Chapter 1- The boy without memories

When Sage forced his eyelids apart this morning, his vision was greeted by a narrow beam of sunlight that managed to make its way though the clouds and into his room. It was weird that this one line of photons was breaking away from the nuclear fusion reactor that was sun and travelled millions of kilometres, just to end up as a narrow beacon of the morning in his room. Before he could capture it with his eyes properly though and perhaps even marvel about the beauty of this one streak of light, it was cut off by dense clouds, that always hovered about this hot, cramped and alien city. In fact, in a weird and unnerving way, the entire room was alien to him. The last thing he remembered was going to sleep in this room last night and the night before as well. But beyond that, his confusion with his own life and memories grew ever stronger.

He moved his body up to sit at the edge of the bed and gaze at the mirror in front of him. Icy blue eyes stared back at him, with a pale, almost bloodless looking skin and a nose that was placed in an almost artificially symmetrical way in the face. Sage did not recognize the face looking back at him, yet it was looking right back at him and mirroring his movements as his own on the reflecting surface. He couldn't bear the staring contest with himself for long and stood up, walking to the window to let some fresh wind into his tiny chamber. The breezy atmosphere on the other side of the glass wasn't much fresher then the air inside though, but it was thankfully cooler due to the morning temperatures and the slight dome of smog over the city below. The room he was in was on one of the highest floors of a larger apartment complex, which meant it was claustrophobically small, but rewarded him with a pretty good view over the ugly concrete behemoth that was Maranurr City. Unfortunately this would also mean that all the heat that gathered inside the walls of the building during the day would eventually rise upwards and end up in his chamber.

It had been two days since Sage had been rescued by the some of the other tenants of this building. Rescued from being a lost and confused man, wandering the streets of Maranurr City clueless of who he was, why he was here and what he was doing.

Yes, that’s right... Amnesia.

It was such a simple word and such an easy concept to grasp, yet so devastating when experienced. Like there was a massive black hole in his mind that only sent radiation beams of knowledge out of which Sage knew he had it, but not how he had originally acquired it.

Sage had completely lost all his memories of his past life until now and not only that, but he felt like he did not even have a proper perception of himself as a person.

Him? A Human man in what appears to be his late twenties at a guess?

That didn't seem right to him, but he could not tell why.

Like someone had grabbed his consciousness and stuffed it into a flesh-puppet that he could not recognize.

The possessions that were found in his pockets, consisted of just than a few hundred Maranurrian Dollars, twenty American Dollars and a passport which stated he was a Maranurrian Citizen. These did not seem correct to him either though or trigged any of Sage’s lost memories. Quite the opposite even, it seemed outright foreign to him, like a completely new concept. In addition to that Sage had a tough time to even read all of the English street signs and naturally preferred the elvish tongues, both the traditional and the simplified, modern versions. Such fluency was remarkably rare for a Human as elvish language was hard to speak without the subpharyngal cave that aided the Elves when speaking. And that he didn't speak the default tongues of his own species put him in an even more strange position, yet it was probably the main reason why the residents of this apartment complex had even agreed to aid him when they found him barely conscious in a backyard-alley of this city district; as a human who spoke their native tongue he was more likely , an ally then an enemy to the Elfish cause. And Elves did not turn down allies, at least so long as it suited them.

Sage felt his own hand slapping himself, when he felt these thoughts beginning to overwhelm again. The Shaman of the clan that had made this building it's home had told Sage that the amnesia would most likely cure itself after a few days, but so far he had been incorrect. Nevertheless Sage has little option but to trust these words and hope his memory-loss was indeed just a temporary thing. Maybe he had drunken too hard or had a fight that he didn't remember anymore. He knew though theat the shaman had no formal medical education and therefore trusting his expertise was a gamble. A visit at a real, professional doctor would have been a thing that he'd like to schedule, but he was told that visits at the doctor were awfully expensive and usually not worth the expense. All that he would do would be scribbling a set of medication on a piece of paper that would cost Sage a grand and demand another grand for making the prescription. At least that's what the shaman said.

Sage was torn from his own thoughts by the creaking noise of a window opening below him. At first he gave it not more then a quick glance down, but then it caught his attention more as a girl with short white hair leaned through the frame and attached a green-white flag to the sill. Weirdly enough, this piece of cloth seemed familiar to him. After staring at it for a couple of moments he identified it as the banner of the royal family of Balmor. At least that was what he believed at first, but after getting a good view on the symbols imprinted on it, he realized it was actually the flag of the Elfish nation of Balmor. The royal version had the green-white-green striping with the tree of life in the centre of the white stripe, while the national version of the flag additionally had a red star, surrounded by a black gear in it's centre.

Sage’s curiosity had been awoken, as this flag was not something you could just show off freely inside of Maranurr. It was a full-blown criminal act that could have some serious repercussions for the girl below him. In addition to the flag, a song started playing now, a song which Sage quickly recognized as the hymn of Balmor. This felt incredibly familiar to him, as well although he still could not properly pin down why. A gaping hole in his brain that prevented him from accessing the context in which he knew this song. The girl leaned out of the window again, watching the ugly skyline of the city that was across the river in the distance and quietly singing along with the tune.

Sage could not resist his curiosity any longer and in addition to that grew worried that the girl might get harmed because of the display of the flag.

“Hey... Girl!” He yelled out the window, loud enough for his voice to not be carried away by the wind. “What you are doing there, is actually a pretty bad crime.”

Immediately after this exclamation Sage regretted his choice of words as the girl twisted her neck until she could look at him from below. Her eyes were brown and curious, but also angry. Even a bit of fear could be seen in her face as she examined him in the orange-red sun of this summer morning, as if she was trying to judge whether it was dangerous that he saw her flying this banned flag. Her hair was cut untidily, so she had to brush it out of her eyes before she could properly glare at him in open hostility.

“What'cha gonna do, Gakhro?”, she called back up at him in Elfish words, as her hair was falling down the sides of her head, revealing long, pointy ears and prominent cheekbones. “Snitch me to the police?”

Sage wanted to respond with an apology, but the white-haired girl had already pulled her head back through the frame and closed the window, leaving this illegal flag slowly to gently wave at the sun in the morning breeze. At least there was no longer an anthem of a hostile nation blasting across the narrow street-canyons below them.

“Great...” Sage thought sarcastically, as he pulled his head back. “Wherever I go, I make friends.”

As if his body was searching for an excuse to change the subject of his thoughts, his belly started to growl in this very second and he realized how hungry he was. His eyes turned to the clock and he realized with slight surprise that it was still six o’clock in the morning. This meant it would be a whole two hours before the common breakfast of this clan-community started. A sigh escaped his throat.

The elves were treating him well, but they were just not offering the right kind of food. An Elf with just fifty kilos of weight might be able survive the entire day on a diet of sugary fruits and seeds, but that didn’t mean a ninety- kilogramme human such as himself could endure the same diet. No matter how much Sage ate of the Elven dishes, they always left a feeling of dissatisfaction in his stomach. It felt like eating an entire bag of chips for lunch. At the end, one was so full that he felt like throwing up, but the appetite still was not quenched. He knew that he needed protein and probably some essential vitamins if he wanted to avoid malnutrition or at the very least a constant feeling of hangryness..

“Screw it...” Sage thought and pulled a blue robe over his shoulders. The clothes which the Elves had given him looked admittedly somewhat weird on his body, as they were usually made for people smaller and slimmer then him yet they still managed to look too widely cut. Sage wondered if these kind-of ceremonial seeming clothes had been given to him because they were the only things he could even remotely wear. Even the tallest Elves barely reached up to his shoulder and had such slim body-plans that Sage could barely stick his arm through the holes meant for the head of an elf.

After getting dressed he unlocked the door of his room and went down the still eerily quiet floor. During the day, even the highest layers of the building could get incredibly busy with children playing on the floors and people coming for visits or going to work, but right now the Elves were still asleep. Sage only passed by one middle-aged Elf, who was probably leaving for some sort of early-shift, until he reached the main staircase. The apartment block was built in a dirt-cheap concrete-box style which was popular almost half a century ago and provided just the bare minimum of space for most of the inhabitants. Back then it had been a good investment to provide the working-class humans and elves with such simple shelters, as the cities population had been booming However that was long ago and in the present day, Humans were mostly gone from these types of buildings and had been replaced by huge Elfish family's, so called clans “Independent clans” as they pridefully dubbed themselves.

This building alone housed maybe a bit over three-hundred Woodelves, living together in a community so obsessed with preserving their culture, they would rather commit a crime then open up to the city around them.

When Sage thought of it once more, it was actually rather surprising that the Elves had actually saved and sheltered him. Lucky for him that he was able to speak their language or otherwise the Elves who had found him would have rather beaten him up then helped him. After all, these Clans could get quite territorial towards strangers.

When Sage reached the ground floor a wide entrance hall opened up in front of him. This part of the building had been altered the most by its occupants to suit their needs. Dozens of small apartments had their walls torn down to make space for their industrial-level kitchen, the massive dining room, the grand entrance hall and the Clan leaders’ quarters. Knowing this place decently by now he turned left to enter the dining hall. It stretched widely in front of him with seven tables each over twenty metres long and hosting each fourty chairs, on which residents could sit, eat or listen. At the end of the hall there was also a smaller table in a slightly elevated position for the Clan leaders’ family.

Sage held himself left side of the room, until he got to a huge two-winged door, leading into the kitchen. Looking around, it was almost like a trip back in time to an industrial kitchen from the nineties, as everything was strictly analogue and seemed to be matriculately maintained to prevent it's components from breaking down. It seemed to have worked fine so far except for the oven that had a much more modern design and a digital control panel. Branching off from the kitchen lead another door down into the food storage, but Sage ignored it and went straight for the fridge. He was hungry and determined to eat whatever protein-rich food he could get his hands on.

Of course he was disappointed with what he found. Despite the fridge being bigger than him and considerably wider, it was almost completely filled with fruits, vegetables, honey and even cake. Again, his stomach rebelled, demanding food that would make him feel actually fed, instead of these empty sugars which the Elves were so addicted to.

Luckily for him, as Sage dug a bit deeper, he could find something at least resembling what his body craved right now: a loaf of brown bread and a handful of eggs. For a short moment the bad consciousness came back to haunt him. After all he was stealing the supplies of a group that quite possibly saved his life, but then again, his stomach cramped and firmly cast aside his moral objections. With a quick movement that seemed almost instinctual, he opened a few of the doors along the cupboards until he found salt, oil, butter and a pan. Eagerly he put the gathered equipment items on the counter and turned the stove on. A drop of oil into the heating pan and a buttered bread later he was about to crack the first egg open, as an amused voice from the other side of the kitchen spoke up.

“You know...” said a young, somewhat sarcastic female voice. “What you are doing there is actually a pretty bad crime.”