Published at 8th of March 2024 7:45 am

Book 2, Chapter 26

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I tried to stay awake to eavesdrop, but I know maybe 4 phrases in Spanish and a smattering of words, mostly from the movie Man on Fire because Denzel Washington had a habit of repeating words. I asked Ida to wake me up when the nurse arrived and surrendered to sleep.

Next thing I knew I was in space again. Except… no, it was the night sky. In a place where the sky was unfamiliar. I didn’t recognize any constellations and the stars were red-tinged, kinda like how Mars looked to the naked eye… except all of them. I looked down and found myself standing on a small hill in a fast valley of nothing. The only light was the stars, which was plenty for me, and even with my mild near-sightedness, I could tell that the valley exceeded the curve of the planet in every direction. The air was stale and dry, reminiscent of a closet or a cellar.

The vague sense of familiarity returned and I once again faced the sky, looking for the perennial mass of clouds. It took some effort to spot it, because it was much smaller… or perhaps further away? No, no it was definitely smaller. I could tell because of the corona of heat that bloomed around it as it entered the atmosphere of this barren world. I briefly considered running, as it was coming right for me. I discarded the idea almost as soon as it came, however. Where would I go? I supposed I could create a pit with my magic and try to hide from what I assumed to be a massive explosion that way… but nah.

Let’s see what this thing had for me.

As it approached I could tell some of its mass was burning off. Or condensing? I didn’t see debris as it fell, but it was definitely getting smaller. I’d call it the size of an island now. Maybe Maui?

I tried to stay calm as it approached, but I’ve never had to stand and contemplate a landmass falling towards me. It’s not something that lends itself to calm repose. Again doubts and echoes of the old terror tried to burst down the doors to the control center of my brain, but I refused to listen to them. Why was this fucking cloud hounding me, goddamnit?

When the cloud got close enough that I thought it was going to hit me, it stopped. About a quarter mile in the air. The shockwave created by all that mass suddenly stopping knocked me back with enough force to make me tumble. When I came to a stop several dozen yards away, I idly remarked that I was unhurt and climbed back to my feet. I slowly walked back to the small hill and resumed the position I had maintained.

“What the fuck do you want?!” I screamed at the floating ball of darkness.

Nothing happened for several moments. I was about to give up and try to figure out a way to get up there when the entire ball shuddered.

A giant, black-on-black-on-black eye opened in the center. The terror came back like a physical blow.

***

I awoke with a gasp that turned into a groan, having inadvertently strained my side when I startled awake.

“Colm?” I heard Ida say from across the room. There was another set of footsteps with her. “I was just about to wake you. The nurse just arrived.”

I made a non-committal noise through my teeth, trying to calm down so the pain in my side would lessen.

Suddenly there was a slightly familiar woman next to me, wearing an N95 mask and holding the sides of my face in nitrile-gloved hands. “Mr. Avery?”

“That’s me,” I said through gritted teeth. “Sorry, I just woke up from a nightmare and tweaked my side.”

“I need you to look into my eyes,” she said, holding my head gently. “I’m not doing any magic, I just need to see your pupils.”

I complied, looking into her eyes. They were green. She released my head and held up a finger. “Follow my finger with your eyes,” she said.

She ran me through a few more triage tests. She was wearing a T-shirt from a band I wasn’t familiar with and a pair of old worn jeans. Ida hung around, helping the nurse (what was her name? Cuper? Cooper?) by bringing a chair for her to sit next to me or anything else she asked for. I couldn’t hear Alice anywhere in the building.

“Alright, now we got all the boring stuff out of the way,” the nurse said and she pulled out a sports bottle with a squirt top filled with a bright green liquid. “Have you been healed before?”

“Twice,” I said. “Once was this morning.”

“Do you know the method?” She asked.

I thought for a moment. “I don’t, actually. Both times I was near comatose and didn’t think to ask,” I turned to Ida. “Is Alice around?”

She shook her head. “After her phone call she took the—“she hesitated. “The police car to see what she could find out.”

Oh, she went to interrogate the cultist and didn’t want to do it near the nurse.

I frowned. “Well, I know the ingredients,” I said. “Will that help?”

The nurse nodded. I repeated them for her and her and she nodded knowingly.

“Cécht’s Well,” she muttered. “Great spell if you can source the ingredients. The one I’m going to be using isn’t nearly as thorough as that one, but the ingredients are much easier to get your hands on. Are we ready?”

“Yeah, just—just start slow,” I said. “I’ve done some things to my body and I kinda need to give you admin permissions to be able to not kill me.”

I was given a long look. “Like a computer?” She asked slowly.

I shrugged one shoulder helplessly. “It’s the easiest comparison I can give.”

Back in the times before I’d fought nearly a hundred pirates and a few warlocks, I’d sold the souls of a few very, very bad people in order to make changes to my body. Over the years I’d made a bunch of changes, some good, a lot bad. Recovering from a bad change took months. One such change was I’d given myself vampire teeth, and getting them back to normal had taken so long that once they got “mostly” there I just gave up and started on other experiments.

The gift was not intuitive in its use. Imagine that every cell in your body had a drop-down menu with thousands of commands. Now imagine that you can group a bunch of cells together and give commands to those cells, but selecting which cell was in the group and what wasn’t was a real pain in the ass and also not an exact process. For every change you made to a group of cells, you had to issue a series of—for lack of a better word—commands, that would change how their protein structures align and other stuff that I barely understand. I got a D in biology folks, I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea.

The problem becomes that these things have to operate in perpetuity or my body loses the bulk of whatever change I made. So when an outside source of change comes in (say, healing magic) and tries to move stuff around, the changes I’ve made to my body fight back.

This is just the best way that I can describe it. The actual process is much more… intuitive? It’s like trying to get a specific muscle to flex, but the muscle doesn’t exist. I've gotten better at it over the years and even made real strides in the past year, but it was still a very slow process.

Like I said; it's kind of a pain in the ass.

“Alright,” she said, drawing out the word.

She removed the bandages around the wound and inspected it for a bit before nodding to herself. Then she twisted the top of the sports bottle and shot the liquid right next to the wound, which came out with the consistency of shampoo. Once there was a big glob of it on my chest she gently pushed it over the wound and as gently as she could, spread it around it. Once it was good and coated she put both her hands around the wound and looked at me.

“I’m going to start now,” she said, and I gave her a weak thumbs up.

I half expected to suddenly convulse like I had on the ship a year ago, but I just felt my muscles tightening as the energy crept into me. I sunk into myself and started telling my body to ignore the foreign energy, to allow it to make changes. After a minute or so, the energy started to flow in a torrent. But the gates were open, so to speak, and there were no problems.

After five minutes the energy suddenly stopped and the nurse made a concerned noise. “What’s up?” I asked.

She lifted her hands and gestured wordlessly at the wound. It only took me a moment to find what had made her stop.

The wound looked markedly better than it did just minutes ago. It wasn’t completely healed, but just another few minutes under the spell and it should be safe to take out the stitches. The problem was that the black flesh was growing in time with the healing. Where before the little black tendrils had spread maybe an inch from the stab, they now covered a significant portion of my side, and the area around the wound was about half an inch of solid black.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should have spotted the spread sooner, but I had my eyes closed while I concentrated on the spell.”

I sighed. I spent a few moments thinking about what to do but… there really wasn’t a choice, was there? I needed to find Conner.

“Just keep going,” I said with resignation. “I need to be able to move in case I get attacked again.”

The nurse was obviously reluctant but did as I asked. After that, the healing went on for another half hour without interruption, the nurse stopping twice to cover the wound with more green goop.

“That’s as much as I can do safely,” she said as she straightened and stretched her back. “Any more and I might interfere with your body’s natural functions.”

The tendrils covered a good… I wanna say forty-five percent of my abdomen, reaching as far as my back before they stopped. I kept the worry off my face as I thanked the nurse and arranged for her payment.

“What spell is that?” I asked. It could come in handy.

She shrugged. “It isn’t a standard spell,” she said. “Something Doctor Cross and I came up with. If you’re looking for a healing spell, though, I recommend Apollo’s Light. It’s pretty common and not nearly as effective as what I’ve done today, but you don’t need to have a strong medical foundation to draw upon to use it.”

“Sounds right up my alley,” I said with a smile. “Thanks for patching me up.”

She nodded and gathered her things. I left to go find a shower.

Then I needed to poke Alice and find out why she had been yelling at her mom. And also what she managed to dig out of the cultist's head.

Christ. What a day.

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