Green and brown swam beneath Cal in a nauseating blur.
The ground lurched with each step, and he felt the hard ridge of a shoulder digging into his ribs. His arms dangled, swaying as Corinne carried him. Each impact sent a fresh jolt of agony through his body - especially the stump of his right hand. The sensation was so all-consuming that for a long time it was the only thing that existed.
He managed to twist his head sideways through the pain. As the forest tilted, he caught a glimpse of Leo, face pale and streaked with sweat, carrying Mira in both arms. The girl's head rested against his chest, and Leo continuously murmured soothing words that Cal couldn't make out.
The image dissolved as he lost consciousness once more.
Sudden warmth pulled him back to alertness.
A rush of heated air replaced the cold damp of the forest as the common room of the Hearthsong Inn wrapped around him. Even through the delirium, the pull of safety clawed his mind toward the surface.
Cassia spoke through the din. "Lori, get that room ready. Put him and Mira in there together, it'll be easier to—"
"No!"
He felt Corinne flinch beneath him at the outburst. Then Leo spoke again, his words so small they barely carried. "No, ma'am. Please. Can they... can they be in different rooms?"
Cal tried to lift his head. Tried to speak. He opened his mouth and produced nothing but a dry rasp before the darkness rushed back in, blotting out the warmth and the noise.
A bed. Softness beneath him and a scratchy woolen blanket over the bare skin of his chest, pulled up to his chin. The air stank of medicinal herbs and the faint copper of old blood. Grey light fell in a thin sliver through the window to illuminate an empty room.
Voices filtered through the door.
"...he what!?"
Cassia. The words were muffled, as if Cal had a head stuffed with wool, but the disbelief was evident, regardless.
"...potions? He was selling potions to Jakob? After he'd appeased Zarven through foraging?" A pause, one that made Cal anxious even through the mental fog. "Why? Why would he take such a risk, knowing it put you all in danger?"
The last part dropped to a whisper, but the whisper carried more weight than a shout. His body tried to curl inward, some primal instinct to make himself smaller, to disappear into the mattress and cease to exist.
Corinne's response was too low to hear as both voices moved down the hall.
"...they must have been desperate for him to have pushed so far."
A new voice. Aurelian. He was close, inside the room. Cal felt a presence at his bedside, the faint displacement of air as someone leaned over him.
Selara replied. "You heard what happened to them… it is a miracle he was able to get any of them out alive."
"Miracle or not, he shall need another. The damage has reached a tipping point and it is cascading now. Feeding on itself." He sighed heavily. "He has a week or two at most."
Weeks, he said. The words held significance, he knew that much, but his mind couldn't assemble them into the shape of his own death.
"No!" Selara declared fiercely. "There are places in the deep wilds I have not been. There has to be a solution."
"Selara." Aurelian softened his tone to something almost gentle. The change was so unusual that even in Cal's delirium, it stuck out. "That is dangerous, even for you. I like the boy as well, but his life is not worth yours. You would risk much."
A few moments passed where neither spoke.
"I would risk that and more, brother. You would have done the same, once."
The silence that followed that statement was longer.
"Very well." Aurelian finally relented. "I will keep him alive until you return. And you will return. Understood?"
Cal tried to hold on. Tried to anchor himself to the conversation, to the lifeline Selara was offering. But the fog thickened, pulling him down through layers of grey, and the last thing he registered was the soft click of the door closing before consciousness slipped away once again.
Pain ripped him awake.
It erupted from his right wrist, tearing through every nerve in his body and peeling his eyes open wide.
A figure in immaculate white robes bent over his right arm. Spinova. Locked in concentration, her lips moving soundlessly as her hands worked over the ruin below. Warm golden radiance poured between her fingers as a new sensation hit.
Bone. He could feel bone grinding outward from the cauterized stump, and as he turned his head he could see it splintering and reforming in jerky increments that sent shockwaves of agony up through his elbow and into his shoulder. Behind it, muscle fibers wove themselves into existence, each strand igniting like a white-hot wire pulled taut. Tendons threaded through joints that hadn't existed a moment ago, snapping into place with clicks that he felt more than heard.
Nerves came last.
They crackled to life like disconnected cables suddenly reattached to a power source, and the sensation was beyond pain as it chained to the meridian damage throughout his body. It was an entire vocabulary of suffering compressed into an unending instant: the burn and the freeze and the crush and the tear, all at once, all everywhere, a scream that filled his skull from the inside.
He tried to cry out and couldn't. His jaw locked. His back arched off the mattress. The room whited out, and somewhere impossibly far away Spinova said something that he couldn't understand.
He passed out.
Time lost all meaning.
Grey light shifted to black and back to grey. The bitter taste of potions appeared on his tongue at irregular intervals, forced between his lips by hands he couldn't see. A cool, damp cloth pressed against his forehead, lifted, returned, lifted again. The flow of it became the only measure of passing hours, the only fixed point in the dark.
At some point he became aware of Corinne. She sat in a chair by the window, a rigid silhouette against the thin winter light. She was still; all the excited motion, the humming, the fidgeting, the leg-bouncing was locked down tight. When she rose to refresh the compress, her fingers were careful and efficient. The cloth was folded neatly. The pressure even and gentle. She performed the task the way she polished silverware.
Cal drifted. The fever held him in a state between sleeping and waking, where the room was simultaneously real and impossibly distant, and Corinne became a fixture as constant and unreachable as lucidity.
The mental fog finally receded.
It pulled back in slow degrees, and Cal regained clarity in what he realized was his old room at the inn. Aurelian stood at the foot of his bed, arms crossed, regarding him critically.
"Ah. There you are." Aurelian studied him, grey eyes roving all over. "I was beginning to wonder if the stasis was suppressing higher cognitive functions. Evidently not, though one could argue the evidence has always been ambiguous in your case."
The deadpan delivery startled a laugh from Cal, a scraping sound that sent a fresh spike of agony through his damaged channels. He choked on it, the humor instantly extinguished as he gasped against the pain.
Aurelian’s severe expression broke into a smile that vanished the moment Cal gasped, dissolving into a frown. The clinical mask settled back over his features.
Once the wave of pain subsided, Cal swallowed against the sandpaper in his throat. "How..." He croaked, but couldn't finish.
"How long?" Aurelian anticipated the question with a dismissive wave. "Three days. You have been drifting in and out of a fever state while I have been forced to set aside critical research to babysit your spiritual collapse." He paused, and something shifted behind the mask. A tightening around the eyes. "Still. I cannot have my apprentice dying from heroic self-sacrifice. It would reflect poorly on me."
Cal managed a weak exhale that might have been a laugh in better circumstances.
"The elixir I administered is a spiritual stasis remedy. Custom-brewed, since I never learned a recipe for it but was at least taught the theory." Aurelian smirked before continuing. "I am glad to see it works! The medicine arrests the ongoing erosion in your channels. Your Stamina pathways were degrading at an accelerating rate; the overall structure no longer able to support itself. Left unchecked, it would have resulted in a complete spiritual collapse within days."
Alarmed, Cal checked his status and noticed the truth of what Aurelian said.
[Channel Erosion: 33.00%]
His throat was still raw. "So it's fixed?"
"Fixed." Aurelian deadpanned. "No, it is most assuredly not fixed. It is paused. The stasis locks your spirit in its current state. The erosion cannot worsen, but neither can it heal. Your channels are frozen exactly as they are: riddled with damage and barely functional." He held up a finger. "Furthermore, the stasis field encompasses your entire spiritual body. That means no energy manipulation. No spiritual perception. You are, for all intents and purposes, spiritually crippled until the underlying damage is repaired."
Each drove a little deeper, and Cal truly began to appreciate the seriousness of his situation.
"The elixir is a stopgap," Aurelian continued, his voice sobering. "If Selara does not return with what she is looking for... there may not be much more that can be done."
Cal absorbed that in silence. Then he slowly lifted his right hand.
It rose from the blanket like a foreign object, too pale, the skin unmarked by callus or scar. The fingers were the proper length, correctly proportioned, and the nails were clean and neatly formed. Spinova did great work. And yet it looked like the hand of a stranger. Its skin was smooth and new where the rest of his body had earned its weathering through months of training, fighting, and surviving. It belonged to someone who'd never gripped a spear or slipped with a knife.
He flexed the fingers. They responded, curling inward stiffly.
A new hand, grown on my own arm. It seemed like a dream, even after months on Veraxus. He turned the hand over, studying the unfamiliar palm pensively. Magic could fix what was broken, but it couldn't replace everything that was lost.
He thought about the warnings on internal casting and felt he fully understood the dangers now.
But how did it even work? If the Spell was forged within the spirit, how did it manifest in the world without tearing the caster apart? It didn't seep through the skin unassisted. It had to be projected… somehow.
"Stop staring at it," Aurelian broke up his reverie. "The nerve integration will improve over the coming days. Assuming you survive long enough to live them."
Another day ground past.
The following morning, Aurelian returned with a fresh vial of the stasis elixir. Cal swallowed the bitter concoction without complaint, and an internal lurch quickly followed. It was like being seized from within, a spiritual inertia that clamped down on his being. He reached for his [Spiritual Perception] to explore his surroundings, yet nothing responded. He couldn't mobilize Mana or feel the strength of his Vitality. It was disconcerting, to say the least. But he no longer had to worry about holding back his Stamina… so there was that. Then the door opened.
Selara strode in, sword on hip, and the room narrowed to the unrelenting forward momentum she exuded. The faint scent of the forest clung to her. Her traveling cloak was torn across one shoulder, the fabric dark with dried blood, and a line of crusted red ran from her hairline down the left side of her face, branching across her cheekbone. None of it dulled her smile.
"You look terrible," she said, pulling a chair to his bedside and dropping into it. She looked him over, then fixed her attention on his face. "But cognizant. Good. That means my brother succeeded, and we have time."
Aurelian cleared his throat.
"Oh, hello dear brother! Didn't see you there!" she teased.
"Selara, your—" Cal started, gesturing weakly at the blood on her face.
"Nothing to worry about! Listen." She leaned forward, all business. "I pushed into a part of the Virethane I had not gone before. Past the dungeon, into a region that has not seen a forager in decades because it was rumored to be home to some very strong beasts." She grinned wolfishly. "They were right! But strong beasts were there for a reason: I found a Klyn'ora Blossom."
Aurelian, who had been leaning against the wall, suddenly jerked upright. "You're certain?"
"Am I certain, he asks," Selara scoffed, her focus still on Cal. "It was the real deal. A D-tier natural treasure that could handle the amount of channel erosion you are facing, even for someone at our level. It will make short work of your problem, believe me."
"A ripened Klyn'ora could likely restore even a fully dissected spirit, or worse." Aurelian added. Then, whispering, "I cannot believe one of those grew in this backwater… first the Vitae Lily, and now this?"
"Well… it is not fully ripe, but the spiritual pressure it gave off will be more than enough for our needs."
A knot of tension loosened in Cal's breast. Hope. He hadn't realized how heavy the despair had become until a fraction of it lifted. But maybe this hope wasn't just his alone. "If it can fix a spirit," he said, "can it fix something physical? A severed spine?"
"It could..." Selara shot him a warning look.
The hope flared. Mira. He opened his mouth, the name on his tongue, but Selara cut him off before he could speak.
"There is a catch. A Klyn'ora is a singular prize. Its power cannot be divided. One flower, one person."
She didn't give him time to argue. "And there is more. Treasures like the Blossom are so delicate, and so powerful, that they must be harvested by the individual it is meant to heal. It will immediately start to wither and die if removed, regardless of the forager's Skill. It is why I did not bring it back with me."
The hope that had taken root in Cal just moments before turned to dust.
"Listen to me," Selara continued serioiusly. "Even if it worked differently, getting Mira out there is a problem all on its own. But more than that... as harsh as this is, she will live. Her life is changed, but it is not over. Yours is." She gestured toward Aurelian. "Those elixirs he is brewing are temporary. They are expensive and made from resources that are hard to find. They will run out. This is not about choosing who gets saved, Cal. You are the only one who is dying."
Cal held her stare, seeing only the unvarnished truth of his situation. Crumb. He drew a breath, pushed his palms flat against the mattress, and sat up to swing his legs over the side of the bed. His bare feet touched the wooden floor. He shifted forward, straightening his spine, and prepared to stand.
A half-second later, the pain arrived, as if his nervous system needed a moment to process the sheer scope of what was happening before it could properly rebel. Sweat broke out all over his body as molten steel flooded his meridians, and he cried out before he could clamp his jaw shut.
He collapsed backward onto the mattress, his body seizing, tremors running through him in violent waves. The ceiling swam overhead, and for several seconds he couldn't draw breath, his diaphragm locked in a spasm that left him gulping for air.
Aurelian hadn't moved from his position against the wall, but his tone was gentle. "The stasis elixir preserves your spirit. It does not dull sensation. Every movement you make will pull against damaged channels, and those channels will protest. Loudly." He looked Cal up and down. "Your body is still physically capable. It is just that using it… will not be pleasant."
Cal lay there, staring at the ceiling, chest heaving. Without his permission, tears streaked from the corners of his eyes, running sideways into his hair.
I can't do this. His will wavered. The pain is too much. It's impossible. I can't take a single step without—
The images came unbidden. Gavin. Mira.
This pain.
Cal gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. The tears kept coming, and he let them.
I earned this. Every bit of it. Gavin is dead. Mira can't walk. Leo doesn't want to share a room with me. And every second I spend lying here feeling sorry for myself is another second I'm not fixing what I broke.
He owed debts now that ran deeper than gold or apologies. They demanded effort, suffering even, and the willingness to stand up even when it meant being flayed from the inside.
He pushed himself back into a sitting position. The pain returned in full, a tide that tried to drag him under. He rode it. Shoulders hunched, breathing through his teeth in short bursts, his newly formed right hand clumsily gripping the edge of the mattress.
The door banged open. Corinne stood in the frame, her face flushed from running up the stairs and looking concerned, likely drawn by his earlier cry.
She watched him for a long moment, hazel eyes unreadable, and her expression became rigid. She turned to Selara, her mouth a firm line.
"Why is he getting out of bed?"
"I found a natural treasure in the deep woods that can save him, Corinne," Selara replied. "He is going to be alright."
Relief broke out on her face, but it was quickly surpressed. "He can't go alone."
The words were directed at the room. She kept her focus on Selara.
Selara nodded slowly. "No, he cannot. The moment I engage a real threat, he will be helpless. He needs a dedicated guard." She glanced at her brother.
Aurelian scoffed. "Absolutely not. I've lost enough time analyzing that tendril to lose more playing nursemaid in the woods."
Selara exhaled through her nose, muttering, "Shameless."
"Hire Kamari's team." Corinne advised. "They're some of the best."
Selara considered this for a beat, then nodded decisively. "Done."
For a moment, no one spoke. The only sound was Cal's ragged breathing as he sat on the edge of the bed, fighting through the pain of simply being upright, his body trembling with the effort of holding still.
Selara lifted her chin and snapped toward the window, eyes narrowing to slits. One hand drifted to the hilt at her hip, fingers finding Flamewright.
Aurelian pushed off the wall. "What?"
Selara held the pose for three heartbeats. Four. Then her focus returned to the room, and she released the hilt with a dismissive shake of her head. "Nothing. I thought I felt something."
She turned to Cal. "Rest. We leave at dawn. I'll inform Kamari and prepare everything. You just need to focus on making it there in one piece."
Rising, she gave Aurelian a look, and strode from the room. The alchemist followed with a murmured comment about the "unconscionable waste of research hours" that faded down the hallway behind him. The door closed.
Cal and Corinne were alone.
An awkward silence pressed in. From the inn below, he caught faint sounds: the murmur of voices, the distant clink of dishware being stacked. The world continuing on as if nothing had changed.
Cal drew a ragged breath and gathered what strength he had.
"Corinne..."
He sounded weak, scraped thin. It barely carried across the small room.
She kept her eyes lowered, and interrupted him before the apology could form.
"Spinova did what she could." She swallowed hard. "Mira still can't feel her legs. The Specialist said it would take a more skilled healer to try and repair her spine, and that there isn't anyone like that in Deadfall."
"I'll fix it," he declared weakly. "I'll fix all of it."
Corinne glanced up at his face. Just for a moment. Long enough for him to see the redness around her eyes, and the way she was holding herself together through force of will. Then she looked away again.
"I took some others back to the clearing for Gavin's body." Her voice lowered. "By the time we got to it, there wasn't much left. We brought home what we could."
She turned and walked through the door, closing it softly behind her.
The click of the latch was the loudest sound Cal had heard in a long, long time.
He sat on the edge of the bed staring at the closed door, the pain in his channels a distant throb compared to the breaking of his heart.
I will make this right.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Happy Monday folks, let's have a good week!
Jon