Published at 3rd of August 2024 7:50 am

Book 2 Chapter 36: He Loved That Hand

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Dantes could feel the blood loss sapping his strength as he ran, but he was moving on pure instinct and could think of nothing but his desire to escape. Eventually he collapsed in a dirty alley. He started to push himself up, but collapsed back down. Jacopo reached him shortly after.

“Focus,” he sent.

Dantes gained a moment of clarity, and moved the branch to stem the bleeding on the stub that remained of his arm. He then used the last of his energy to shift himself into a roach. As a roach he was missing half of three limbs rather than just one, but it was much less painful. Still, he had almost no energy left and couldn’t move more than a few inches.

Jacopo moved forward and grabbed him, placing him on his back as he began to run. Dantes’s memory of what happened after that was a haze. He didn’t come to again until he was in his garden. He changed shape to become himself again, and collapsed on the soft layer of clover that covered the ground. His mind was still a horrible blur of half-thoughts and pain.

He could feel the poison assaulting his mind without any signs of weakening, and he tried to focus on it, but lacked the clarity to truly sense it. Still, he pushed, trying to bind his attention to the extraordinary pain he was in, and for a moment it was as if he could see exactly what the poison was doing to him. He could feel each individual component of himself, down to a degree far deeper than anything he’d sensed before, but while he was in such an intense state of focus, another wave of pain hit, and this time his consciousness surrendered to it, and he passed out.

…

Dantes floated above the table on which a tapestry was being woven. The man in the black and gold cloak was now standing only a few feet from it, holding the thread of his own cloak which had partially been sewn into it. He lifted a burnstick, struck it against his knuckles and lit, then brought the fire to the thread. Before the line of fire could hit, a quick black shape would swoop down and put it out. The first time the shape was in the form of a rat, then a bat, and finally a roach. Then, very suddenly, the box of matches seemed to disappear from the man’s hand, and he shrugged, stepping away from the tapestry and cutting the thread that connected him to it with a pair of golden scissors. The man in the blue cloak and the woman in green, straightened out their respective ends of the tapestry, and got back to work with the woman wearing the veil allowing more thread from her spool to unwind. Dantes felt a certain expectation emanating from her toward him, though from what he could tell she wasn’t facing him.

Before he regained consciousness he looked out over the horizon. The silhouette of the headsman was still there. It seemed…closer, but only by one or two steps. Before he could look at anything else, his dream faded, and he was left in blackness.

…

Dantes awoke to the feeling of someone yanking on his stump of an arm. He let out a scream and his garden responded, with the trees, weeds, rat’s, roaches, bats, and flowers all immediately moving toward the threat. Before he could fully send his will through the garden to kill whoever it was he heard a voice.

“Dantes! It’s me!”

He focused his eyes for just a moment and saw a beard full of mushrooms.

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“Clay?”

“Yes, it’s me and my sister.”

Dantes released his violent intent and everything in the garden receded back to where it was.

“Sorry.” he coughed, keeping his eyes closed to avoid the glare of the sun. “I’m a little high strung at the moment.”

He felt hands on his face, they were as rough as Clay’s, but smaller. They brushed against his face, then very suddenly he felt a finger jam up his nose painfully. He coughed painfully, and felt some kind of strange viscous liquid begin leaking from the top of his throat, where it met his nasal cavity. He tilted his head as it flowed out of it, as slow as molasses. If it hadn’t been for the incredible pain where half of his left arm used to be, it would’ve been the most unpleasant thing he was experiencing.

“I thought so. A magically amplified version of Fool’s Foul. He’ll probably be an idiot for the rest of his life.”

“So, no changes then?” He managed, a self-satisfied smile reminding him of the constellation of bruises and cuts on his face from Mondego’s beating.

He felt Hema’s hand against his forehead. “He’s got a fever, he has multiple broken ribs, and his right eye isn’t able to focus. He should be dead.”

“His color’s actually better than it was when I first found him. I think he’s getting better, not worse.”

“We need to get that strange wood off his arm so that we can clean and dress the wound. A fever means it’s probably infected. We may even need to cut away some of the flesh. Did you grab the liquid dust?”

“Yes, but I’m surprised you had it. You complain about my weed all the time.”

“I made it from dust in your stash I found when I left. What was I going to do? Turn it into the guard? Get sent to the convent? Or a labor camp if I was lucky?”

“Aye…that’s fair.”

Dantes listened to the description of his current state with a kind of detachment, finding the majority of his focus was on his lost hand as the haze that had been caused by the poison that Mondego had used on him started to leave his system. He loved that hand. He’d taught that hand how to feel the tumblers in a lock. His father had taught him how to use that hand to tie knots. He'd learned to please a woman with that hand. He’d felt blood running down that hand when he’d driven a shank into a man that had stolen his last potato. He’d felt the knuckles in that hand crack when he’d struck Gaspard far past the point that he’d been dead. He could still feel the warm earth on that hand as he’d dug it into the ground to plant a seed.

He forced his head to turn and raised the stump.

“Stay still!” yelled Hema.

He ignored her, picturing the hand as it was in his mind, picturing every experience that he’d had with it. Remembered wiping the sweat from his mother’s forehead on the last night she’d been alive. The last time he’d cupped Mercedes's face in it. The last roll of loaded dice he’d thrown with it. He channeled all of those thoughts, those feelings, and everything that went along with them into the branch that was currently keeping him from bleeding out. Every subtle sensation, both emotional and physical, he pushed into it.

The branch started to shift, he gritted his teeth as it grew roots and connected them to his severed veins and arteries, as it tried to mimic the feel of flesh by weaving into the edges of his fresh stump. The branch began extending outward even as it began sealing itself into his capillaries. He watched as it formed a forearm, even sprouting thin hair-like branches, then the base of hand, and finally delicate fingers, a perfect match for those on his right hand. He flexed the hand, making and unmaking a fist, then he flexed each individual finger, then he made the entire hand rotate in a full three hundred and sixty degrees, then he had the fingers grow and shrink by several inches. He could feel the kiss of the wind on it, and warmth of the sun suffusing it. The pain in the hand seemed to cease, and his consciousness began to rapidly fade. The agony had been the only thing tethering him to being awake.

“I don’t like your friends Clay. I thought the Kobolds were weird enough,” said Hema as Dantes drifted off.

The rest of the day he was in and out of consciousness as Hema and Clay treated his wounds. He’d wake to having cloth wrapped around his ribs, alcohol applied to cuts on his face, some foul liquids being poured down his throat, or poultices being applied. Throughout all of it, he could feel his strength returning as the gardens and other life he’d fostered throughout the city fed him as he’d done for them. He could feel the life it granted him suffuse every inch of his body. He could sense the different parts of himself as he healed, not just the skin and bones, but deeper than that. He could feel down to the smallest components of his body, those pieces of him that were too small even for the naked eye to sense. He put what little focus and attention he had to strengthening those smallest parts nearest to where he was in the most pain, where he guessed it was the most needed.

His bouts of consciousness became longer and longer, days passing on the edges of his consciousness, until he found himself fully awake again.

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