Chapter 4

Right before the exams, something terrible happened - the Heir of Slytherin kidnapped a first-year Gryffindor girl, 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 and the Arts teachers in the history of Hogwarts, and in Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets itself, the unsightly truth about him, about the famous writer, Gilderoy Lockhart, came to light. It turned out that the feats in his books were not performed by him at all, but by other wizards, from whom he learned details and erased their memories.

That same evening, Harry Potter, Ron, and Ginny Weasley found themselves in the hospital wing. Although they were battered, and the national hero had suffered a near fatal blow, they looked pleased. However, none of them, nor anyone in the castle, not even Albus Dumbledore himself, knew that the phoenix Fawkes, when helping to blind the giant basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, had not pecked out the monster's eyes, but torn them out and brought them to Hector Granger. Why? Why? No one except the phoenix itself, who secretly visited the strange boy every week and always looked at him with curiosity, knew the answer to this question. Hector, still unconscious, squeezed the basilisk's eyes that Fawkes had gotten, and they dissolved into a cloudy liquid in the boy's hands, immediately being absorbed into his skin.

After the exams, when the happy students went home, Hector woke up in a separate room in the hospital wing of Hogwarts. But his gaze was no longer empty. Meaningful, alive and... dissatisfied.

***

I woke up suddenly. Strange and forgotten sensations from the senses, from every nerve. Heaviness, as if you had been hanging in the water for a week and were suddenly thrown onto the shore - nailed tightly to the surface. But this was a semblance of sensory shock only for consciousness, not for the organs and brain, and therefore I recovered extremely quickly. Immediately I felt the lack of the familiar sensations of that strange space with particles of "everything". Staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, I quickly decided to remember the dream. Yes, the life of this body seemed to me exactly like a dream. Vague, blurry, strange, a dream that retained a few details.

Helpless, forever "absent" from the body, unable to go to the toilet for a long time without outside help - that's how I was. But even in such a vegetative state, those short periods of clear consciousness allowed the body to learn everything necessary to interact with the outside world and take care of itself. Well, my current relatives have suffered, I must say!

With great difficulty and a cramp in the muscles that shouldn't be there, I tore my head off the pillow and looked at myself. A simple light pajama suit, a humanoid, a man. A whole fountain of diverse and contradictory emotions immediately poured out in my head. The fragments of the elf's memory were indignant at their current belonging to the lower classes, the fragments of the dwarf - at the weakness and puniness of a puny little body. The memory of those accustomed to darkness complained about the light, and so on. The fragments of numerous animals emitted a desire to eat already, after all! The fragments of intelligent beings from developed worlds cursed the backwardness of everything around them, and the fragments of several magicians of different races and directions complained about the unfamiliarity of the energies around them. Hell, there was even discontent from the fragments of the opposite gender! And only the largest fragment, one might say the core around which the others lined up, was simply glad to breathe in the characteristic hospital smell mixed with something strange, to see daylight, to feel the body and simply live. It's a pity that I had lost so much and that my past life was full of holes, and the other fragments were not able to patch up these holes. No, there were many of them, very many, enough for hundreds of such holes, but they were different.

Each fragment now felt like a part of me, as if it had once been Me. Having immediately thought this thought through, I came to a logical conclusion - perhaps that was how it was. Something like reincarnation. Each life ended with death and entering that strange space where you literally lose everything. Perhaps after that you go to a new life, clean, without experience and memory, and then everything starts all over again. By some coincidence, I was able to absorb either someone else's, or return my own, lost over many lives. It's a pity that it did not return completely.

Having looked around the space, I noticed a small wardrobe with clothes next to the bed, a chalkboard covered with many symbols, a table with stacks of papers, a chair. The room was small and looked more like a quarantine isolator - the walls were clearly not load-bearing.

I tried to move my limbs. My mind quickly regained its skills. A couple of minutes, and I calmly got out of bed and changed into my regular clothes - they were folded in a pile on the bedside table. Sweatpants, a T-shirt, socks, sneakers without laces, with elastic bands. To avoid untied laces in my previous state?

The series of simultaneous contradictory sensations from different fragments of the soul caused a headache, from which I sat back on the couch, starting to massage my temples. Something needs to be done about this.

Memory... You shouldn't perceive it as a set of pictures or something like that. It's a much more complex, comprehensive system of associations and responses to this or that external or internal stimulus. And these reactions, they are incredibly contradictory and concern everything - from the body to the environment and smells. They bring out associative chains that generate images and thoughts that only cause irritation with the situation. Rejection of everything at all and at the same time! This problem needs to be solved, and solved immediately.

Using an elven meditation technique, I fell into the void in a split second. As soon as I wished, a massive multi-colored cloud appeared before my eyes. The problem was found immediately - the overlapping of fragments' memories. There were a huge number of such overlaps, and the reason for them was the lack of time marks. Simply put, each fragment was relevant right now, causing not only a mess in the mind, but also an overload of the brain due to the maximization of the load on neural connections.

Experience with mental techniques from fragments that belonged to wizards in some fantasy worlds suggested to me a method for creating an autonomous mental block to solve my problem. It was not easy to get to the bottom of the necessary methods, because the necessary images were sometimes simply absent due to the inferiority of the fragments, but I seemed to have managed it. The mental block itself will set marks according to the following principle: from a simple organism to a complex one, from less mentally developed to more. The last life as an ordinary person will be taken as the basis of the personality. Yes, a lot is lost there, but even so it is the most integral, and simply the last. Everything else will be an ordinary memory, like a firmly remembered dream.

Opening my eyes, I saw the following picture. Not far from my bed, on a chair sat a suspicious gray-bearded old man in a purple robe, presenting a composite image of fairy-tale wizards. Next to him stood a lady over fifty in the uniform of some kind of sister of mercy. Familiar... Something familiar, but I can't quite get this information out. Although, associations quickly began to lead me along the nooks and crannies of images from the memory of fragments, filling in the gaps from other images. What a stupid mess in my head - I can hardly even think!

My last name also seems familiar to me... No, of course I know it, because it is mine. But it is as if I should know something from past lives, but it has disappeared. Like links to empty pages on the Internet.