"Light. I feel light"

"I should think so, you lost about half of you."

I struggled to open my eyes, afraid to see what had happened. The last thing I remembered before the darkness was the light, the bright light that had surrounded and suffused me, that had seemed to consume me. A hand waved in front of my face, and at first I was certain it wasn't mine, couldn't be mine. I had never been that skeletal, I had always been a rather large man.

"Easy there, you just did something stupid or amazing, and you're rather week. We have another team on the other you." I felt something warm and very sweet trickle down my throat, a strong hand propping my head up so that I didn't choke. "Slowly now. Slowly." He took the bottle away.

I tried to sit up, and the effort of it nearly made me black out again. But the memory of it all started coming back, the chance to be two places at once, to be more than myself. "It worked? The second me?"

"I guess you could say that, but as to which of you is the original, I wouldn't care to guess." The magic used was wild and strange, and in preparation I had certainly eaten my fair share, packing the pounds onto my already heft frame. But I had not imagined what it meant to split myself, to make me two, would take. The energy, the material, it had to come from somewhere, and this was one of those sacrifices that could not be avoided.

I managed to turn my head, and look at my homunculus, my clone I guess. I wondered what it felt like to be so new and strange, to be so different and still completely the same.

James coughed a bit, still holding my head. "So which one are you? Are you the original? Because the other you is saying he is the original."

I tried to speak, but the effort of it was too much. I saw the flaw in my plan.