Volume 1, Chapter 55: Very Impatient Patient (Patreon)

When Alexander slammed into the wooden crates, the entire platform we had landed on shuddered, and the ropes snapped taut so hard I thought they were about to break and everything he had just done would go to waste.

The whole thing started swinging, several strands of rope giving way with sharp cracks, while I quickly slipped out of my cage, which—because of the way his body had landed—was lying dangerously close to materials that would have caught fire the moment they touched my outer shell.

I looked around, sliding my face along the surface, but fortunately none of the men who had watched our jump seemed brave enough to repeat my best friend’s stunt. They only stood by the railings, watching to see whether he would move.

Following his own philosophy, I tried to move as little as possible so I wouldn’t draw attention to myself.

“Lex, no—please don’t move too much. Maybe they’ll think you’re dead,” I told him, keeping my flame low and limiting my fumes as much as I could. At the same time, I was especially careful to stay low.

“If... this keeps going... they’ll be right,” he managed, forcing the words out with difficulty, but stopping his attempts at doing anything more.

I immediately used my Eye of the Physician to assess his condition. A wall of fire—completely different from me—and some kind of web shimmering with rainbow light sprang up in front of me at once on some spiritual plane, blocking my attempt.

“Lex.” I waited until I had his attention. “Drop your guard. I'm going to heal you before, well, it's too late.”

“Sorry... instinct...” he muttered between shallow breaths.

I dismissed the messages from my Daimon informing me of an Authority conflict. My Aura had already told me that much. As the power gathering inside me reached my eyes, his body began speaking to me in an entirely different language than the one presented by his outward appearance.

One rib was slightly fractured, but posed no immediate threat to his life. The muscles around the shin of his left leg were badly swollen, and a clot had formed in one of the veins. The right side of his body was covered in stab wounds, including two deep enough to cut through muscle and reach his intestines. Their contents were now leaking into his body, poisoning him from within. A mild concussion from the fall and his head snapping backward on impact. And the knife still sticking out of his back, where it had punctured one of his lungs.

“So? Am I... gonna live, Doctor?” he joked, spitting blood.

That was when I felt his consciousness slowly slipping away from that battered, mangled body. The hormones keeping him alive were dropping rapidly, and with them the elevated heart rate of an organ that no longer seemed particularly interested in continuing its function.

“Lex. This is important—you need to work with me. I need your help if I’m going to heal you completely. Do you understand?”

“...I think... yeah,” he answered.

I noticed we were already much higher, and the mist created by the waterfall had thinned, finally allowing my body to breathe real fire again.

“Good. We’ll deal with the most urgent problem first,” I said, flying closer to him. “Can you protect your body with Cinderhide? How many times, roughly? Talk to me!”

“Mm-hm. Don’t know. Hard... to think... like this. Maybe twice? Three or four if I drain absolutely everything from my Psyche... which... I don’t want,” he spat blood and coughed. “...to do.”

So I flew over to him and touched the skin of his arm with my not-quite-finished hand, burning him.

He groaned as his skin began to melt and the hair scorching away released an unpleasant smell into the air.

I knew I was hurting him, but I also knew it was the only way. He needed to be able to armor himself for procedures more difficult than removing poison from his body. The moment we made contact, I used my magic and began removing every toxin that had already managed to spread through him. One after another, as they vanished, burned away by my power, the fog clouding his mind began to clear until enough of his strength and awareness returned for him to yank his arm away.

“Fuck!” he shouted, then coughed again. “...what now?” he whispered.

“Lift your shirt. Turn slowly so you don’t move the knife in your back. You need to expose the stab wounds in your abdomen—use Cinderhide there.”

“Okay,” he whispered, following my instructions.

When his skin became covered in black lava, still shimmering with a fiery glow, I flew closer and touched him with my hand once again. My Daimon protested. It wanted to tell me that this wasn’t a hand. But I knew better—it might have been ragged, and it might have been missing fingers, but the framework was intact, and if it had been real, it could have functioned.

The moment my flames brushed his skin, I began the healing process. I reached inside him, somewhere deeper than the skin—toward the intestines that had been cut open—and despite the protests of my Psyche, which strained harder than it had at any point since I had first become aware of its existence, I guided the tissue, showing it the path it needed to follow to become whole again.

My sparks and my magic entered the cells and helped them connect to one another until his intestine was whole once more. Then I moved one layer higher and began sealing the fatty tissue and muscle, reconnecting veins that had been severed, before finally working on the skin itself—allowing its roughly divided edges to join back together into a single tissue.

“End the spell!” I shouted at him.

“Okay!” he answered, and his blackened skin cracked apart, the wind carrying away the glowing black dust.

“Now the knife in your back, Lex. I can’t pull it out—you have to do it yourself.”

“Fuck. Do I have to? Can’t we... do that later?” he asked, spitting out blood.

“Yes. It cut into your lung. Use Cinderhide there too—this will be the last time. Quickly!”

“Fine, fine.”

He rolled onto his stomach and slowly felt around for where the blade was, then grabbed it and pulled, ripping it out of his own body. He howled, tears running down his face. Fortunately, he covered the skin with his protective spell almost immediately, and I was able to repeat what I had done before, joining the severed parts of his lung and the surrounding tissue back together.

When I finished, my flames started behaving strangely. My fiery hair was blowing downward now, then sideways, curling and whipping around me in every direction until it started interfering with both my sight and hearing.

“Thank you, Bri,” he whispered, rolling fully onto his newly healed back.

He rubbed the arm I had burned, which had turned badly red and was already covered in blisters. Even with his eyes half closed, though, his vitals were much better.

“There’s still... um, your leg,” I said, surprised to find my tongue tangling itself again. “You’d have to cut it open because there’s a clot in the vein. I’ll tell you where, um, exactly to do it, and then I can put it back together afterward.”

“No, Bri. I can move the leg, and even though I feel like shit, I know I’m going to live. Thank you. We’ll deal with it later if we have to.” He coughed again, clearing out the last of the blood that had collected in his lung. “I think your Psyche is running on fumes, considering you’ve apparently forgotten what a fireball is supposed to look like and how fire is supposed to behave. And I’d rather keep at least a little strength in reserve myself, just in case.”

Alexander braced himself on his hands and sat up, looking out beyond the edge of the platform carrying us upward.

I followed his gaze toward the rim near the edges of The Pit, where people moved around like tiny ants as they worked.

“Why did you, um, do that?”

“Why? What kind of question is that, Bri?” He let out a breath and looked down at the knife in his hand—the one he had pulled from his own back. My glow reflected off the blade, painting it orange.

“Why... why do you fight? Why do you, um, treat your body like that? Why didn’t you stop?”

“Are you seriously asking me that?” He turned toward me. Blood was smeared across his face, hiding some of his freckles. His hair was stuck together with sweat and dirt, but his eyes—his eyes were still ready. Still searching, still tracking everything happening around us. Even now, while he was looking at me, they would occasionally dart to the side whenever they caught some movement.

I let my face flow downward in a gesture meant to imitate a nod.

“Bri...” He tilted his head. I didn’t like when he did that. It meant he wasn’t taking me as seriously as I wanted him to. “When my choices are stop moving and die, or keep running, I’m always going to choose running.”

“You could’ve died just now too. Mm-hm. You could’ve missed the crates and fallen, or hit them and still, well, died—so why... why not choose the easier death? I understand that it worked this time, but... I don’t know. I couldn’t take a risk like that.” His eyebrows rose when he heard that, which I thought meant my answer had surprised him.

I still didn’t understand what drove him.

“I’m an impatient man, Bri. I hate waiting, especially when I’m waiting for someone or something else to decide what happens to me. I’d rather die a million times because I fucked up a jump than because I gave up and just sat there waiting for someone to slaughter me.”

“So... you did it for yourself?” I asked directly.

“For... myself? Bri—” He stretched out my name. “Did you think I was desperately trying to save you?”

“Yes. The thought crossed my mind. I was afraid you were risking everything to protect me—I wouldn’t have been able to live with knowing you died saving me. Especially since, well, I refused to give you the help you needed.”

“I’m a selfish man, Bri.” He was looking at me so intensely. “Knowing you were with me, I wasn’t thinking about anything except how you could be useful to me while I escaped. That’s the truth. Honestly...” He laughed quietly to himself as he said it, his gaze drifting somewhere off to the side. “Honestly, I don’t understand why I’ve done so much for you. I told you we were in this together, that we were friends, but we don’t really know each other, and I... I don’t have friends. Never had. I was going to leave you behind the moment it became easier to do that than keep dragging you along. Saving you. Pulling you out of trouble.”

His words hurt me. My fire dimmed, and a burst of black smoke poured downward. I felt unpleasant tingling somewhere inside of me.

“...but at some point, I realized that wasn’t true. That I keep taking risks. Ever since we’ve been together, I’ve kept doing more than I have to just to keep you alive and keep you with me. I feel some kind of strange bond. This need to take care of you, Bri.”

“I’m a burden to you,” I said.

He looked at me again, this time with a smile that quickly faded into something more serious.

“Yes, you are, Bri. Maybe you always will be. But like I told you—I won’t let anyone hurt you. We’re in this together, and contrary to everything I’ve always believed about myself, I actually mean that. So even though, while I was running, I wasn’t thinking about what would happen to you, and I wasn’t doing all of that for you—don’t doubt for a second that if someone had caught you, I would’ve done everything in my power to get you back.”

“Even if it cost you your life? Even, um, if you had to choose between a guaranteed escape and putting yourself in danger?”

“I don’t know. My brain tells me I’d leave you behind in that situation, but everything that’s happened so far seems to say otherwise, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t know whether I was supposed to be happy about that or not. I was also beginning to wonder whether the words he was saying to me were really coming from his heart—or whether they were simply something meant to convince me that he genuinely cared what happened to me.

[Event Achievement Points earned: 3. Total Points Earned: 15. Source: “Excellent, young fiery orb full of healing power—you have reached the city of desert wonders despite numerous hardships.”]

This time, the message didn’t make me happy, even though the numbers kept going up. Instead, Alexander and I simply stared at the city spread out before us as the crane finally lifted us completely out of the hole in the ground.

I looked upward, where in the glow of the silver moon a floating island hung in the air, its golden towers trying to reach the heavens, half-hidden behind a veil of water falling upward from its surface. The thing hung high over the city, vast enough to blot out a portion of the stars, its underside lost in shadow while golden towers rose from its surface like spears aimed at the heavens. They glittered through a shimmering veil of water that streamed from the island upward. Entire waterfalls climbed toward the sky. They poured from cliffs and terraces only to reverse themselves halfway into open air, breaking into silver ribbons that rose around the towers and vanished somewhere above. Moonlight passed through them, scattering across the city in pale, trembling rainbows.

Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of bluegrass spheres drifted through the night below it. They floated lazily between towers and rooftops like enormous blue lanterns, their luminous grass rippling despite the absence of wind, water gathering along their undersides before falling in glittering curtains onto the city below.

Salirion stretched beneath them farther than I could see. Buildings climbed over one another across the metropolis in terraces and tiers—layer upon layer. Nearly every flat rooftop had been transformed into a garden. Trees, flowering vines, bluegrass and reeds spread across them in dense patches of color. Wooden bridges, steel walkways, suspended streets, and narrow archways connected one rooftop to the next until individual buildings almost ceased to matter. From where I floated, the entire city seemed covered by a single immense, broken landscape—a sea of yellow flowers, deep green leaves, luminous blue grass, copper roofs, and pale stone rolling toward the horizon. Here and there, enormous domes rose from that sea. Their curved surfaces reflected thousands upon thousands of lights: glowing plants, floating spheres, lanterns, torches, windows, and the cold radiance of the moon.

Then I noticed the wall. Far in the distance, an enormous fortification cut across the metropolis, so tall that entire neighborhoods seemed to cling to its sides. From its upper reaches stretched colossal aqueducts—bridges wide enough to carry rivers—splitting apart and disappearing toward different districts.

And through them flowed that cursed water. Some streams descended, some crossed the city horizontally and some climbed—rivers running through the sky. Beyond the wall, Salirion rose again. Countless towers pierced the darkness, taller than anything I had seen. Some were narrow as needles from where I could see them. Others broadened into stacked terraces, spiraling palaces, or great columns crowned with gardens and lights. They stood against the stars like a second horizon, their highest floors disappearing into mist and drifting waterfalls.

“Fuck me. That’s not what I was expecting,” Alexander said, getting to his feet, holding onto the ropes and staring out at the view that had captivated me as well.