After Methis put his hand on Tom's head, Tom felt his consciousness start to become hazy. Bit by bit his connection with his surroundings was being eroded away. It felt like his very link with the Grand Cosmos itself was being gradually cut off. Eventually, it felt like he was staring into darkness and he was surrounded by nothingness. Suddenly, Tom felt a jerking sensation and then felt as though he was spinning.

'I guess this is what he meant by disorientating' thought Tom.

The spinning got faster and faster until it stopped as suddenly as it started. Once it had stopped Tom felt a strange sensation all over his body. He opened his eyes and the canvas of a night sky appeared in his view. He felt a tingling feeling and he also felt cold, colder than he'd felt before. But, if there was one word to truly describe how he felt right now, it would be diminished. As he was now, he couldn't feel a shred of his own power. As he was now, he was the most powerless he'd ever been before.

Tom tried to orient himself but realised he couldn't move properly. All that happened was that his limbs jerked slightly. As he kept trying to move he felt a thumping coming from chest and heat flushed through his body, or rather through his vessel, for that was where he knew he now was.

The heat that Tom was feeling was of course from the reanimation of his vessels' body. Methis had chosen a freshly dead human as the vessel and now that it was occupied, the heart had started beating again, the blood was flowing and all the bits and bobs of the body had become active.

As heat was returning to the body, Tom was able to move his new body more. He turned his head to the side and saw the face of a bloodied man lying motionlessly on the ground. The man was wearing dull scaled armour that obviously hadn't done him much good and there was a broken sword lying not far from his body.

As Tom continued to move his head, his field of view expanded. He saw that he was lying on a rocky, dirt track road and that the bodies strewn about weren't limited to his vessel and the man facing him. There were several other dead men, and some dead horses, that could be seen lying around the area, some of which had arrows protruding from them and others which had gruesome wounds with bone showing and guts and blood spilling out of them.

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Tom slowly but surely began to gain the strength to move this new body. He was finally able to lift himself up into a sitting position. He looked down on himself to discover he, unlike the others around him was devoid of any armour or weaponry, however, like all of the others his clothes were soaked in blood. This blood was concentrated around a slit in his clothes in the middle of his torso. Tom reached his hand to feel this area but discovered after putting his hand through the slit that aside from sticky moisture of the not yet dried blood, there was no wound on his body.

[So Methis repaired the vessel then]

While still staring down at himself, Tom lost himself in thought as he experienced a series of complicated emotions. He'd just willingly allowed his consciousness to be put in a mortal vessel while effectively making himself powerless in the process. Furthermore, the vessel was that of a human. It was truly an odd experience.

After being lost in thought for a period of time that may have been mere seconds or perhaps minutes Tom finally regained his composure. He knew that he had to get a handle on the situation. He knew too little about his vessel or in fact anything about this world, after all he came down here without asking Methis or Jacob anything about it. Of course this was Jacob's home world and he had told Tom some stories about it and his life there, but, none that was helpful in this situation.

To get a clearer understanding of who he now was, where he was and what had happened to his vessel and all the dead men around him, Tom stimulated his new body's brain in order to look into its' memories. He closed his eyes and was beginning to delve into the memories, however, before he had barely scratched the surface Tom was brought to by the sound of hoof beats and the wooden rattle of a wooden wheel.

Looking over, Tom saw a man riding over on a horse and another man driving a wooden cart. The two men had evidently spotted the carnage on the road and the man riding the horse began galloping over to Tom who was sitting up.

Tom felt annoyed at being disturbed at such an inopportune time. The only thing he had managed to learn about his vessel was his name.

The man riding the horse had finally drawn close. Tom could see that he was a middle aged man; with greying hair, wearing a steel grey long sleeved top, with an emblem of a closed fist on it over where the heart would be.

"Who are you? What happened here?" said the man in a gruff voice.

Tom turned to the man and answered using the name of his vessel that he had just found out. "My name is Tom... Tom Cardinal".