I had flashes of brief moments of lucid clarity. The sound of yelling, a loud gasp of surprise, many voices all speaking simultaneously, a flash of light, frenzied motion all around me, a tearing sound, horrible pain, my head being pushed and pulled, numbness over my body, the feeling of floating and drifting, a loud commanding yell, and finally peaceful silent oblivion.
I slowly and gradually became aware of a steady beeping sound, similar to that of a heart monitor. I felt distant, separated from reality almost as if my conscious mind was floating on a cloud but my body was still on the ground. My ability to reason was distorted, like I had just woken up from a deep slumber.
I tried to yawn but my jaw wouldn't move, 'That's odd . . . oh well.' My sense of equilibrium told me I was lying flat on my back and my sense of touch told me I was lying down on a somewhat cushy flat surface. I tried to raise my arms to rub my eyes. My hands only rose about an inch before they were halted by a metallic sound which accompanied pressure against my wrists. I tried to raise them several more times before I came to a conclusion, 'I . . . must be . . . in some kind . . . of restraints . . . RESTRAINTS!'
The realization that I was immobilized snapped me awake. I tried to open my eyes and sit up at the same time. I could do neither. I couldn't sit up, I couldn't even move my head. I couldn't open my eyes either, it was like they were glued shut.
My panic was almost instantaneous. I could not even begin to try to hold it at bay. The incessant beeping sped up dramatically as I thrashed wildly, within the confines of my restricted movement. I strained hard against my restraints as a feral scream tried to force its way free of my throat. I coughed and almost choked, having forgotten in my panicked state that I couldn't even open my mouth. The attempt made the right side of my mouth come alive with red hot agony. The feeling of helplessness combined with the pain tore into my psyche overwhelmingly.
My eyes, still closed, leaked impotent tears of frustration. I could hear myself whimpering pitifully. The pain in my jaw refused to abate and there was nothing I could do about it. I had never felt completely helpless before. It was absolutely terrifying.
I lost any concept of time as I lay there in agony. It could have been minutes, hours, or days. I didn't know and I didn't care. My mind was completely occupied with pain, frustration, and anger.
At some point, long after I had awoken, I heard a door open nearby. I tried calling to whoever was there, but my cries were reduced to frantic, muffled groans as the pain in my jaw became white hot, mind numbing agony. I heard a voice gasp, then the door shut loudly.
My anger and frustration boiled over once more. I began thrashing against my restraints a second time, determined to get free. I felt hard cuffs bite into my wrists and ankles but I didn't care, nor did I stop. If anything the pain from my wrists and ankles spurred me onward. I thrashed my head, pure rage filling my mind. The restraint holding my head in place began to loosen as the entire right side of my head lit up with fiery agony. That tiny spark of understanding led me to new heights of vigor. I pulled against my restraints harder than ever, still moving my head around trying to get free.
My cranial restraint slipped off the top of my head and I put everything I had into pulling against the hard, solid objects keeping my hands immobilized. I could feel my skin tearing, adding to my pain. I could feel a warm slickness dripping down my ankles, wrists, head, and neck. I didn't care. I would die before I let myself be put at anyone's mercy.
I heard the nearby door slam open as a cacophony of voices began chattering loudly. I could hear steps all around me and my panic reached a figurative crescendo. My movements probably couldn't be called anything but frantic. I pulled and strained with all my might. I could feel the skin on my wrists starting to glove as the muscles underneath were exposed to the air but I only thrashed on.
I felt a hard object plant itself on my forehead and firmly push me back down. Struggling against it was futile, the strength I was pushing against was unmovable. The shouting intensified and somehow, over the flaring pain from the rest of my body, I felt a tiny prick in my left thigh. I began to feel drowsy and I hated every second of it. My frustration and rage broke down and reformed into begrudging acceptance as my mind became foggy.
* * *
I slowly came back to my senses. I felt disjointed. I could feel my whole body but I couldn't move anything.
I felt movement and heard a cacophony of voices all around me. I couldn't understand what a single voice was saying. My head felt elevated and I could feel something rotating a circuit around it. I felt pressure ease off my head as it was set down. Suddenly my right eye lid was pulled open.
I could see a bright light but no indication of what had opened it. The bright light shined directly into my eye. It HURT. The light moved back and forth but I couldn't make my eye follow it. The same procedure was performed with my left eye and concluded in the same manner. I could see a small flashlight. It had a strange glowing aura around it but I couldn't see who was holding it.
My eye lids were released and they snapped closed of their own accord. I felt movement around my jaw, but I still couldn't move. I felt movement by my right foot. I finally identified the motion. My foot was being unwrapped.
My foot was lifted and touched around the instep, where I had gashed it open but there was no pain. My foot descended back to where it had been.
The talking quieted down and I could feel someone breathing close to my ear,
"Danyel Puring?" the voice sounded like Insabre, "Danyel Puring?"
I wanted to respond, I really did. The problem was that I couldn't move anything. I tried mumbling, I tried making any sound that would communicate that I was awake. I accomplished nothing.
"Danyel Puring?" I was almost certain it was Insabre.
I felt my left arm nudged by what felt like a cold, wet nose. My arm flopped around lifelessly by my side.
"Danyel Puring?!" Insabre was beginning to sound concerned.
I wanted to do something, anything to let her know I had heard her, but my body just wouldn't respond. A cold, wet nose nudged my head back and forth but I could do nothing. It was maddening.
"Danyel Puring!" Insabre was sounding more and more concerned each time she spoke.
I heard a shifting of movement and felt two, I assumed, hooves press against the left side of my chest. The hooves shook me back and forth vigorously.
"Danyel Puring!" She sounded almost frantic by that point.
It hurt to hear. I wanted to tell her I was here. I wanted so badly so say something. She had been nice to me, as far as I could remember, and I didn't want to upset her.
In the end, all I could do was lie there, like a corpse as I listened to what sounded like soft weeping next to me. It broke my heart. I was powerless to respond, I was powerless to make her feel better, I was just plain powerless.
I wanted to ask if the Unicorn filly was alright. I wanted to ask what hit me in the head. I wanted to ask about my friends. I had so many questions that needed answering but I could do nothing. Nothing except lie there.
Eventually they all left. I had been trying to force my body to respond in vain. I was emotionally spent. I had listened to Insabre try to wake me only to break down in tears that I was powerless to stop. I had cried on the inside. I hadn't wanted to hurt her, I hadn't wanted to hurt anyone but in the end I had done just that. I had hurt a kind kavim who had only tried to help. I felt guilty as hell. Eventually I drifted off to sleep.
* * *
I slowly came around to wakefulness again. Out of habit, I reached up to rub my eyes. My arm felt sluggish like it had fallen asleep but my hand rubbed my eyes. It took me a moment to realize what I had done.
I snapped awake,opened my eyes, and instantly regretted it, 'Fuck! That's bright!' I reflexively brought my hands up to protect my vision. I closed my eyes quickly and let them rest for a few minutes before trying a second time.
I cracked them open again and had to squint. It was still very bright to me. I used my weighty, sluggish arms to shield my eyes and tried turning my head. It hurt my neck to move, 'I'm probably just stiff after my panic attack last time. I did strain pretty hard. Way to show gratitude Dan.'
I cast my squinted eyes to my right and saw a large window not five feet from where I lay. The window had bright sunlight beaming through it at an angle. The wall supporting the window was pure white and plain. It bore the weight of no decorations, no patterns, and no pictures. It was boring.
I grunted in pain as I forced my neck to rotate 180° to the left. I could make out a small table set up against the surface on which I was lying. The small table looked to be made of some sort of light colored wood, 'Pine perhaps.' I thought. Sitting on the surface of the table was a small lamp with a button set into its base. It took me a moment to notice something odd about the lamp, 'It doesn't have a cord.'
Shifting my eyes beyond the table and lamp, I saw there was another plain, white wall about fifteen feet away. It was just as boring as the first wall I saw, sans the window.
I moved my head slowly from side to side, trying to loosen up the tight tendons and muscles. It ached fiercely at first but the pain eased up after ten or so rotations. Taking note of the stiffness in my neck and the sluggish movement of my arms, I decided to close my eyes and stretch out every muscle and tendon I could.
I don't know how long it took, but by god everything hurt to move. My shoulders and upper arms were tight. My elbows, wrists and fingers felt like I was moving through thick honey. I flexed muscles and bent joints through gritted teeth, but eventually I had loosened up my arms and hands.
Next came my legs. I decided to start with my toes, wiggling and flexing them was even difficult. Once they became easier to move, I went to my ankles. Dear god they hurt. I gritted my teeth again and kept moving them. I moved them in circles, rotating them as much as possible. Sparks danced along my legs as I lifted my right leg and flexed my knee. I could hear it pop and a jolt of pain shot up and down my leg. The left was a mirror image of the right and brought just as much discomfort.
I opened my eyes again and could see much more clearly than before. I lifted my eyes and looked 'up'. The wall behind me was only a few inches from my head, 'Surprise, surprise. It's white too. Go figure.' I thought sarcastically.
I looked toward the 'foot' of my bed, I was sure it was a bed by that point. I finally saw, for the first time, the white sheet that covered my body from my chest down. The wall beyond my feet, that met my eyes was white, 'Big surprise there.' There were two very important differences with the wall though, it had two wide, wooden doors set into it.
'This is a hospital room if ever I've seen one. One of those doors is almost guaranteed to be a bathroom and the other one should lead out into a hallway.' Each door's handle was a lever but the door on the left had its handle on the right, by contrast, the door on the right had its handle on the left. They both opened away from each other.
I couldn't see the bottoms of the doors so I also couldn't see if there was light coming from underneath one or both. I laid my head back to rest my neck and examined the ceiling. I could see lights in the ceiling, but they didn't look like fluorescent bulbs like normal hospitals use. They were something different but I had no idea what. The ceiling itself was puzzling as well. It looked to be one solid piece. I could see no lines or tiles, honestly it looked like white stone.
It was time to sit up, 'This is going to hurt.' I tensed the muscles in my stomach and tried to sit up. The key word was 'try'. I barely lifted my head before the combined shooting pain in my back and stomach made me flop back in exasperation, 'Why am I so weak?' I wondered. An itch made itself known on the right side of my jaw so I reached my right hand up to scratch it.
The hand and arm that came into view made my breath catch in my throat. I hadn't noticed before because I was still groggy, but my hand, hell my whole arm was bordering on skeletal, it was so thin.
I examined my hand with growing concern, 'What happened to me?' a second thought overpowered the first, 'How long was I asleep?' I lowered my hand to my side quickly and grasped for anything to hold onto. I gripped a cool, wooden bar with my right hand and matched the feat using my left. I tensed my stomach muscles and pulled with my arms, trying to sit up.
I struggled for several seconds but succeeded eventually. The bed I was lying on looked to be almost exactly six feet long. It was covered with a white sheet, upon which I was lying. The bed itself had two dark colored hand rails which rose a good four inches from the level of the rest of the bed. I looked down at my chest in shocked disbelief.
My ribs protruded from my chest garishly. I pulled the white sheet from the rest of my body and gasped in horror. I could see the outline of my pelvic bone clearly through the filmy skin of my stomach and groin. My legs looked like knobby toothpicks, my feet were rail thin and my toes were long with swollen looking joints. Every bone was clearly visible through my skin. I was reminded of some of the pictures of the emaciated bodies of murdered Jews that a friend's grandfather had brought back from World War II.
I was so thin I figured I must have been on death's doorstep or close to it. I looked at the cracks at the bottom of each door. The left one shone light from underneath, but the right one was dark, 'The right door must be the bathroom! Bathrooms have mirrors! I have to see myself!'
I inched my butt across the bed, wincing as I utilized joints and muscles that had lain dormant and unused for, who knew how long. My legs dangled over the end of the bed and I winced at the mere thought of trying to walk on them, 'I'm way too weak to even try that. I'll have to use the edge of the bed for support.'
I shifted my legs to the right and very gradually lowered my feet to the cold floor. The floor was quite close to my surprise, 'Of course it is. It's meant for Kavim.' I slowly shifted my weight onto my stick-like legs and pushed my hands into the bed, trying to rise to my feet.
My legs shook and wobbled but to my surprise they held my weight, such as it was. I took one unsteady step toward the rightmost door and nearly toppled over as my knees practically gave out. I stumbled forward several steps and landed, chest first, against what I presumed to be the bathroom door.
I wedged my hands between my body and the door and slowly pushed myself off and back to a standing position. Taking a single step back on unsure legs, I grasped the door handle with my left hand and pushed downward while pulling it toward me. The door swung open smoothly and silently. I looked inside and confirmed it was indeed a bathroom of some sort. I let go of the door and reached out my left hand, feeling for a light switch. Finding one, I flipped it.
To the right, about six feet back into the room was the strangest damn commode I'd ever seen. The whole affair looked almost exactly like a 'u' that had been turned 90° to the right, with the bottom of the letter sticking into the wall and the top protruding from it. The bottom of it was only about one foot from the floor while the top rose a good two feet above that. The entire affair looked to be made of waxed stone and had water running down from the top to the bottom close to where it met the wall. Directly across from it was a roll of, 'Toilet paper?' I pondered, 'How would a Kavim even reach their . . . you know what? I don't want to know.'
I stepped into the bathroom and saw a mirror right above a small sink that was low to the ground on the left wall. I held tightly, my left hand on the wall while my right gripped the lip of the sink as I lowered myself down.
Long did I gaze at the man I saw reflected in the mirror,
"That's not me. It can't be me." I whispered in disbelief, "What the hell happened?"
The face that stared back at me was gaunt and thin. It had sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. A rough, scruffy beard hung in short, uneven tangles from my face while a full mustache sat on my upper lip like some sort of flat, fuzzy caterpillar. The bones on the right side of my face, from my temple to the bottom of my jaw were misshapen and lumpy. Fortunately the ridge of my right eye seemed to have healed correctly and my jaw worked without any pain. Those facts did nothing to ease my shock or disbelief.
I looked at myself bordering on incomprehension,
"My face." the man in the reflection moved his mouth in sync with my voice, "It isn't me."
I felt tears welling in my eyes as I looked at the hideous, naked, skeletal monstrosity of a man in the mirror.