They stepped from the dark rower’s world into the Blood Moon hive. The moment the portal closed behind them, Arthur turned to Brixaby. “I need you to make sure the captains are using the new monetary system. Be as strict as you want with non-compliance. At this point they’ve been warned several times.”
It seemed so trivial compared to the other problems they faced—dual eruptions, all the revelations… everything. But Arthur couldn’t forget he was leader of the hive. The specialized garnets would be the hive’s lifeblood.
Brixaby looked unusually contemplative. “If it is indeed being widely adopted, I may need to craft more garnets.”
“Reach out to Horatio,” Arthur said. “Now he’s back from the pocket space, he has a card that might be able to help.” He knew his friend was focusing more on a light-based combat deck, but it was possible Second Helpings might come in handy, if Horatio had learned to work around its drawbacks.
Arthur continued with a grimace, “We also have to get a census on the number of shards that have been harvested and add them to the hive’s cashes. We have bills to pay.”
Brxiaby reached into his personal space and produced a bulging sack of shards. “All Common and Uncommon I harvested from the eruption. Let it help make our hive strong. Naturally, I kept the Rares,” he added. “As for the rest, I suppose I could… delegate to someone who would be interested in accounting.”
Arthur shrugged. He didn’t care how it was done as long as it was done correctly, and that person was not skimming off the top. The last thing he wanted was for the new foundation of the hive to be riddled with corruption.”
Brixaby was looking at him oddly. “Why are you not taking care of these things?”
“I have to alter the cards we just got,” Arthur said. “And by the time I get out of my Personal Space, I don’t think I’m going to be good for anything.”
“You should see your healer.”
“That,” he smiled grimly, “is the point. Don’t you think?”
But Brixaby didn’t let it go. “Is it not dangerous? I remember you blowing yourself up a few times in the extra dimension space.”
“I’ll be careful,” Arthur said, and with that he dipped into his Personal Space.
Inside, Arthur frowned as he looked around. He had cleaned out his Personal Space several times, but he may have gone… a little overboard with restocking it. Now there wasn’t a lot of room to move.
His cousin stood in the middle of the room, frozen in time. He looked gaunt and haggard and also rather wet, thanks to being splashed with a bucket of paint thinner. Though most of the painted-on runes had been broken, bits of them still covered his visible skin. They were also extremely complex. Now he had more than a moment to look at them, he saw runes within runes. The more he looked, the more he saw.
He knew some about runes, but enchanting was not his forte. Brixaby would be able to tell him more.
With a shake of his head, Arthur turned to his work. There was already a table set up, and he spent his first few minutes clearing it of stuff and loading it instead with snacks. He’d used his cooking skills to create fortifying meals with various low-level boosts to his strength and alertness. They weren’t as good as one of Cinderwood’s boosts, which was why he hadn’t gone for them before, but they were enough to sustain him here. At least for a little while.
This was a timeless space, and yet he still didn’t have all the time in the world. There was a certain mental strain that went with working here. That, compounded with everything else… Well, he wasn’t going to dawdle.
For some reason he didn’t have the chair that went with this table anymore. Had he left it in the pocket space? He suspected the answer was yes.
That was fine. He could stand just as easily.
Arthur spread out the healing set? then examined each one carefully using his Master of Cards. Visually, it was clear that they were a set. The designs around the edges were all similar: A sort of artful houndstooth that started dark and bold at the edges, then bled through to the inner card. The hashing seemed to sparkle whenever it caught the light at a certain angle.
As they were Uncommon cards, none of the images moved.
Each card was narrowly focused, as well. One closed inner wounds, one took care of head trauma, such as concussions. One cleaned and healed wounds done by viruses, bacteria and parasites. The fourth set and healed bones. And one… the one he suspected was the jack card healed soul wounds done by combat.
Arthur had never known that was a possibility and he shuddered to himself.
I’ll have to keep that in mind.
Plucking the soul wound card out from the rest, he set it aside for special focus. Then he took out his stack of Uncommon shards and started to sort through them. While he did, he tried to hold the feel of the Soul Wound card in his mind. Without knowing it he slipped into a semi-meditative state, breathing slowly with his eyes half closed. It felt like he was balancing the Soul Wound card on the edge of a knife, not allowing it to tip one way or the other, all the while seeing if any of his shards had a connection to it.
New Skill Level:
Card Insight: (Card Smith Class)
Level 14
Card Intuition: (Card Smith Class)
Level 17
Of course he had no idea how long this took, but at the end he had a small stack of shards that resonated with the same feel as the soul card.
A sharp tension was making itself known in his head. Not a full blown headache, not yet. But it would be if he didn’t stop soon.
Too bad he had four more cards to go.
Arthur took the Bone Healing card next and started to sort again.
Finally, an unknown time later—though he had the feeling it had been awhile as he’d been forced to take breaks to sip water or have a snack—each card had its own stack of shards sitting next to it.
He couldn’t stop. Now he could finally get to work.
Using the tools he had learned in the alternate dimensional space, he focused on adding shards to the existing cards. He scratched out and readded the phrasing in little bits and added shards to alter them even more. It was like chipping away at a mountain, but here Arthur had the time to do it.
While sorting the appropriate shards had been a dance on a razor's edge, now he felt like he was juggling many things up in the air at the same time. He could spend hours just focusing on one word.
If he pushed one card too far, it would fall out of balance with the others in the same set. He suspected that would create a cascade effect that would spread to encompass the other cards.
Arthur very much did not want to find out what would happen if something exploded in his Personal Space.
While he was in here, he had tools that he didn’t have in the real world. Time only moved when he wanted it to. If he felt like he had pushed a card too far, all he had to do was lift his hand away and let the timeless, frozen Personal Space block the card back in time so he could reassess.
He saved himself several times that way.
And if worse came to worse, he could always exit his Personal Space and toss the card away. But if one card disintegrated or blew up, it would make the rest of the set useless.
He came close—shockingly, scarily close—a couple of times.
Altering each card a little at a time, but not too much at a time took every iota of skill that he had earned.
It also set his little used Set Creation Skill through the roof. It now sat at level 10.
But slowly, surely, he altered the description of each card so that it turned from healing of the body to the healing of the spirit. Finally, he turned to the one card that he had not altered at all—the soul wound card. And that one, he moved to something completely unique.
It would be too easy to only alter it a touch or even leave it as it was. But this one already had a foundation in the metaphysical. Everything he had learned as a Card Smith told him he could push it further than the others.
His fingers trembled, and he took several steady breaths. He asked himself if he had the strength to do this, and the honest answer was that he wasn’t sure.
But he strongly felt that stopping right now was a bad idea. The cards were in a strange flux, and he could not afford to pick up again later.
It was now or never.
So he set to change that card too, not to get it more in line with the soul, but to have it fix the heart deck.
Was the heart deck the soul?
No. He didn’t think so. But they were connected.
Finally, after what felt like endless tweaking, he got the card to a place where he wanted it. But it still felt like the set was imperfect, so he went through the rest of the cards one more time, quick fixes here and there. Little final tweaks that probably meant nothing by themselves, but added in together with the rest helped color in the last details.
Finally, hands shaking, his mouth dry, headache pounding and joints aching for some reason, he finished with his last card.
When he re-entered real space again, Brixaby was just finishing his end of the conversation. “It is not about being careful, it is—" But then the dragon stopped and stared at him for a moment before he snorted with pure exasperation. "You have already done it. Congratulations. You look terrible."
Arthur felt terrible. He bent over double with hands on his knees and his eyes shut thanks to sudden light sensitivity. A terrible, throbbing migraine seemed to pound from the inside of his head outwards.
"I think I'm going to throw up," he said calmly, and then staggered over to a waste bin to do exactly that.
****
Arthur did not have the energy to take himself down to the healing hall again. Brixaby went to the opening ledge and, using a stunning shout—which of course rolled through the entire hive and brought a new wave of pain to Arthur’s headache—summoned Asha and Marion.
"Thanks," Arthur said. His knees were shaking too, so he decided to settle down on the bare floor and wait.
Luckily, Asha did not take long to arrive. The silver dragon had grown quite a lot, but she could still squeeze herself into the tunnel.
“Where is your rider?” Brixaby demanded. “I want both of you to fix what Arthur’s done to himself!”
“Marion is caring for patients. I will transport Arthur down to him if need be.” Unmoved by Brixaby’s displeasure, she brushed past him to regard Arthur. “What have you done to yourself? Every bit of you is under some sort of strain, including... temporal?"
But she didn’t wait for his answer before she exhaled her healing breath over him.
Time seemed to come to a standstill for Arthur, though it didn’t have anything to do with the damage caused by his Time card. More like he was in so many different flavors of discomfort and outright pain that he had been quite unable to identify one. Then her healing breath washed most of it away.
He looked into her kind face and blinked.
"I know you," he said.
"I should hope so," Asha said, then frowned. "But are you all right?"
"He is not all right," Brixaby said, pushing his head anxiously forward. "Clearly, he is suffering some sort of brain damage. Of course you know her, Arthur. She is Asha and Marion is her rider."
"I know that," he said impatiently, then realized that he was sitting down next to the trash can that he had been throwing up in. With a grimace, he got to his feet. "It’s just that... you know, you grew. You’re not a hatchling anymore."
Asha bared her teeth into a smile. However, Brixaby seemed more alarmed. "But you have seen her before—when your mate fell ill."
"I know," he said with a little laugh, pushing Brixaby’s muzzle away. "With the second eruption and all, I hadn’t taken more than a few seconds to really look at her."
Arthur took a step back to do that now.
Asha was what the others had called an origin dragon, though no explanation had been entirely forthcoming—except that an origin dragon was something special.
Arthur could see that.
Her silver had a pearlescent shine, as if she were glowing from the inside. Her eyes were set a little more forward than usual dragons, giving her a permanent, slightly kind expression. The nails on her claws were blunted, and the digits seemed more dexterous.
With one breath, she had almost entirely healed him.
Arthur looked down at his arm. The cut had already scabbed over before he met her, but now the flesh was entirely sealed. He brushed the scabs away and found whole skin underneath. There was no pain. Not even a scar was left behind.
"You are somewhat healed and you are very exhausted. You will regain your life’s force, but only with time, rest, and nutrition," Asha said, and her voice held a deep well of sympathy. "There is some injury I sense I cannot reach."
"The temporal injury," Arthur said. "From my time card."
"Perhaps that's it." She frowned. "What can we do?"
"There's nothing. He altered a card to help heal himself and then gave it to his mate," Brixaby said. "Once he gets that back, he will be fixed."
Arthur shook his head. "How is Cressida doing?"
"She sleeps," Asha said gently. "Marion is with her, though he should sleep as well. It has been an exhausting day with a lot of nasty injuries." She gave him a look. "You should sleep too.”
Well, he knew that, but though he had trouble sensing time, he wasn’t going to waste it.
"Nothing a little coffee won't fix," he said.
"Do you drink coffee?" Brixaby asked. "I've never seen you drink coffee."
"I’ll pick up the habit." He gave Brixaby a look. "We have things to do."
Brixaby groaned. "Very well. I will get started with the... finances."
Arthur turned to Asha. "Could you take me to Marion?” He grinned. "I have some cards to give him."
Next chapter: Tuesday Jan 13th 9PM PST