by M. J Kreyzer
“I’m okay… But…” Seraphine started, the reason of her approach stumbling clumsily from her mouth. She was a shy little thing. “That leg’s infected.”
Smart little thing too. Hendrick shrugged. “It’ll be fine. If it doesn’t kill me then it’ll make me tougher.”
“…But… but what if it does kill you?”
Hendrick laughed, looking down at her. Her head was turned, almost in the complete opposite direction. It was a wonder she could even see what was in front of her. Her concern was appalling, especially for a girl who had absolutely no idea who he was. Hendrick said nothing. But looking down at Seraphine, Hendrick had no doubt that there was still a slew of things that she wanted to ask him and he knew she didn’t possess the courage to actually ask them. He’d help her along for now until she could open up.
“So what’s the matter, kiddo?”
Seraphine clasped her hands together. Her eyes were still averted. Hendrick placed a hand at the base of her head and turned it towards him.
“It’s okay if you look at me.” He said with a chuckle. Seraphine didn’t return the amusement.
“Now,” Hendrick went on. “What is it you’d like to ask me?”
The eye contact made Seraphine uncomfortable and once Hendrick removed her hand it was clear that she struggled to maintain it. Eventually she looked away.
“Heh, we’ll work on that later.”
“…But Hendrick?”
“Call me Nate.”
Seraphine blushed. “…Nate… what about all those cuts on your face?”
Hendrick put a hand on the crusty bandages that were scattered across his head and realized he was still pretty beat up. He looked quickly back to Sable.
“How bad do I look?”
Sable looked his face over and winced. It was all the explanation he needed.
“Can we stop for a minute?” Seraphine asked him.
Hendrick shook his head. “We can’t, darlin. Gotta keep up with the other groups so we don’t break-“
“It’ll only take a minute.”
Hendrick looked to his left towards a group of rocky cliffs where he knew Morlo’s group to be before turning back to check out his own group. After a moment of thought he sighed and raised his hand for them all to stop.
“Hang in there everybody.” He said. Seraphine’s concern was touching but, at the same time, surprisingly annoying. He turned to her in a mixture of both admiration and aggravation at her persistent concern.
“Alright,” He said while folding his arms. “What you want me to do?”
With bashful hands Seraphine made a waving movement with her hands. “Sit… sit down.”
Everybody was watching. Hendrick smiled in complete confusion. “Okay…” He fell to his backside and winced as his weight temporarily fell entirely on his right leg. Seraphine nodded to herself.
“I knew it.” She muttered. She began rolling up his pant leg. Hendrick shot backwards, the confusion on his face transforming into shock.
“Easy, cupcake, if I’d known you were doin’ that I would’ve kept walking.”
At Hendrick’s sharp withdrawal Seraphine retracted her hands and became shy once more. She pointed timidly towards Hendrick’s thigh. “I just… you have to-“
“Have to what!” Hendrick said. “Sweet Nancy, just tell me what you’re doin!”
“Just roll your pant leg up.” Sable said, cocking her hips impatiently. Hendrick looked up at her with renewed surprise.
“You too?” Hendrick asked. When he was met with silence he went quiet. He looked between Sable and Seraphine and considered the situation. Hendrick couldn’t ever recall feeling uncomfortable, but if discomfort was the sensation he was experiencing then he didn’t like it: not in the least. But Seraphine was persistent, and there was no way a girl like her anticipated getting fresh with him, especially in front of the others. Hesitantly, Hendrick relaxed, sat back with a defeated but consenting look on his face and waved for Seraphine to continue.
Her hands diffident, Seraphine took the hems of Hendrick’s pants and rolled them slowly upward. Hendrick shook his head and rested on his one arm.
“I have absolutely no idea what she’s doing.” Hendrick said, speaking casually up to Sable. “I’m perfectly fine and there’s really nothing to wor- SON OF A BUZZARD BLOWING...!”
Hendrick’s hand shot out and clasped Sable’s ankle. She jumped at the sudden movement and looked at his leg.
Seraphine had the pants rolled up to his lower thigh and the issue became immediately clear.
Hendrick’s pants stuck to his leg, glued there by dried blood and pus. Only a small portion of the wound was visible but the look on Seraphine’s face was a nervous one. She kept rolling the pants upward. Hendrick bit his fist as she did.
“You’re pullin’ my leg hairs! Careful!”
“Don’t be such a baby.” Kristik grunted while shaking his head disapprovingly.
“I’ll kill you!” Hendrick said, shoving a finger in Kristik’s direction. “Say something else and I’ll kill you!”
His pants tore away from the wound with a harsh ripping noise, taking hair, dead skin and blood with it. The edges of the wound stuck to the pants as well, stretching out until they broke the hold and went back to their normal shapes. After an eternal minute Hendrick, breathing hard, gave Seraphine a critical and angry stare.
“You happy now!” He said.
“Lay back.” Seraphine said, her voice urgent. She placed a hand on Hendrick’s chest and gently pushed him back. Hendrick swatted her hand away and tried to get up.
“No! I’m not going to!”
“Please!” Seraphine pleaded, looking back and forth between Hendrick’s face and the wound in his leg. “Just look at it!”
Hendrick saw her concern and calmed himself down. After regaining his composure he looked up at Sable and saw her eyes. They weren’t even looking at him; they were glued to the wound on his leg. So were Kristik’s and Pitt’s. Kristik whistled, quite impressed. Hendrick had to get a look for himself. He readjusted his sitting position, sat up straight and took a look at his wound.
A gash over five inches long ran from just above his knee towards his mid-thigh. It was as though it were pulling itself apart on its own; the surface of the wound was gaping while the inside looked like purple, rotting meat. The entire area around the astounding lesion, an area which nearly consumed his entire thigh, was purplish-black with a putrid green around its edges. Seeing that was actually a surprise to Hendrick. He thought that it was healing up but instead it looked like his leg was trying to eat itself. Like Kristik , he whistled in amazement.
“Wow,” Hendrick muttered. “I’m the fricking man.”
“These kinds of things get amputated.” Seraphine said, rubbing her hands together and looking around at the group.
“Whoa!” Sable said, putting both hands over the hilt of her katana and stepping back. “I’m not doing it!”
“I’ll be fine!” Hendrick shouted. “Don’t even think about taking my damn leg!”
“We have to take care of this now.” Seraphine said, concentrating her eyes on Hendrick’s legs and raising her hands up towards the wound.
Hendrick shook his head. “I don’t care! You’re not-“
“Just lay back.” Seraphine said, placing her hands on the wound. She looked at Hendrick with a beseeching expression. “…please.”
“Nate,” Sable said, walking up to his head and kneeling down next to him. “Calm down. She’s not going to chop off your leg.”
“Then what’s she-“
Sable put her hands on his shoulders and hushed him. She nodded towards Seraphine as a request for Hendrick to give her his attention.
Seraphine was on both knees, her hands placed one on top of the other on top of the wound. Her head bowed and her eyes closed, she began to mutter something in a language Hendrick couldn’t understand.
The words were soothing, and Seraphine’s gentle voice uttered them beau
tifully. Without explanation, Hendrick felt his body loosen up while every muscle in his body relaxed. Hendrick listened to Seraphine and tried to make out what she was saying. As he tried, Sable’s head came down next to his ear.
“She’s praying.” Sable whispered. “In Deche. She’s asking for guidance. For strength and…” Sable listened further, trying to remember what she’d learned about the ancient Durant language. “And asking that your leg’ll mend well, I think. She’s healing you, Nate.”
“Healing?” Nate said, his voice loud. “I’ve never seen-“
“Shh.” Sable whispered. “Not everybody prays out loud. Most Durants think of healing as a direct action from God himself. You’ve been around Luke for decades, you should know these things.”
“I know that, I just have never seen it like-“
“Quiet.” Sable said.
The area around the wound began to glow a sapphire blue, starting at the edges of the bruise and nearly consuming his entire leg. Blue ribbons twisted and tangled inside and around the gash, illuminating Seraphine’s hands as she continued the process.
There was a warm tingling that flowed through his entire leg, starting at his knee cap and stretching up to his upper thigh. His skin felt as though it were solid rock while the inside of his stab wound burned intensely, though it wasn’t a painful burn. It was a burning that Hendrick would have a difficult time describing.
Watching the healing take place was almost mesmerizing to Hendrick. He’d had some bad wounds before but he’d never let anybody heal him; he’d always preferred traditional means. Yet there was something about Seraphine that he hadn’t encountered before. This healing process was different. With her doing it, it felt like more than just a way of closing a wound. Standing around Hendrick, Kristik and Pitt were awestruck. Never in their lives had they seen an actual healing, and seeing a healing such as this was something they wouldn’t soon forget.
Inside the wound Hendrick could feel his muscles pulling themselves back together and tightening as though the wound had never been there. The brutal blackness around the wound began to withdraw as though the wound were sucking it back into itself, and the laceration itself got smaller and smaller, closing up as though without any sign of there being a wound before.
The glowing died down and faded into nothing, leaving the area darker than it had been before.
The sun was almost below the horizon and stars were slowly revealing themselves all across the sky. Seraphine, heavily fatigued with her hands still on Hendrick’s thigh, continued praying, whispering the words in Deche.
Hendrick felt no pain anymore, and neither him nor Sable had seen a healing quite like that. Not just in nature, but in skill. Looking down at his thigh Hendrick found no traces of the wound at all. Most healers- in fact, every healer he’d ever known- could heal a wound but left a scar because they simply accelerated the healing process. But whatever Seraphine did, she did what they could do but did it without scarring; a difficult thing to do.
“Thanks…” Hendrick said, flexing his thigh and testing its strength. It far surpassed his expectations. But the amazement surrounding his newly healed leg was quick to flee as Hendrick realized they’d been immobile for almost twenty minutes. That was enough time for the other groups to get several miles ahead of them. They had to move fast. Hendrick sat up.
“Thanks for that.” Hendrick said. Seraphine motioned for him to stay sitting there. Hendrick pushed her hand down. “We have to go. We can finish up whatever it is you’re doing later.”
Seraphine’s voice sped up. She finished up her prayer, balled her hand into a fist, kissed it, and placed an open palm on the area where the wound used to be.
“Okay.” She said through her renewed exhaustion. She scooted up towards Hendrick’s head and reached a hand out. “Let’s hurry and take care of those.”
“No time, Sera.” Hendrick said, getting to his feet. “I can call you that, right?”
Seraphine tried to get to her feet but winced in pain. “Yeah…” She said through a groan. She tried standing up again but this time it looked like the pain was too much. She collapsed to the ground onto her backside.
“Everybody here all right?” Came a deep, foreboding voice. Kristik yelped and nearly fell over, taking several steps back as Vyvyr passed in front of him.
“We got it.” Hendrick said while reaching down to help Seraphine to her feet. “She was just healing one of the cuts I got in my spat with Frenz. Have to get a calorie pack in her though. Whatever she had before she doesn’t have anymore.”
“Still a bit of work left, I see.”
Hendrick put Seraphine’s arm over his shoulder and he gave Vyvyr a mocking look.
“And that’s why you’re single.”
“We have to move.” Vyvyr stated, taking no time for banter or untimely pleasantries. “There’s Forge tanks on every peak surveying the valleys. Once the rest of the forest cools down we’ll be impossible to miss on their thermals. Now I just got a good look up ahead and the other two groups have stopped about a mile downhill. Probably found a good place to set up camp.”
Hendrick began walking with Seraphine, finding that she was virtually incapable of bearing her own weight. She insisted that she was capable of walking on her own but Hendrick ignored her and scooped her up in his arms.
“Then let’s get there then.”
Pontious stood at the edge of a subterranean cavern, looking over the forest behind them in search of the final group. Morlo and Muldoon rested themselves on massive rocks where Morlo attempted to hold conversation with Muldoon but ended up holding that conversation with just himself. Taking a look down inside the cavern was Serenity, not straying too far as she wasn’t quite sure what they might find inside. And sitting next to one another at the mouth of the cave, in complete silence, was Luke and Tess.
Neither one knew what to say, and what they thought might be appropriate was put down by the discomfort of actually saying it. The possibilities of how Luke might spark a conversation kept flitting across his mind, though every time Luke decided against it.
She felt guilty. Tess had inherited Luke’s inability to hide his emotions. She made attempts at seeming indifferent, but her feelings were obvious. But no matter how bad she felt, she wouldn’t say anything. For one reason or another it was like Tess felt like, if she didn’t talk about the problem, it would blow over as though it hadn’t ever happened at all. Teenagers were strange beings.
They had been there almost an hour and Luke was starting to get impatient. That third group was the only group that actually mattered to the mission. But then he saw that the sun hadn’t moved since they had sat down, and Luke realized that they didn’t actually have to worry for another couple hours.
“Luke!” Yelled Morlo, who got to his feet and approached Luke. “We gotta get out there ‘n find those guys!”
“They’re fine.” Luke replied without an ounce of concern. “Just be patient.”
“We were only a few hundred yards apart, man. There’s no way that-“
Morlo stopped as he saw Luke tapping a finger in the direction of the sun.
“Decelerated Time-field.” Luke said. “There’s a Furo spring somewhere nearby. I’d say that our time is about a tenth of the speed of regular time.”
“…Cool.” Morlo said as his concern melted and he immediately returned to his own jolly self. “Hey, Muldoon! Let’s arm wrestle!”
“Not a chance.”
“C’mon, you little poon!”
As Morlo returned to rejoin Muldoon in the two-man circle they had created, Luke put his focus back on Tess, thinking of the right things to say. The fact that he was worried surprised him, though. He knew she felt bad yet he found himself afraid that he still might say something wrong. And it wasn’t like he had her entire childhood as a reference to predict her behavior; in the past six years he had seen her a grand total of eight days. That wasn’t exactly much for him to go on. That fact though is what Luke suspected fuele
d the anxiety around his interactions with his daughter. He still didn’t even know her, yet she was all he had left. He didn’t want to mess things up a second time.
“So… are you okay, Tessy?”
Tess exhaled sharply as though she had been holding her breath. “I’m not twelve anymore, Luke. You don’t call me that anymore.”
She used his first name. Luke’s confidence plummeted.
“You can still call me Dad, Tess.” He said quietly.
“What,” Tess said, tensing up in preparation for an argument. “You don’t even know me. Reading my mind isn’t going to tell you everything. Just stop it.”
Luke found himself being timid. Only his family could do this to him. “I never said I knew you.” Luke said with regret lacing his voice. “But I’ve always wanted to.” Again, he stopped. Everything he’d been doing was proof to the contrary. “I… I never wanted things to be like this. Is that what you think? That I like slaughtering Legionnaires, sleeping with my sword in one hand… that I like… that I like wondering if I’m going to die the next day or even that night? Or if you might die.,.”
Tess leaned in. It looked like she was no longer on the offensive. She seemed to melt at the sight of Luke’s depression.
“I never wanted any of this.” Luke said, almost pleading with Tess. “I wanted a quiet life. A good life. Before Lynch came along and ruined things for everybody I had my entire life figured out.”
Thoughts of his hopes and dreams for life came sprinting back to him with such ferocity it made his heart skip a beat. Every once in a while Luke would wonder what life would be like if the Commune hadn’t taken power, but there was never a time when he recalled those things so directly as he did then. He smiled fondly.
“I was going to get you a new dress for your first birthday. You know, one of those little pink frilly ones that your mom used to talk about. Whenever we would get up and get dressed for church your mom would dress you up with little ribbons in your hair… you had so much hair for your age, Tessy, you really did… and she’d say how much she wanted to get you one of those cute little pink frilly dresses to wear to church so everybody could look at you and see how gorgeous you looked. And every week we went to Church everybody would say to Trina… they’d say to your mom ‘Trina, she’s so beautiful.’ And they’d ask to hold you and coddle you and your mom would let them… and you never cried. Not once. With all the people we passed you around to you never cried.”