Harry was floating in a dark void, completely numb. He couldn’t see or hear anything. He couldn’t feel his body at all. All he could feel was his orb… wait, orb? Harry suddenly could feel that all that was him was floating in the blank blackness. Its brilliant light shone like a sun spinning in the blank void of space. It was his soul, Harry knew it.
“Where… Where am I?”
Nothing answered Harry’s question which was swallowed by the void.
Harry floated like that for a while, his soul spinning in silence all alone. Then he noticed the strings. The glowing strings streamed off Harry’s soul and sunk downwards into the darkness. They all lead roughly in the same direction, but some were floating free and slowly shriveling into darkness. They had been cut.
With long forgotten instincts, Harry slowly twitched and shifted himself down to find their source. As Harry floated along the length of the tether, the number of surviving strings grew thinner and thinner. Until there were only three glowing strings left to guide his way. He kept moving until eventually there were two strings. One string left, the only other one slowly drifting away and turning to darkness.
There was only one final string, and Harry hoped that this one had survived. He put all the effort and motivation he could into moving faster. The void was the same but the string flew by at a rapid pace, its trailing length slowly being absorbed into Harry’s soul. The string was vibrating like mad as Harry pushed himself to move faster.
“C’mon, Come on!”
The string suddenly went slack and before Harry could react he went flying into the inky void again, the slowly decaying end of the string receding into the distance behind him as he flew by.
“No!”
Harry despaired as he kept flying into the void unsure of what else he could do without his guide. Would he be lost here in the blackness forever? Then, a point of light and Harry immediately stopped himself in an instant. There, on the edge of his awareness, the decaying end of a string! It began to snake away, its light receding from the edge of Harry’s sphere of perception. But Harry leapt after it and quickly caught up. He followed this string and as he went, there were more and more of them, their decaying ends waving at the end of Harry’s perception as he traveled. Eventually they were woven together in twos and threes, then more and more and more…
Harry reached the base, the thick woven rope where all the strings originated from. It was slowly unspooling, unweaving itself as Harry floated next to it. Harry continued downwards along the thick cable until he reached something new. There at the bottom was a glowing portal. Harry carefully floated up to its edge and looked down at his body sitting in a hospital bed. The room looked like St. Mungo’s and Harry’s body’s eyes were closed. The thick cord of white light emerged from the body's navel and curled up and looped through the room before eventually winding its way through the portal and into the void.
At seeing his body, Harry leapt forward, only to feel an unpleasant clammy feeling wash over him. His soul body was being eaten away at and being reshaped into something new. Something that Harry could sense would never be able to reconnect to his body. Harry quickly flew upwards with his soul back into the void and let out what he interpreted as a gasp of relief. The unpleasant change slowly reverted and he returned to his proper form. What else could he do? Maybe he should try calling for help again. As a last resort he would dive through and suffer through whatever process had happened to him before.
“Hello? Is anyone out there? I’m trying to get back into my body on…”
As soon as Harry said the word ‘body’ he felt hundreds, no thousands of presences shift their attention to him.
“Body, body body? Free body? Yes, is it that body? Where body?”
Harry went silent and over half of the voices quieted down, but the other half circled around him like sharks. Harry could feel them now as they continued to babble all at once as they closed in. The void wasn’t as empty as Harry had thought it had been.
Out of the darkness the first attacker emerged. It was a tiny orb less than a tenth of Harry’s size, and as soon as it saw the portal it darted forward. Harry shifted to block it with his bulk,
“Hey, what…”
“BODY BODY BODY!” The little orb shouted at the top of its nonexistent lungs, sending the rest of them all converging on Harry in an instant. Harry touched the little soul in front of him and returning his instincts again he swallowed it in one bite. He felt himself grow a little bigger as it entered him.
The wave of hundreds of nearby souls was about to crash down on Harry, all looking to dive through the portal and presumably possess his body. Harry felt more and more of them enter his perception every second, the calls of those nearby drawing those of farther away presumably. All the souls here were much smaller than Harry, the largest only half his size.
Harry felt his focus draw inwards to a point as he suddenly began to vibrate in place. He looked at the approaching swarm and all he felt was… hunger.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
— — —
Harry didn’t know how long he fought, consuming every soul he could that was diving through the portal with suicidal abandon. At certain points the area was so choked with souls that they bounced off each other and could barely maneuver around their neighbors.
The ones that made it through Harry’s defense and the portal were affected by the process that Harry had avoided. Almost every one of them turned into ghosts that quickly floated away. People with wands were standing in the room casting frantically but none of them could stem the enormous tide of ghosts being created and bursting from the portal into the void.
But Harry saw the largest of the souls make it through and sink directly into his unoccupied body. The body’s limbs were twitching now and Harry realized that he had given up too easily. Of course he had to reach his body first in the real world before linking to it!
Harry’s soul was now nearly the size of the portal, but the wave of souls was only growing thicker and thicker around him with time. Harry kept absorbing more and more of them to grow but he was hitting some sort of limit and was slowing down as if overfilled. After a seconds more hesitation, Harry shoved himself into the portal awkwardly. His large mass was wedged half way through, only the glowing cord shoved against the portal’s edge making it past Harry. Harry was stuck there for a few seconds, struggling to get his fat soul through the portal.
He felt the pack of souls in the void pushing and shoving forward with all of their might trying to get past him. They pressed him forward until Harry’s perfect round shape slowly distorted for a moment. Then with a *pop*, Harry was through and bounced back into his round form.
The wizards and witches that had been stemming the tide of ghosts had relaxed as Harry blocked the passage, and were not ready for the absolute wall of ghosts that spilled out now that Harry had given them some time to accumulate behind him.
The air cracked around Harry and the room swirled into a faint wind stirred in the room as he and the solid wall of ghosts entered reality. Harry darted to his body and settled into it, hoping for something to happen. He felt something click inside him as he settled above the body’s navel. There were a dozen other souls there fighting viciously for the spot, but Harry just squatted on them and crushed them without a second thought under his massive mass. He felt himself drift into the socket for the body and there was another deeper click as Harry felt his soul settle properly into place. The old rope Harry’s soul had been attached to was suddenly severed as the portal shut closed above him abruptly. The rope unfurled into its individual strings, but Harry could see that these ones were not dissolving.
They floated around Harry’s massive sphere that was nearly a meter and a half tall and the strings spread out evenly around him. They all floated a meter away from his surface, lightly repelling each other and phasing beneath the bed beneath Harry’s body so they were perfectly distributed around Harry’s soul surface.
All at once the strings struck inwards and latched onto Harry and began to pulse.
Harry’s body began to spasm as Harry’s soul form began to rapidly shrink. The strings siphoned his size to thicken and grow themselves, forming a rootlike web coating Harry’s soul surface. Harry’s soul was paralyzed, unable to act as he began to slowly spin. The strings between his soul and his body began to twist together under the motion until it formed a very thin glowing cord between Harry the soul and the body. Harry kept shrinking, he was barely a meter in size now. He kept shrinking, all his lost size going into thickening the cord twisting into shape below him as his soul spun.
Harry felt his finger twitch. Yes, his finger! He could feel a little of his body now!
The cord was now the size of Harry’s diameter at 75 centimeters roughly. Harry floated there, caught in the web of strings and thick cord his size as the drain on his size came to a stop. Was this it? He could still faintly feel his body, but he couldn’t make himself move yet.
“Ugh!”
Suddenly the rope tightened and violently dragged Harry’s soul downwards until he was physically inside the body. Harry’s soul began to feel itself be surrounded by layers and layers of something as the strings of light did something beyond his perception. Harry’s soul lost consciousness…
And Harry woke up with a gasp.
“I’m back… I’m alive.”
Harry lifted at them and stared at them in wonder. He remembered… everything. How he had traveled back through the void and fought the others for his body. He… was alive.
Harry smiled widely and sat up, throwing his blankets to the side. He was alive! His bare feet touched the floor and he relished the cold feeling. He stood up and turned his head as he registered the shouting of the other humans around him. Harry shook his head. People. His strange perception as an isolated soul seemed to have made an impression on him.
The people were frightened and appeared to fear that Harry was possessed by something.
Harry spoke again and felt his soul vibrate as he spoke. Has it always done that?
“I am not possessed. I am fine. Better than fine, actually.”
They still didn’t understand him, beads of sweat running down their faces as they watched him.
Hmmm.
Harry went to speak again and noticed his soul vibrated again as he opened his mouth. He stopped the vibrations and tried to talk again and his brain nearly exploded under the mental effort. It was like trying to think about two completely different things at once.
“No No no NO no NO. Thr- Thre- Threat. Threat,” Harry said with difficulty.
They lowered their wands. Harry sat back on the hospital bed. That had been a rather intense experience. But at least he had a new goal now.
“One one One one One ONe. Two Two two tWo.”
Harry continued in that way for a while, ignoring the people rushing around and trying to check on his health. He would figure this out first then he would deal with whatever they were trying to tell him.
Time to finally gain the ability to speak AND write at the same time. At least Harry was finally getting some compensation after getting screwed so hard by the universe over this last year.