"This hospital is usually well-staffed. Where in the Crystal’s light have all the doctors in Yliakum wandered off to?" Allena lay unconscious on an unwrinkled bed as Geoni towered over her limp form, spittle and blood rolling out of her mouth. "I suppose the night is to blame, but still…"
Sarras kept her thoughts in the moment. That was as much as her mind was capable of given her own lack of sleep. "We’ll need to wake her up so she can drink something. Maybe eat. We should clean her up, too."
They had recently arrived from Hydlaa by Pterosaur. The small nolthrir had collapsed a day ago, and her unbroken bout of deep sleep signaled that she needed long-term care. Bringing her to the hospital was a blessing for Sarras, who had stood vigilant outside the sanitorium for more hours than she cared to count. The city guards had already cycled through a full set of watches, and she had yet to remove her platemail.
"Need to keep you hydrated. Wake up now!"
Geoni shook Allena as gently as a kran could, but the girl flopped about like a ragdoll.
The dermorian stepped forward before Geoni might have considered his attempt too restrained. "Alternative method." She levelled a water pouch above the girl’s forehead and tipped it so that a small stream trickled out. The patient’s only response was a thick cough. The water mixed with the fluids expelled from the coughing, and Sarras cursed before finding a fresh cloth and patting dry the face and neck.
The two racked their heads for ideas. To put someone to sleep was simple enough with magic, but to wake someone…
"I’ll use Azure!" Sarras stood by the head of Allena’s bed and clasped her hands together. "I don’t think I’ve tried this before."
"Just make sure you have a good sight on her to see if it’s burning her like Crystal does. If it’s a Dark Way thing, I don’t think it will, but still…" Back in the sanitorium, he had cast a Crystal spell upon the girl after her collapse and not only found his effort to be of no avail but to have burned her skin. Sarras knew it was a condition unique to Allena but failed to warn the well-meaning kran.
"It won’t," Sarras reassured Geoni. As her hand pressed against the unconscious girl’s head, an aura of azure light collected about it and pooled around her fingertips.
She had only meant to contact Allena’s sleeping mind, to express the urgency of the girl’s waking world. But, just as an abandoned house welcomes a vagrant, an uninhabited mind welcomes a curious Azure mage. The spell fell through the lack of mental barrier, and, sensing no one home, Sarras stepped inside. A vacant foyer materialized, twin curved staircases flanking her and ascending toward large double doors. Underfoot lay marble, and sparse architectural details took form. Before she could take in the simple elegance of it, she called out to Allena’s mind.
Geoni stood beside the physically indisposed Sarras for a long minute.
"Are you… getting anything?"
Her half-lidded eyes fluttered in some manner of response. A moment passed before her mouth twitched, more likely due to some invisible experience than in answer to Geoni.
He exercised patience for some time, but it became too much. "Sarras, how is this healing her? You look like you’re using Azure to enter her mind." The elf forced out a resemblance of verbal affirmation.
Sarras tore through a hallway lined with doors, her boots vanishing into a film of fog with each step. A ghost image trailed inches behind in her wake. She had opened a few of the doors already, which she had long since passed now, and found them to house memories. The second memory struck Sarras as relevant and perhaps a key to Allena’s plight.
The girl appeared then as she was in reality: disheveled, at her tallest, but fuming and screaming unlike the Allena that Sarras was accustomed to. She argued with a bipedal creature in the foyer of her own mind, and her tantrum diminished her in contrast to the coolly retorting reptilian. It had blocked her entry into one of the memory doors, and Allena demanded she be permitted entry.
This hub, meticulously organized though it was, did not give Sarras any direction toward Allena’s consciousness.
"Allena, are you in here?!" Her own shout rebounded into her ears, returning in an uneven pattern that distorted her voice into something unrecognizable. The seemingly never-ending hallway forked into three more several paces ahead, and Sarras slowed to a halt at the junction. She combed her fringe from her face, as habit from reality, and sighed in exasperation.
A subtle dread filled her as she reached for the nearest doorknob on the right. It belonged to a nondescript door just beyond a corner of the intersection. Another memory took her vision. A diaboli man stood over her, chanting in rhythm, gripping a blade above her chest.
Sarras’s head angled toward Geoni with an eerie roll. Her lips were parted, as if waiting for something meaningful to utter.
"I’d like to know what it is you’re hoping to gain with this. She didn’t give you her permission."
Another moment passed before words finally came. "She’s trapped. I don’t know what to do." Allena remained unconscious but now with a strained expression.
"Trapped? How?"
The spell released its hold, and Sarras’s plated legs buckled as she fell into an adolescent stupor, seated on the rug with her limbs splayed out. "I didn’t find her in there."
"I’ve not known Dakkru’s curse to make a soul get lost within the mind of its vessel. Weakened, sure, but not lost. Do you detect a different curse?"
"Yes… Something. A—I don’t know—a creature, like a reptile, but it stood."
"What do you mean it stood?"
"It stood like we do. And spoke." She paused to consider something. "It might be the personification of a curse… I was seeing her memories. It could have been a memory."
"What did it say?"
"The last thing I remember it saying was, 'Some things are best left in the past.' From what I gathered, it’s what has her trapped. I think."
"That doesn’t sound like something some personification of a curse would say. It sounds benevolent if anything. Are you sure that creature is the cause of it? Because this is present."
"She accused it of locking her up and leaving her body broken… I think that’s what she said."
The same discomfited feeling from last night denied Sarras a return to slumber. That and the sting in her muscles from sleeping at the hospital’s meeting table. She struggled to recall from where the feeling originated until the events of the previous days flashed through waking memory. Allena’s reappearance. The maulbernaut crashing through the tables on a fateful path of carnage. Her failure to react, to draw it away, before it found prey.
The girl had only just arrived, as far as Sarras was aware. Her cheeks were hollow, eyes sunken, and she evidently neglected to bathe or alternate clothes before returning to Hydlaa. Courage granted to Sarras by leadership of the militia guided her to speak to the lorn girl by Kada-El’s fireplace, but trepidation from past experience cowed her courage into retreat. This was the girl who had aided Rigwyn, the death-obsessed diaboli who had stolen Sarras’s sword-hand in revenge for loss of his own. But that was cycles ago, and her hand had been returned and expertly fixed onto her wrist by the doctor Evirea and mage Gova. The residual ache and clumsiness had subsided after a cycle or so. She also knew that the girl had been betrayed by Rigwyn, and she herself was the first of the search party to discover Allena in the Howling Well after the sacrificial ritual failed.
The high voice echoed in her head, "I see you managed to find a way to heal yourself?"
Sarras confirmed this despite the physical evidence as answer on its own.
"Well, that is good. I hope there is no pain?"
"Not anymore." She recalled that she tried to placate the growing trepidation with a larger than necessary drink of wine. It was also then that memories from cycles ago made themselves clear. Evirea had not been the only one to sympathize with her during the darker days. Allena had repeatedly offered aid despite Sarras’s deteriorated reputation, and Sarras tried rejecting her out of self-pity. She assumed they were attempts at atonement, but they could have been manifestations of the desire for friendship.
"I don’t blame you for anything."
Allena swallowed at that, and her face grew cold. She had been a child then and revealed her true age to Sarras when questioned. The girl was at least five cycles her younger. With the few cycles gained since their last interaction, Sarras had learned of a mirror called retrospection. She could have been like Allena had figures like Geoni, the priestess Dannae, and the guildmasters not been around to push her in the right direction.
The girl must have taken the attempt at reconciliation in the wrong way because blood filled her cheeks and she quickly obscured her face. Sarras did not make a habit of memorizing each spoken sentence, but whatever she had said, it made the girl cry. Anxiety overcame what was left of courage, and Sarras swiveled in her seat to stuff her mouth with a torn chunk of bread.
Then a maulbernaut crashed through the railing, knocking her onto harsh tile.
Perhaps Allena’s condition improved overnight, she thought, and Sarras could return to her fledgling militia duties in Hydlaa. Her stomach flitted with excitement, but it soon fell back into unease. Though the coughing ceased, the girl’s fever persisted, and Sarras knew it would not be long before dehydration.
"I have to search for a healer." She paused to look back while fishing for an edge of the privacy curtain. The fragile nolthrir lay still but for the heaving of breath. Speaking was pointless, yet she promised, "I’ll return."
