looking at the shadows – their obscured, unreadable faces were not any kind of reassurance.
Garbled words hit the boy's disoriented ears, a conversation in a language he didn't know between the two moving, strange-shaped shadows, fast-paced and incomprehensible. How he knew it was 'language', or what 'language' was, he wasn't sure, but it was the only thing that came to his mind; he knew it must be right. Just as sure that he knew that those were words he had never heard before.
As his gaze finally adjusted to the burning sun above his head, he opened his eyes fully and saw that the two shadows were, indeed, other people wearing rough-hewn tunics, coated in mud and dust. Farmers, he thought, followed by; what the hell is a 'farmer'? Finally, his arm responded to his will, and he reached out, the emptiness within his body making him feel detached from the ground he was lying on. Moss tickling his skin was the only hint he was touching anything at all, ferns curling around his calves as if he'd been there forever. The boy grabbed onto the arm of the person nearest to him, a plain older woman. She jumped, clearly startled that the strange boy on the floor was now moving.
The boy startled too, unsure how he knew what he was doing, how he suddenly had the ability to move.
Words tumbled from his mouth, a foreign sound that he could not remember making before. He knew what they meant but couldn't figure out how or when he'd ever learnt it. "Who… who are you?" The boy rasped; his voice so hoarse it was like he hadn't spoken once his whole life. No, it was like he had never made so much as a sound since the sun started shining. Staring up at the couple were a pair of earthen eyes, so rich they seemed a hue of red, steeped in an unspeakable age – if not for the round, puppy-fat-filled cheeks, one could mistake the teenager on the floor as someone elderly, well into their dying days. His pupils, likely a trick of the light, one would think, were not black. From those dark, clay eyes, they shone round and grey. Ashy as burned wood. His hair and eyes were like a smouldering, flickering bonfire. "W… where am I?"
After a few more quick, hushed words the boy didn't understand, the male farmer turned to him and spoke in the same language the boy had used. Steeped in concern, with a voice very different from the boy's, the older man said, "Name's Donngall, and ta lass is my wife, Ita. We were restin' 'ere and we saw yah stumblin' around ta woods until yah collapsed. Yah came from tin air. I… I t'ought yah were dead. What were yah fleein' from, laddy?" His smoky, deep blue eyes peered out of a gentle but weather-worn, creasing face that was just shy of handsome. The slight hint of a smile adorned his lips, while concerned, made the man who called himself Donngall seem permanently jovial. His anxious expression deepened the wrinkles on his aging skin.
On the ground, the boy contemplated something, thick yet prematurely short eyebrows curving gracefully towards his hooded, deep-set eyes. Even at this movement, his face remained infeasibly unmarred by any creases at all as if he was perfectly carved from wood, moving mechanically. There was something off about his gaze, almost hollow, seemingly not reflecting the sun above cascading through the canopy. The boy finally spoke, his words quiet, hushed. "I don't remember anything. Running, falling, being chased?" A dash of panic flashed across his face, and it was the first time he looked his age, a panicked, innocent child lost in the woods. "Who… what- I don't remember."
Ita, who had been standing and fretting in silence, spoke up. Her pale, piercingly hazel eyes seemed to look right through the boy though her ruddy cheeks made her seem kind, motherly despite the guarded expression. "Don' panic, lad. It will come back to yah. What are yah called, yah name? Yah mus' know t'at."
Dancing his gaze from Donngall to Ita, a weighty feeling settled deep in his body. It was a complete unknown; the boy didn't know what to do. As he tried to speak, it felt like something was stuck in his chest, trying to escape through his throat. Once again, he seemed to fundamentally understand things that didn't make sense for him to know. He knew what a 'name' was, just as surely as he knew; "I- I don't have a name? There's- there's nothing… no name." Every word he mumbled sounded like he was practising the sounds they made, unaware of their meaning. It was as if he had just had the knowledge of language thrust into his head with no basis for understanding.
Both farmers looked at each other. Ita's face changed from guarded to exceedingly anxious, obviously concerned that the boy had been injured or was slow in the head. Neither was good, not this deep in the forest. "Ah… Well, 'ow many years on yah then?"
"I don't know." The boy closed his eyes and pressed his hands against them. As he moved his mouth around soundless words, he flashed oddly sharp canine teeth – something about them made the farmers uncomfortable but they had no idea why. There was just something so fundamentally incorrect about them that defied any descriptor they could think of. Donngall and Ita were both uneducated, all they knew were the stories from the Good Book and it spoke of nothing as silly as a strange adolescent with slightly pointy teeth. "I don't… who am I?"
The consensus that all three people came to was pretty simple – this was no good. Memory loss was dire as is but, even when suffering amnesia, the sufferer still remembered their name or their age or something, anything, about themselves, but the boy didn't have a single hint that he'd ever been alive before this very moment. If it wasn't so laughable – completely, utterly unfathomable – the farmers would have thought he had sprung into being right at that unfortunate moment. No matter how the boy racked his utterly vacant mind there was naught there to give him an inkling of who he was or of where he came from. All he knew was how to talk and the meaning of things that didn't seem to make sense for him to know. There wasn't even any sensation or blood to indicate a serious injury, making it seem like, externally, nothing was wrong at all.
To the farmers, he was just a slightly strange, lost little boy.
To the boy, he knew nothing but what was right in front of him. The farmers, the green, the sun and the emptiness.
All he could feel was a gnawing ache in the pit of his gut.
"Can… do you have anything I could eat?" The boy's whisper was barely there as if he was embarrassed that he seemed to need to consume something – that he knew, as well. Instinct of any walking thing, probably. That was what that hollow feeling in his stomach was, it must be. Despite their nervousness, both farmer's parental instincts took over at the pathetic figure the child before them cut.
Donngall smiled. "Ay. Give me yah 'and, we'll 'ave yah up off ta floor now." He reached out a calloused hand to the boy and, tentatively, an oddly pallid, smooth hand met the rough skin of the older man's palm. Fingers that seemed stretched too long for the boy's palm delicately caught the light. The skin across the back of that hand seemed almost translucent. At first, Donngall was terrified to put any pressure on that delicate appendage but, when the boy grabbed him, he was taken aback by the crushing strength the seemingly weak child had. It felt like ten men had grabbed onto Donngall all at once. Wincing slightly as his knuckles popped from the sudden pressure, he gripped back and roughly yanked the boy up.
Not even stumbling slightly, the boy stood in front of them, like he'd floated up from the floor. He was oddly tall – towering over Donngall, though he'd never been more than average height – and willowy, his limbs not having filled out. That teenage awkwardness was pushed to an extreme that gave him an almost alien appearance, gangly but it'd be a lie to call him graceless.
Donngall shook his head slightly; he knew the look of a pubescent and the boy pushed it just a bit too far.
Everything on him was a lick sharp, too thin and ever-so-slightly too long. Despite his gangliness, despite that erroneous shape, the boy clearly had the makings of someone ethereally beautiful when he was fully grown. An Adonis awash with pallid, unblemished skin and curly ginger hair cascading around his face – the looks of a spoiled nobleman's son, never a day of work or worry in his life. However, the detachment in his gaze spoke of a much different life. Vacant, lightless, yet teeming with something unknowable – it spoke of something dark, something beyond comprehension. Those reddish-brown eyes observed the farmers coolly with an indescribable depth as if someone could get lost within them were they to look for a moment too long, framed with thick, gingery eyelashes. Darkness swirled within them, profoundly wrong. The youthful fat on his face hardly hid the delicate, refined bone structure that would become more and more prominent as he aged.
Everything about the odd child was a contradiction. Beautiful, handsome, alien, youthful, dull, ancient. Firey but cold. Fragile but impervious. Donngall and Ita had never met a child, or even an adult, like him before.
"Thank you." It was only then that the farmer realised the boy spoke in an accent that didn't seem fitting for the area they were in. It was a strange one, his annunciation weird, old-fashioned, but it wasn't so bizarre that it was worthy of commenting on. The likelihood was that he was from somewhere far off and had somehow ended up in these woods. There would be no answer as to where that was though, considering the circumstances.
"Don' be so poli'e, boy. It's ta least we can do for a young lad like yahself, in the sta'e yar in." Ita waved her hands dismissively, though it wasn't cruel or mean – she was an older woman who prided herself on her hospitality when tasked with caring for someone. "Yah look about ahr boy's age, so I'd feel just awful if I didn't look after yah."
She strode off, busying herself with rifling through the cart of belongings that they had next to their camp and starting a small fire. Watching her, the boy's face was oddly solemn, though Donngall realised that it just seemed to be the natural downturn of his lips making him seem eternally close to tears. It aged him beyond his assumed years, yet that strange melancholy was hopelessly naïve. Suddenly pulled out of his thoughts, the boy turned to the farmer man and quizzically asked, "How old is… 'your boy'?"
Letting out a small laugh, Donngall was amused by the boy's confusion over Ita's wording. A proud, fatherly smile split his face, taking his looks from skirting around handsome to exceptionally homely but far more pleasing to the eye. "Ahr lad, Leofric. He's jus' fifteen, that one." Watching his wife, he leant against a moss-covered tree. "We sen' him off to forage some dinner for us so yah'll mee' him in nary any time, laddy."
"Leofric…" The boy whispered to himself. A part of his chest seemed to clench at the mention of the farmer's son like he was being tugged towards somewhere he didn't know. He frowned for a split second – an actual, intentional downturn of his lips this time – before a sweet smile split his face as he looked at Donngall. It lit up his face, his eyes curving slightly. He didn't know why, but he felt compelled to say, "That's a nice name."
Donngall was not a stupid man, he noticed the oddity in the boy's behaviour at the mentioning of his and Ita's son, but he thought it was just excitement to meet another lad his age. A more familiar person, for a floundering child, one that was not as intimidating as unknown adults were. His paternal pride blinded him to any other option, not that any other option would have come to mind anyway. "Ita chose it. Ay, t'was ta name of a dear uncle she once had. Suits ahr boy well."
Nodding slightly, the boy felt something that must have been excitement bubbling through his body, replacing the complete nothing that had been there before. While he didn't know how he knew what the things he was feeling were, he accepted that it must be the remnant of something from before he lost his memory. Either way, he was anticipating with what seemed to be great joy the meeting between him and the other boy, this Leofric. He had no idea why, but he did his best to let it go without further questioning.
"Here ya are, boy. Get some food in yah." Ita held out a steaming bowl of grey, watery… something. It slopped against the sides of the roughly carved wooden sides of the bowl, thick clumps unappetisingly floating at the top of the soupy liquid. While the boy seemed to know a lot of things that he couldn't remember ever learning, he knew clearly he had never seen something like that before. It was an entirely peculiar something, that was certain.
The boy stared at it, an unreadable emotion on his smooth face. Despite the gnawing feeling in his stomach, the idea of eating made him feel like heaving out whatever was sloshing around in his empty body. However, he had the sense to know that it would be rude to refuse this gruel that Ita had made specifically for him. Reaching out his hands, he took the bowl and brought it to his mouth, taking a mouthful quickly.
It took everything in him not to retch.
Ita almost yelled, "Whoa, boy, don't eat it yet! Yah'll burn yer shitting mouth!" She was about to yank the rough bowl back in a panic when the gangly boy looked back up, face still unchanged by any expression. The off-colour, reflectionless pupils of his seemed to look right through her like she wasn't there at all.
"Oh… It's fine, it isn't hot." He was far too focused on the vile feeling of that porridge slipping down his throat, the weight uncomfortable within him, to notice the farmers' reactions. It felt like his body was doing everything in its power to reject the foreign substance as he consciously fought back so he didn't spew it across the farmers.
Exchanging a wary glance, Donngall and Ita fell silent. That porridge had been bubbling over the fire for a long while, almost boiling. The palms of Ita's hands were scalded red from just holding the bowl and the boy had just gulped down all the burning liquid without wincing slightly. He even had the gall to say it wasn't even hot in the slightest. An odd apprehension filled them as they looked at the boy. There really was something very off about him.
Any conversation that the farmers were planning to have with the boy was cut short by a youthful, childlike shout from within the woods.
"Mam! Da! I've found us some tea!"
At that voice, the boy's eyes shot up, somehow more thrilled to see the returning Leofric than the actual parents. There was a glint of life in them that hadn't been there before.
That weird, unpleasant tugging in his chest tightened, making his body feel impossibly heavy. He had only just adjusted to his form, the empty, airiness of it making the boy feel as if there was nothing inside him but now, he was solidly tethered to the floor. Those molten clay-brown eyes – if any of the people there had been educated in an uncommon artform, they would find the right way to describe those irises was a dark terracotta – stared pointedly through the trees in the direction of Leofric's voice.
Finally, after a few moments, the farmers' son stepped out from the mottled shadows of the trees and into the mossy clearing where the trio were waiting for him. Leofric was about to wave excitedly to his parents when he stopped, evidently stunned and reproachful as he saw the towering, pallid stranger that was standing just behind them. It was like a flaming white willow had planted itself between his pit-pony parents.
Their eyes met.
A pale hazel eye, inherited from his mother, looked back at the unfamiliar boy. No. No, not hazel, not even a vibrant flax, the boy realised looking at the farmers' son. No shade of flora could describe it. Golden. Even though he had never seen that metal before, nor did he know how he even knew what it was, the boy knew that the only way to describe Leofric's left eye was that it was as pure as gold. An instinct. Perfectly contrasting, yet complimenting, the smoky blue of his right eye: Leofric clearly took that colour from his father. His red-stained cheeks and gentle look were what he got from his mother in place of hazel eyes.
The clenching in his chest tightened impossibly and the boy, still staring in desperation at Leofric, collapsed bodily to the ground once more.