Jack opened his eyes and yawned. "Well that was a mind bender!", he thought to himself as he lay staring at the comforting sight of a roof over his head. Feeling the substantial mass of a bed under him and the faint smell of wood smoke drifting through the room. He lay there, just staring at nothing, shuddering slightly as he recalled the vivid dream - no, nightmare - he'd just experienced.
Then small details started working their way into the forefront of his thoughts. It was a lot brighter in here than you'd expect from a cabin surrounded by trees. The mattress, was it always so soft? Why did the roof look in much better repair than he recalled? A feeling of dread was slowly working its way up his spine and into the forefront of his brain...
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As Jack was stirring, not far away a rather severe looking old man raised his sharp eyebrows in surprise. "It seems our young mystery guest isn't just a breathing corpse after all", he said to his young assistant sitting in the corner awaiting his pleasure.
He stroked his long white goatee for a few moments before decisively standing up and striding to the open door of his study, his assistant in tow.
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Jack sat up to get a better look at his surroundings.
Or at least, he tried - before a searing pain from his side had him falling back the few inches he'd managed to raise himself. Beads of sweat sprung out of his flushed face, and he struggled to contain his ragged breathing. "Shit!", he thought to himself. "Am I still dreaming?".
He gingerly reached over with his right arm to move the covers down. Grimacing, he quickly realised that he could barely move his arm - it felt like he'd just finished a punishing weights routine! And the thin covers were a lot heavier than he expected. Were they lined with lead or something?
Even his head felt like it was glued to the pillow, his neck muscles straining just so he could look down at his body.
Eventually he managed to push the covers down, discovering that he wasn't wearing the t-shirt he'd gone to sleep in. Just his naked torso - and a bandage around his chest holding something in place where he'd dreamed he'd been injured.
Although he was starting to doubt that it was a dream - perhaps the cabin roof had collapsed, and the injury he'd sustained in his dream was actually the reflection of a real injury? It would explain the bandage, and the strange room.
But who would have rescued him? And although he didn't spend much time around hospitals, this certainly didn't look like what he'd expect a hospital room to look like.
He heard the sound of padded footsteps, moments before a door that he hadn't paid any attention to opened, and in strode an elderly gentleman that looked like a caricature straight out of an old Kung Fu movie; white goatee, drooping moustache, even the bushy eyebrows drawn to a point.
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Behind this imposing sight there followed a young woman that he wouldn't guess as being much older than himself. While he was still processing this sight, the man smiled and spoke.
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"How are you feeling?", the town elder, who also doubled as its only healer and magistrate, asked of the young man in front of him on the bed.
He was honestly surprised to see the young man awake after he'd been brought in a week ago, by a forager that had stumbled upon him in the nearby woods. As a healer, he was adept at discerning the life flame of others - and he'd been completely unable to sense anything when he'd first seen this youth. If it hadn't been for the mundane signs of life such as breathing and a pulse, he would have scolded the forager and dispatched him to the town mortuary.
"Do you know where you are? Do you have a name?", he followed up when he received no response to his first question. Again, all he got was a blank stare. Was this young man deaf? A mute? Perhaps brain damaged?
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Jack stared at the old man, incomprehension and apprehension vying inside him. The man had clearly spoken to him, but he couldn't understand a word he'd said? It didn't even sound like any language he'd ever heard.
"Hi, I'm Jack. I'm sorry, but I only speak English?" he ventured. He watched as the man looked at him with obvious incomprehension for a few seconds, before turning around and addressing the young lady behind him in the utterly foreign language.
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"Did you understand anything he just said?", the old man asked his assistant. Maybe he'd simply misheard?
"No, senior", she replied.
Now he was truly intrigued. He couldn't sense any vitality from the young man in the bed, and now he was speaking in a tongue that he'd never encountered before. What made even less sense was that he couldn't even make out any hint of intent behind what the young man had said.
Even if he couldn't understand the words, he'd never expected to not be able to discern the intent that all human languages carried within them. It was almost as if he were looking at a talking animal. Was he truly a simpleton just making meaningless sounds?
"Bring our guest something to eat", he instructed his assistant as he strode to the side of the bed. He took the youth’s head in his hands and proceeded to inspect him more closely. The youth resisted at first, but was clearly too weak for his resistance to amount to anything.
He pulled each eye wide open, looking for any signs of disease, before turning the head in his hands one way and the other, looking for an injury he may have missed. Nothing.
Yet the young man's vitality was at a level so low he'd have assumed he was dead, and the lack of intent in his gibberish showed there was no thought behind it. Was the young man an imbecile, cursed, a cripple?
He lifted the bandage around the young man's chest and found that the small wound there had almost fully healed with no signs of infection. As he was completing his inspection, his assistant returned with a small bowl of food.
"Keep an eye on our guest, I need to go and study his condition” he instructed her as he strode out of the room and headed back to his study. “It's remarkable!".
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Jack was bewildered. After the few words he'd spoken earlier, the old man had simply walked up to him and started manhandling him. He was simply too weak to resist, and when his head had been in the man's grasp he had even been unable to open his mouth.
The man's grip was like a steel vice!
He gulped, relieved when the man moved on to look at the wound under his armpit. He was clearly not out to harm him, but his bedside manner could use a lot of work...