A white, sterile ceiling stared back at Liam as he opened his eyes, so unlike the deep maroon one he'd fallen asleep under. His head pounded as if it had taken a hammer blow, and even blinking felt like scraping sandpaper across his dry, burning eyes. But the worst was the sharp, searing ache in his gut. It wasn't crippling, but a pain in that spot was not a sign of good health.
"Finally awake, are we?" A voice, dry and unimpressed, broke through his fog. He turned his head to see a middle-aged woman standing at the edge of the room, arms crossed and assessing him with a look that seemed more irritated than concerned.
"So, uh… what am I doing here?"
She raised an eyebrow. "You do not remember?"
"No. Last thing I remember is… my own bed."
"Mr. McLaggan?"
Liam paused when the woman addressed him as McLaggen. He did not pause out of recognition, understanding or confusion.
He paused because her words had unleashed something with his mind. An eruption occurred within his mind, like glass shattering, and he felt something deep within himself… break.
And then the voices came, a flood of thoughts that weren't his, roaring through him in blazing images and words. The thoughts of a thing that scared Liam.
"Last Hope."
"Last Tool."
"Victory."
"Defeat."
"Evil."
The voices Liam heard were many but he knew in his heart that it belonged to a single thing. Something great. Something vast.
"Wizard."
"Wise."
"Ignorant."
"Honourable."
"Frost."
"Fire."
"Corrupted."
The voices spoke as many and one, all at once.
"Necessary."
"Liam."
"Thing."
"Cormac."
"Pawn."
"King."
"War."
"Peace."
"Choice."
Liam felt tired. Cormac felt drained. Liam died. Cormac died. A thing was BORN. The threads of FATE burned. Thousands of miles away, across the world, ancient monsters smiled as they felt a shift in the order of things that would always be.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-**-*-*-*-*
He woke up again. In the same room that he had woken up in before. The pain deeper, greater than before. His eyes burned, his gut twisted from pain and his head felt like someone had axed him.
And yet despite the pain he felt, he also felt better than ever. Something had changed from before.
It felt new. It felt right. And above all, it felt nostalgic. Liam had become Cormac. Cormac had become Liam. And yet what had emerged by this amalgam was something new. Someone new.
A being that had the knowledge of what was to come into the future and a being who was in the position to alter that future had been merged and what had emerged was a being of actions that would change the future.
"Mr. McLaggen?" He recognized the voice of the woman from before. But this time, his mind made more connections than before. Cormac realized that he was hearing the voice of Madam Pomfrey. The rude, harpy of a matron that would always berate him for coming to the infirmary. Even now, Cormac sneered internally, he could feel the contempt in her voice. Like he, a scion of the McLaggen family, was an annoying pest distracting her from doing some important work.
'Not gonna lie, some of the blame lies with myself,' Cormac paused as the thought rose unbidden within his mind. A chain of thoughts and memories rushed within his mind. Of how he had been using the infirmary for the past few years he had been at Hogwarts. He had used the wing as a way to skip classes or for treatment after he almost got himself seriously harmed due to some foolish dare he had decided to take on as a challenge. He had been a prat, who had taken the healing offered by the matron for granted.
'He had been a child. An arrogant, ignorant child who was a danger to himself.'
Cormac stamped down the indignation he felt and said, "Yes, Madam Pomfrey?"
God his throat hurt from speaking.
"Eating Doxy eggs? Did you ever stop to think what kind of havoc the poisonous toxin of the eggs would wreck within you?"
'I did not. I was too much of a bragging idiot to realize the damage it was going to do.'
"Fortunately for you, your housemates realized the kind of trouble you had dragged your feet into before you had the chance of being the first to die to Doxies. I have treated the poison but due to the damage being of the darker nature, it is resisting healing. You will have to weather the pain for the next few days before your body deals with miasma on its own."
Cormac gave her a nod of understanding. The woman huffed before she said, "You can leave if you want. I will however, recommend like always that you do not engage in any of your foolhardy endeavours anymore."
She walked away leaving him alone. With his thoughts finally flashing back to the vague horror that he had felt before he had woken up. The voice, that had been many and one. The screaming, non-speech that had spoken to his ego without words. The feelings of the voice had been clear. He had gotten the gist of it clearly.
He was abhorred and favoured by it in equal measure. Not as a person though, but as a tool.
That is what Liam and Cormac had understood from the torturous soul rending screams of the many-voices-that-were-one, before the two had died and he was born. He had their memories, thoughts, experiences, all of what made them people.
He was not the same. He valued things differently than the two. Liam liked his solitude, Cormac courted attention at all times. He, the amalgam, believed he would prefer the company of a few good friends than either.
Cormac and Liam were prideful, and he was more prideful than the two combined.
Cormac's pride was an empty, vain thing while Liam's pride was a cold, hateful thing. His pride was even greater than theirs. Cormac took pride in his looks, Liam in his wisdom and intelligence. The amalgam took pride in his potential, and the tools he had available to achieve his ambitions whatever the form they might take.
His potential. The thing that made him almost laugh out loud. Magic, Knowledge and Inspiration, of all things were the rewards that death had granted him. He could not bring himself to care for the eldritch abomination that had pulled him into an alternate, supposedly fictional reality. Nor its designs for him when he had been reborn in a world that he found immensely intriguing. Nothing mattered. Not because it wasn't important but because he was already making plans to fit right into this world.
He might not be able to escape the abomination but he was sure that it had made a mistake when it had mixed the souls of two bastards like Cormac and Liam. One with the ability to wield magic and the other with the ideas, knowledge and intelligence to merge them.
He was the amalgam of Cormac McLaggen, the Wizard and Liam, the Law Student. He did not need rest, he needed answers.
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/Author Notes/
Cormac McLaggen is an interesting character and I just wanted to sandbox what I could do with him. Hope you all like my work. Drop some of these powerstones if you like it.
Become a patron at p**tr**n.com/PaxOctavian and get early access to my drafts.