Boy of a Million Men

Prologue
This is the tale of Jimmy Blake; this happens to be me but at this point of the story I’m neither interested in ghosts nor even born right now. I’m not quite sure when the story truly starts but this is the furthest we need go; it was forty four years before I was born when the sixteen year old Francis Blake came home from the corn mills and crawled into his bed.

The similarity in names will be explained further on into my story but all you need to know right now is that in this world words have more power than you can ever contemplate. If you look into the mists of time (constantly called this because even when you’re there everything’s a bit blurry around the edges and you can’t see past the end of your own nose) you will find references to true names; the name that will let you have complete control over the owner. I’ve found that on at least some levels they are right; there is power in a name.

We seem to be getting a bit off the subject at hand; Francis Blake was lying in his thin metal framed bed in his parents’ house. It wasn’t a special bed but at the moment he loved it beyond all else, he’d been working hard all day and his muscled arms hurt from pushing the massive grinding stones. The metal frame creaked under his massive build; spending all day sweating and all the free bread you could steal really built up a boy’s bulk.
“Francis!”
The yell could have shattered windows if there had been any panes in them, Francis didn’t as much as wince; that was his mam and he’d had to live with that since he could remember.

Francis opened his red eyes; sleep deprivation and corn dust in the air will do that to a person. His head hurt and he swore he’d left his arms in his other jacket but his mam was calling and you either find out what she wanted or she killed you with her belt. Francis’ brain told him that he should go with the first option; his heart on the other hand told him that he was out of it. He pushed himself up off the bed, his red eyes dimmed, a splitting pain ran through his chest, his arms shook and he collapsed in a heap on the relatively lumpy duvet.

Francis’ mam came storming up the stairs, her curly brown hair a fray and her face ruddy with pent up rage. She always looked like this Francis mused as he hovered in the corner of the room; she was angry most of the time anyway so the colour suited her... wait a minute. Something wasn’t quite right here; a moment ago his arms were aching and a mighty pain and shot through him and now he felt fine. He felt better than he had in years actually; little aches and pains that he’d always had, joints that were stiff in the cold weather and scars that sometimes tweaked at his nerves were all gone and left him feeling as light as a feather. Lighter in fact; he swore his feet weren’t touching the ground. It was a shock to find that when he looked down his feet weren’t actually touching the floor; the greater shock was when he saw his white faced mother shaking the arm of somebody lying on his bed.

Francis let out a snort of rage and tried to grab at the guy on his bed; HIS BED! His hands passed through the man like steam, foggy trails rippled along the man’s back and Francis stared at his hands.
“Mam?” Francis said, his voice high pitched in worry “What’s happening mam?”
By the look of it Francis’ mam didn’t know what was going on either; she was white as a sheet as she backed out of the room.
“Mam?” Francis whispered, reaching out with a faded muscled arm towards his mam “What’s going on-“
He stopped and stared as his leg was pulled stopped before he moved it more than a few feet, the clink of metal joining his mam’s horrible wails as she ran out into the street. He couldn’t take this; Francis didn’t want to accept the fact that it was more than likely he was dead.

BOAMM chapter one