Myfanwy’s First Manifestation of Her Powers

Myfanwy’s first manifestation of her powers is a childhood hospital emergency that reveals the bodily force of her ability and sets in motion her recruitment by the Checquy Group. At nine, after a fall leaves a sharp branch embedded in her leg, pain activates a power she does not yet understand: medical staff who touch her bare skin lose control of their bodies in different ways. The incident ends with her wound treated, but not with the power forgotten. It becomes the basis for an institutional inquiry into what she can do—and for a training system that expects her to demonstrate it again.

The fall and the first manifestation

The episode begins in an ordinary accident. Myfanwy has climbed a tree and fallen onto a sharp branch, which becomes jammed in her leg. Her parents bundle her into a car and drive her to hospital as she cries from the pain. She is wearing a tracksuit; in retrospect, she assumes this clothing kept her parents from touching her skin during the journey. The detail matters because the ability is not presented as a deliberate act: before Myfanwy can identify or control it, contact with her bare skin is already dangerous.

At the hospital, a doctor cuts away her track bottoms, which have stuck to the injured leg. When his hand brushes her skin, he falls and begins screaming, having lost control of his legs. Another medical worker rushes in to help, touches Myfanwy’s bare skin, and loses her sight. The consequences spread from one person to another through the very contact intended to provide care. Myfanwy, meanwhile, becomes quieter as the commotion grows around her, giving only an occasional whimper. The scene makes the power legible through its effects on other bodies before the child herself can explain what is happening.

A third medical worker tends to the affected staff first. The next person to touch Myfanwy wears gloves, allowing the staff to stitch and bandage her leg without triggering another episode. When she wakes, people can touch her safely again. The crisis has therefore been temporary, but it has not been harmless: a routine attempt to treat an injured child has left multiple people screaming or physically impaired, and the incident has shown that ordinary medical contact can become a source of danger.

Recognition and the question of control

Afterward, Myfanwy understands that she caused the chaos and that she could do it again if she chose. This recognition marks a change from bewilderment to awareness: the hospital episode was not simply an inexplicable accident, but an ability with a potential for repetition. She does not yet know its limits or operation, but she knows enough to connect what happened to herself.

The later account of the incident also places it in the context of her amnesiac successor’s predicament. The former Myfanwy writes that the ability seems to disrupt another person’s control of their own body, and assumes that the new Myfanwy’s pain has unconsciously triggered it. She warns that eliciting the power without care could involve substantial pain and possible injury. The letter points to a red folder containing instructions for bringing an arm or leg close to breaking, while stopping short of actual breakage, and for inducing other nonpermanent forms of damage. The successor finds these directions while remembering the chaos at the bank, where she had manifested the ability without having to hurt herself in this way. The contrast connects the childhood origin to a later, still-unsettling question: how the power can be deliberately summoned, and what its use costs its possessor.

From hospital incident to institutional scrutiny

The hospital crisis appears at first to leave no public aftermath: there are no lawsuits, and Myfanwy’s parents never discuss it with her. Yet the account makes clear that the silence does not mean the event has disappeared. Someone must have talked about it, and that information eventually reaches an interested party. Three months after the hospital visit, Myfanwy’s father receives a letter from an obscure government branch. He and Myfanwy are driven to an old stone building in the City, where she is introduced to Lady Linda Farrier and Sir Henry Wattleman of the Checquy Group.

The event thus becomes the route by which a private bodily crisis enters an institution’s records and attention. The initial scene is intimate and accidental: a child is hurt, adults try to help, and touch produces an alarming reversal. Its delayed consequence is administrative and life-shaping. The Checquy Group learns of the manifestation, approaches Myfanwy’s family, and ultimately subjects the ability to organized examination and training.

Training and the institutional demand to perform

Years later, at the Estate, an interview with the head of the department responsible for students’ special features returns Myfanwy to the tree and the hospital. The interview lasts about two hours and is one of the most excruciating experiences of an already punishing day. It establishes a practical expectation: Myfanwy believes that she can repeat the bodily disruption, and the Estate proceeds on that understanding. At the time, she does not consider what might have happened had she said she could not reproduce it.

Her later reflection supplies the darker institutional principle behind that omission. The Estate’s approach is captured in the maxim that birds capable of singing but unwilling to sing must be made to sing. In the hospital, the power emerges involuntarily from pain; in training, the question becomes whether its owner can demonstrate it on demand. The event’s significance therefore extends beyond discovery. It foreshadows the gap between a child’s embodied experience of an uncontrollable ability and an organization’s interest in making that ability usable, legible, and repeatable.