Chapter 1

How will the soul, freed from the flesh, perceive the world? Will the soul see and hear in the usual sense? And does that soul even exist?

Such questions have popped up in my mind from time to time, but I have never specifically sought an answer. However, man supposes and God disposes, as they say, so I got the answers to these questions quite unexpectedly and, as it is necessary according to the law of the genre, at the most inappropriate moment. The moment of success of my career, personal growth and prosperity. It is a wise phrase, but it is true - when life is going well, fate may well throw a trick up your sleeve and, in the worst case, you will die. And I did.

Death is scary not only because of the obscurity, but also because of the process itself. A stupid set of circumstances, a few deep cuts, and I was already dying absurdly, bleeding to death, and the sudden realization, the adrenaline and the rapid heartbeat only accelerated the process. Slowly the advancing darkness dissolves the resentment of the circumstances. When even thoughts disappeared into this darkness and there seemed to be nothing left around as something seemed to explode.

It is difficult, extremely difficult to describe in words. It was as if you had always been blind, deaf, unable to smell and even tactile sensations were out of reach. It could be called a sensory shock, and yet you were still blind and deaf in the usual sense. It was as if there was some awareness of the space around you, but that space was strange and incomprehensible. There was no top, no bottom, no other directions, and the space itself was far from being three-dimensional - something more, all-encompassing.

Fear froze the mind - in this space you lose yourself. Not so much that you forget yourself and become different, no. You feel, you feel with every fiber of your being, how some particles are chipping from you and flying away, mixing with the space around. You know that you have lost something, some memories, but you do not know what it is. It is as if you are looking at your body slowly crumbling with ashes, you know that it is crumbling, you know that you have just lost something, but only for a brief moment, becouse in next moment it seems normal. At the same time, you know it's wrong, and the vestiges of logic hint that sooner or later there won't be anything left.

I don't know how long I was here, but by some intangible moment, fear for myself had turned into certainty - something had to change. I was able to make a fist of my will, concentrated and began to try to hold on to the pieces of myself, not letting them disperse. It took some time, and by this point I had lost quite a lot of it. Probably a lot, it's hard to judge the severity of a loss if you don't know its value.

Once I was sure that the pieces were no longer flying away from me, I decided to try to recover what I had lost, even though I did not know what I had lost. I just tried at random to attract something to me and fix it in place. However, contrary to my expectations, the attracted particles either did not want to cling, or they clung, but immediately broke away again, also taking particles of me with them. This situation touched some strings of my soul and determined to deal with this bad world, disregarding my own safety, I started trying to absorb "something" from the surrounding space with renewed vigour.

There is no pain or fatigue here. It is hard for me to judge the success of my attempts, though with time the various attracted particles stopped flying away from me and held quite reliably. However, another question arose - how many are needed for integrity? And the integrity of whom? Seriously! Who is "I"? Are my particles attracted? Each particle carries a crumb of information - an association, a tiny memory, an opinion or idea, a thought, etc. They are all so different, and logic suggests that they probably contradict each other.

Some sense of irregularity prevented me from relating the associative rows of consciousness of a knight in iron armour who lived in a small fortress, a genetic engineer assigned to some "second fleet" of the Space Force, or some mongrel dog. There were countless such fragments and all different, incomplete scraps, but I collected them diligently.

"Who is 'me'?" - an obvious question, but the meaning and importance of the answer was somewhere far, far away, the main thing was to collect the pieces so as not to scatter exactly, to be the most complete. It seemed to me that even then, just appearing here, I was not whole.

One day something changed. A tiny part of my mind saws life. It was as if I were alive again, a little boy, lying in a cot with a wooden fence, I wish I knew what that construction was called. Sometimes there were people bustling around, doing things, looking at me with strange eyes. I could feel it all in bits and pieces, at the edge of my mind. Yes, on the edge of mind, but it was life. An orderly linear timeline and happening right now - I couldn't look any further, like with the shards. But then why is 'I' still here, in this inhospitable world that first tried to destroy, to dissolve me into myself? I am not yet assembled. Not all the shards. The assembled is not in order. Is that the reason? I need to collect...

***

There was a festive-looking atmosphere in the rather affluent cottage in Crawley, a town south of London. The Granger couple were celebrating the eleventh birthday of their second child, Hector. Their first child had been Hermione, and the following July a boy, Hector, had been born. And everything would have been fine if it weren't for his strange mental abnormalities.

From birth, Hector displayed an absurd minimum of any activity whatsoever. As an infant, he never cried. Never. Even soiled diapers or hungry, he would remain silent and in a kind of detached state, as if he wasn't even here at all. I had to spend a lot of time with him. Sometimes Hector would return to this mundane world with some activity and autonomy. But it was rare and short-lived. Emma and Robert found it very difficult.

Later on, when Hermione was learning to walk, babbling incoherently in her baby talk, Hector, who should have learned to crawl by now, remained completely aloof, still occasionally "coming back" and taking a slightly more active part in his development.

At the age of three the boy suddenly took off and walked. Without preparation, without anything. And the purpose of his walk was a change of disposition - from one corner of the nursery to another where there was more sunshine.

It was about the same with absolutely everything children normally learn. Hector would just start doing something, keeping a completely unconcerned face, staring off into space with vacant eyes. It frightened Emma and Robert. It frightened little Hermione. It frightened the babysitter who had to be hired, because parents had to work sometime.

In time, Hector gained a certain independence. Still disconnected from the world and the people around him, he was busy doing his own obscure things, contemplating, reflecting, or whatever. At least that's what everyone in the house thought when he was stuck in a wall for a couple of hours. Some might have thought, "Didn't they see a doctor?". They did, very often. Except no one could tell anything. But an encephalogram along with other diagnostic procedures showed extremely high simultaneous activity in all parts of the brain. There were speculations, theories and so on, but no conclusions could be drawn.

For instance, Hector could make a photographic quality drawing in a couple of minutes if he was in the mood and had a pencil and paper at hand. But a drawing of what? That was another question. Some inexpressible, inconceivable objects and shapes in which one could trace a logic that was completely beyond comprehension. It was in everything. Once Hector had scribbled three notebooks with tiny formulas, but even his acquaintance, a mathematics professor, broke his brain trying to comprehend what he had written and was hospitalized for a month.

Hector, on the other hand, was quite independent, unlike children with autism and other disabilities. Yes, he could not perform complex activities because he withdrew quickly into himself, but he performed momentary needs and operations as if he acted on the same reflexes according to a long-established pattern. And, as always, he was looking somewhere in the distance, making everyone very much worried about himself. Worried, yes, but to the unaccustomed person, it is a scary picture.

Hermione, like her parents, had also struggled with Hector. From the age of seven, when she finally realized that Hector would die without help, she began to actively help her parents with everything, so that they could pay more attention to her brother - she didn't want to do it herself. She helped out around the house, did her own homework, looking for information and ways to solve her childish but important problems. Deep down inside, she disliked Hector, even a little - he was the source of a phenomenal amount of problems and worries! Also, his parents hardly spend any time with the girl because of this. Even if it wasn't really the case, children saw things in a very different light.

Hermione also had a big secret. She could do incredible things, albeit mostly by accident, uncontrollably. The girl hid her gift for telekinesis and the like from her parents, because they had enough trouble as it was.

Now, on the Fourth of July, 191, no one was expecting anything out of the ordinary. Another modest holiday, quiet and peaceful. Hector will eat cake with everyone else and get presents in the form of painting sets, because he simply has no time for anything more complicated than that from his "flashes of awareness". Anyway, he will get the presents and go back to his room, and the rest of the family will take a breath and congratulate each other on another hard year. Hermione would be sure to talk about her progress at school and modestly shy away when asked about friends - no friends, no time for them.

It went like this and Hermione stared modestly at her knees sitting at the table - the very question was voiced. But there was the sudden and not at all musical sound of the doorbell.

"I'll get it," Robert, a medium-sized, fair-haired man, the father of the family, stood up from the table and headed for the door.

Emma, a short-cropped beautiful brunette, set aside her cup of tea, listening to the conversation at the door. Hermione did the same. The girl had her mother's face, but her hair was a mixture of both parents, a curly, willful and unruly mop of different shades of blond, from dark to very blond.

A couple of minutes later, Robert was back in the drawing room to the set table, followed by a tall statuesque lady in an emerald closed floor-length gown and a black robe. Her age was uncertain, but she was not young - the slight sparse wrinkles and gray hair gave her away as a lady much older than Emma, though if you didn't look closely you wouldn't give her more than forty.

The lady introduced herself as Professor of Transfiguration and Deputy Headmaster of Hogwarts, Minerva McGonagall. With a deft flick of her wand she convinced those present of the existence of magic, which pleased Hermione and surprised her parents. Anyway, she came to hand over two invitations to study at Hogwarts. Hermione and Hector.

"Professor," Robert's face literally darkened, "there may be some problems with Hector."

"What is it, then?" The professor wondered, sitting at the table with everyone else and sipping the offered tea, "Where is the young man, by the way?"

"He's in his room," Emma answered.

Everyone got up from the table and went to the first floor. They stopped just inside the door and Emma spoke again:

"Are you familiar with something called autism?"

"I have an understanding," McGonagall nodded, turning her stern gaze to Emma and Robert.

"A very similar situation, but not it," Robert nodded, and Emma opened the door and they all stepped inside.

A simple room with light colours. The plain bed is as neatly made up as ever. Chalk and plastic boards on the walls were scrawled with completely incomprehensible symbols, signs and diagrams, rarely interspersed with familiar numbers. From the far corner to the window stretched a wardrobe, clearly for clothes, and next to it was a low table, at which to sit on the floor - Hector only sits on chairs when necessary, for example, in the kitchen. Leaning with his back to the cupboard, a black-haired young man sat on the floor, his blank blue eyes directed elsewhere. McGonagall was even slightly surprised at how cute the child's face was. True, the face showed no emotion or trace of any kind typical of a mentally disturbed person - just a mask with no emotion. And that caused subconscious anxiety and fear.

"Let me be clear," the professor spoke after a moment's pause, "Does Hector sometimes become more adequate?"

"Rarely and not noticeably."

"Is he like that from birth or after some incident?"

"Since birth. We've had every imaginable and unimaginable test, visited various specialists, but the only thing we've been able to figure out is abnormally high brain activity."

McGonagall pursed her lips and adjusted her glasses with her finger.

"I would suggest calling in a healer from Mungo's."

Seeing the incomprehensible looks from the adults and the girl, McGonagall explained:

"St Mungo's is a magical healing institution. Perhaps our healers can help or at least determine a course of treatment."

Of those present, only Robert noticed the shadow of sadness on the Professor's face. The professor had clearly experienced something similar, but it was not worth getting involved in.

After obtaining permission to call a medic, and realising that the Grangers themselves could not deal with the matter, McGonagall conjured up a ghostly cat, whispered something to it and it galloped away, vanishing into thin air. As the professor said this, she summoned a healer she knew, and a couple of minutes later the doorbell rang. On the doorstep stood a not young and slightly overweight man with a slight graying in his dark short hair. He was dressed in a plain dark robe and introduced himself as Healer Smethwyck.

For about half an hour, the healer hovered around the still motionless Hector, waving his wand, mouthing something, and his face clearly showed curiosity and enthusiasm. Robert clenched his fists indignantly, but Emma stroked his shoulder.

"Now you know how the parents of that boy felt, the one you were spinning around during the examination and kept saying, "What an interesting case!""

After a few minutes, healer Smethwyck put his wand away and walked over to the adults watching.

"What did you find out?" Professor asked.

"Strange and unusual, but not critical," the healer replied with a slight smile, "The boy has become more adequate over the years, hasn't he? I see that he has. And no oddities or magical manifestations or anything like that had been noticed in him?

"Neither had Hermione."

Of course, Hermione's mother couldn't help but notice some oddities that could so easily be attributed to superpowers. That's why McGonagall's appearance wasn't taken so keenly. But Emma, like Robert, was now wondering if and how their little girl would get out of it.

Smethwick looked at an embarrassed Hermione blushing and smirked.

"Is there something we don't know?" Emma asked with a smile, only that smile hinted at the obligatory educational conversation.

"Not that you don't know..."

"Not about that," the healer interrupted the moment and looked again at the boy's parents, "Physically he's perfectly healthy, even if he's a little thin, but I think it's because he doesn't do much exercise. The problem is that his mind and magic are fully occupied with a much more important task. It's like he's restoring the integrity of his soul."

"Soul integrity?" McGonagall literally took the question off the tongue of Hector's parents.

"Yes. You know, Minerva, we've been watching the Longbottoms for ten years now and trying to cure them. We've learned a lot, we've come a long way, but it's a pity it's no use so far. One of my colleagues' theories was that such severe dementia was caused by damage and decay of the soul, and the resources of the body and magic, even with external support, were simply not enough to stop the process and recover. In their case, the theory didn't hold up, but here it does."

"Wait, but is there a soul? Can it be destroyed?" Hermione asked, catching a pause in the conversation. Catching her parents' gaze, she blushed a little and lowered her head, "I'm sorry..."

"It's all right, it's all right. Good question. The properties of the soul are still debated to this day, and there are many theories. Some think it's like some kind of endless pudding-cut as much as you want. Others think it's like an onion - many layers, and deep inside an indivisible core. There are many theories, but the problem is that each has evidence, but some are mutually exclusive, hence the inability to come to a consensus. But in general, yes, the soul exists, it can be divided... The one thing that is common to all the theories is the connection of soul, body and mind, the mental triad. You pull one, the other two change. In Hector's case, all the resources of this triad are devoted to restoring the soul. However, there is one thing he is sorely lacking."

A dramatic pause, during which everyone eagerly awaited the continuation.

"Hector lacks magic. Magic, as energy, is the product of the interaction of the mental triad. Without one thing, there is no magic. Given the boy's state of mind, his magic is weak."

"It was enough to get him on the Hogwarts enrollment list. No outliers."

"So, the boy's mind is very strong, as is his body, which partially compensates for the damage to his soul. The situation could be compared to building a castle out of sand. Hands are there, desire is there, sand is there. But you cannot build a castle out of dry and quicksand - you need water. That is where magic plays the role of water. He does not have enough of it, that is why the process takes so long."

"How is it possible?" Robert rubbed the bridge of his nose. Emma had long been brooding against the wall, and Hermione listened attentively, memorizing new and unprecedented knowledge.

"Are you familiar with the phenomenon of stillbirth?"

After receiving confirming nods, Smethwick continued:

"Besides abnormalities in the development of the fetus, in a very rare case the soul can be the cause. It can be rejected by the body, can decompose and leave it, there are many variants, though the cases are isolated in the history of many centuries. It is so coincidental that something similar happened to Hector, but something stopped the decay and now he is recovering.

"So, what do we do?"

"Put the boy in a more saturated magical background, give him a course of strengthening and stimulating potions. But even in the current situation, Hector will manage on his own by the age of fifteen, maybe a little later. He is past the critical stage. With our help, he could recover within a year. Give or take."

"And where do you get that magical background?" Emma asked, breaking away from the wall.

"Minerva," Smethwick looked at the professor, "Talk to Albus."

"Do you want to place the boy in the hospital wing of Hogwarts?"

"Yes. At Mungo's we'd have to create a backdrop artificially, and that costs a lot of money. And Poppy will provide even better care than ours. She's got one or two patients, we've got an entire hospital. The potions are simple, anyone can make them, and the ingredients cost a few sickles."

That was the end of it. Professor McGonagall spent about half an hour telling the parents of two young wizards the various nuances of life in a magical world, talking about the peculiarities of learning at Hogwarts, about the subjects, among which were also general studies. Only after the professor had answered the questions that parents of muggle-born wizards had been asking for years, did she escort Hermione to the school for shopping. She had already gone to the hospital, and was discussing his findings with his colleagues so that he could be two hundred percent certain of his diagnosis and treatment, while out of the blue Hector was scratching out another rambling pile of symbols and multi-dimensional structures on a couple of sheets of paper.

The next day, in the evening, a tall, gray-bearded old man wearing a purple robe with many runes and symbols made a brief visit to the Granger's house. He introduced himself as Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts. The purpose of his visit was simple - to transport Hector to the castle itself. Normally, Hogwarts rules did not allow any non-staff to remain in the castle over the summer holidays, but cases of medical assistance were always the exception.

Hector's transport was fairly straightforward. The adults sensibly decided that the traditional method by train, fireside or other methods could be detrimental and were rather problematic. So Albus Dumbledore decided to use his phoenix, Fawkes. He is able to apparate with people so gently that it has no effect on the wizard and causes no discomfort. It is completely safe and can be taken directly to Hector's hospital wing. Some personal items such as clothes, scrapbooks, notebooks and a movable writing board will be delivered separately.