by Rain Oxford
“What was that about me being a doctor?” I asked Edward in English.
“They cannot know you’re the only one left in the world with magic. At least if they think you’re a doctor, they won’t suspect anything when your ‘patients’ suddenly get better. You need to disguise your healing and not heal them too much. If they find out you are the only one left with magic, they would likely suspect that you’re the cause of its absence.”
“I got it. Play human.”
“Not human. You are officially listed as my brother and they will believe anything I tell them to believe,” Nila said. “Now bring my nephews to visit or I will tell my guards that your pet is a mercenary.”
“You really must stop calling Mordon my pet. And besides, I don’t think Mordon would care.” We came to a partially collapsed tunnel. There was a way around, but it would have taken most of a day, so we went through it. Still, it took more than an hour. Most places were a tight squeeze for everyone but Nila and the loose clay was wet and sticky.
We made it out to another village, which had suffered a lot more damage than Nila’s city. Houses here were made of stone and an odd synthetic wood which disintegrated when wet. Very little held up to the knee-high flood and what was built at a higher elevation had shaken apart from the quake. People were trapped in their homes and businesses everywhere. Several people hadn’t reported to the stations because they were trying to get their loved ones free.
Nila was an incredible help, as he could lift and toss aside debris three times his size. He was the strongest of the dile, which were the strongest of people. Even the other dile stood aside to let him work. When we got to people who were mortally wounded, I would disguise my healing magic by wrapping bandages, as I learned to do on myself as a kid. We rescued several goblins, which were very difficult for me to heal because they had to be unconscious for me to get away with it, as they were very sensitive to magic of any kind.
We worked throughout the day and night, going from village to village. I lost count of how many people I healed, but I knew exactly how many I failed. There were too many people and some of them had been killed instantly. Some died from bleeding out or suffocating because it took too long to find them.
The first time I saw one of the rare trolls, I was timid to approach him. Halfway out of a tunnel that had collapsed on him, he was obviously in need of help, but he was about twice my height and four times wider. His skin was greyer than a person’s and his huge face was a little flatter. When Nila tried to move the fallen rock off of him, he woke thrashing and yelling nonsense over and over. Edward explained to me that trolls were not bright and were extremely dangerous when they felt trapped. Oddly, when Nila got enough of the debris off him, the troll still did not get up. Instead, he moved around before resettling himself with his arms under him.
“He’s holding something,” I said.
I reached out and touched his arm, sending magic through him. He lifted his head to look me right in the eyes. It reminded me of the last time I came eye to eye with a draxuni in the Aradlin forest. It was protecting its pups, but the pack had somehow mistaken Mordon for an abandoned pup and was not going to let him go on his own.
My magic showed me no damage except for some bruised bones and a sprained wrist. “Come out of there. No one will hurt you,” I said as softly as I could. I knew my magic would translate my words into something he could at least halfway understand.
The troll glanced past me at Nila and Edward before he retreated a few inches further into the collapsed cave. It was as much as he could move, but it left a message. The troll never moved his arm that was blocking whatever was under him. He was holding himself up on his elbows and cradling something with one hand while hiding it with his other.
“Nila, Edward, back up just a little ways,” I said. “He’s scared.”
“Trolls are dangerous when they’re afraid, Dylan. He might attack you,” Edward said, not moving.
The troll snarled his rotting teeth at the Guardian.
“Hush,” I said, moving to block the troll’s sight of my uncle. “Nobody is going to hurt anyone. Come out. I can’t help you in here.” I kept my hand gently on his arm as I took two slow steps back. With my free hand, I waved everyone behind me away. I paused before taking another step away, breaking contact with the giant.
He crept forward, just enough for my hand to touch his arm again. I wondered why his skin was so cold, but I figured that must have been a troll thing because my magic didn’t warn me about it. I smiled, but kept my lips closed so I wouldn’t show my teeth.
I took another step back and he followed, braver now that I was retreating instead of advancing. Soon, he was cleared of the cave. “I am a healer. I can help you if you need it,” I said. He looked unsure, but slowly uncurled his arms, laying his burden on the ground. It was two little dile children, both about Ron’s age.
“Heal,” the troll grunted, nudging them towards me.
The two children had short brown hair and dark purple eyes. They were almost identical in appearance, including the raged, torn clothes and dirt covered faces. I assumed they were twins, but one was a boy and one was a girl. The boy was fine, just shaken up and a little dehydrated. The unconscious girl, on the other hand, needed serious medical attention.
There was a small mound of dirt, just high enough and wide enough to lay the girl on to keep her out of the water. Somebody laid a damp sheet down on it so it wouldn’t be so muddy. My magic found multiple broken bones. Her legs were crushed and with only a mortal’s power, she would never walk again.
“Please help her. I tried to get her out but she kept screaming,” the boy cried. Of course, he was speaking Dego, but my magic didn’t miss a word in the translation. “The troll heard her screams and came to help, but then he was trapped, too.”
“Nila, take him,” I said. I couldn’t concentrate. I had stitched flesh, mended bones, and even healed burns with magic… but I never had to rebuild bones that had been crushed before. “Get me scissors, a cloth, and water.”
I don’t know who handed me the cloth and water, but Edward got to work on cutting away her pants, revealing horrible wounds. My magic had been too overwhelmed by all the internal damage that I hadn’t even seen the deep exterior injuries. I pulled out my pen light to help me see in the dim light and washed the wounds as gently as I could before Edward started applying medical herbs. All around us there was crying and pleading from the injured and their loved ones. Debris randomly fell loose from the ceiling and I could hear tunnels and homes collapsing in the distance.
This was what being a doctor in the middle of war must have felt like.
When Edward was done with the external wounds, I stopped him from wrapping her legs. The medical paste would prevent her from bleeding out, but I needed to work on her bones without the gauze hindering her healing. After putting my penlight away, I released my magic and concentrated on healing her.
I could see in my mind how her bones would expand back into their original shape and begin mending. They would never be perfect, but I had to do my best. When I didn’t feel pain in my own legs, I knew it wasn’t working. So I sent more magic. I stopped trying to picture the healing and trusted my magic to do what it was created for.
It was distracting when someone put a curtain around us, but it cut off some of the sounds of people in despair. As prepared as I was for pain in my legs, it was a sudden pain in my chest that left me gasping for breath. “Her heart stopped,” I said, moving to press my ear against her chest. I was right, but I wasn’t about of give up.
I was CPR certified for infant through adult since middle school on Earth and I had never been more thankful that I had learned. I did the hands-only method because I didn’t have enough air to give her. My magic was still cycling through her and giving me her pain.
She woke and coughed before screaming in agony. I stopped pressing on her heart and continued working on her legs. As distracting as her screaming was, I didn’t want he
r to stop, for it meant she was alive. Then the pain came on more strongly than I had ever felt from healing someone. I was glad to be sitting because I knew I would not otherwise have been able to continue. I could barely keep from screaming myself.
Finally, her cries ended, but my pain did not. Edward quickly wrapped her mostly healed flesh wounds. Her brother helped her up and when she stood, wobbly, but without pain, she cried and hugged me. Although it was agonizing, I couldn’t tell her to stop. Her brother took her away and Edward knelt in front of me. Edward tried to hand me a cup of water, but I couldn’t take it. When another spasm of pain went through my legs, I fell back. Instead of landing in knee-high water, huge hands caught me and pulled me up, way off the ground. The troll held me to his massive chest in an extremely gentle hug.
“Good healer,” the troll praised, petting my hair. “Good healer.”
The pain was fading, but not enough that I could stand when the troll tried to set me down. “I can’t,” I said. My legs wouldn’t hold me up and the pain was crippling. The troll couldn’t figure out why I didn’t stand, but he wouldn’t let me fall into the water, so he sat me gently on the same mound where I had healed the girl.
I didn’t know how to heal myself from phantom pains… or even real injuries. If Mordon were here, I could have cycled my magic through him to help myself, but without him, I would just have to suffer through it. Edward helped me drink water.
“Bring me someone else who needs to be healed,” I said. I couldn’t even move my legs, but at least the rest of my body just hurt.
“Not a chance. If you can’t go to them, you are in no shape to heal them,” Edward said.
He would always put my needs first, and somewhere along the way, he learned that I felt the pain of the injuries I healed. I looked at the troll and saw more intelligence in his eyes than I expected. I held out my arm and he gently picked me up, cradling me like a child myself.
“There’s someone screaming louder than anyone else,” I said to the troll. “Take me to her.” The troll had no trouble following her cries… but it wasn’t an injured woman we found. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty and despite the blood covering her body, she appeared uninjured. In her lap was a dead man in his late twenties with a horrible gash to his head.
I tried to reach out to him to see if he was beyond help, but the woman yanked him away.
“This man is healer,” The troll advised, his voice guttural.
She looked from me to the man in her arms before moving away just a couple of inches. The troll sat me down next to him. I let out my magic, but it came back to me with hopelessness. I looked at the woman as she watched his face. I knew she wanted nothing more in life than for him to open his eyes. “I am sorry,” I said. She cried and laid her head on his chest.
The troll nudged me in the back. “Heal,” he demanded.
“I cannot heal the dead.” The man had been dead for hours. Nila came to my side. “You need to help her before she does something to herself.”
“He was her husband. It is not shameful to die of a broken heart,” the boy-king said.
“If she kills herself, that is not dying of a broken heart,” I argued.
He considered the woman. “It is to us. She has a right to end her pain. She is not a child and we cannot ask her to move on. You can heal anyone who asks for it, but let her deal with her grief.”
“People get over the loss of their spouses! They even get over losing children. You can’t let her kill herself because she’s upset!” The troll picked me up and walked away. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Healer is wrong,” he said simply.
By now, the flood water was only about five inches deep. The pain in my heart was overtaking the pain in my legs, but the troll would not set me down until it was to heal a teenager who was bleeding out badly with a major head wound. I healed her with no incident and the troll moved me to another victim. He only offered one-word answers when someone spoke to him.
A man about my age, holding a little boy about five, followed us as I healed the injured, but he didn’t approach and the child never cried. Finally, when I finished healing a pregnant woman with just a little internal bleeding, I held my hand out to stop the troll from picking me back up. I looked at the man and little boy. When I didn’t say anything, he approached hesitantly.
“Please look at this one. I found him in his family home, which had collapsed. His parents are both dead, but he was not crying or screaming.” He sat the boy in front of me.
“Hey there, little man. Can you tell me your name?” I asked. He stared blankly at me. “Can you hear me?” He showed no sign of hearing me, but that didn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t. “Okay, then. I am going to take a look at your throat. I will not hurt you. I need you to open your mouth and stick out your tongue. Can you do that?” I asked. He didn’t respond.
I pulled out my silver penlight and gently pressed down on his jaw to open his mouth. His eyes finally moved from his dull stare to look at the thin flashlight. He held his mouth open and flattened his tongue out. As I focused the light in his mouth, I let my energy search him for injuries. His throat looked fine and the only injury I could find was a badly sprained ankle.
“Well, I can see nothing wrong there, let me look at your ears,” I said. Then I clicked the button on the end to turn the light off. He flinched. I put the light to his ear and clicked it on. He flinched again. “So your hearing is fine. Can you tell me what happened?” I asked. I focused the light in his other ear before clicking it off. He turned his head to study it.
“What is that?” His voice was a whisper.
Obviously he wasn’t about to pass out, and I was still supposed to hide my magic from everyone. People needed my help much more than him, but I was worried about his mental condition if he could watch the death of his parents and not cry. “This is Vaigdan technology. It can heal little wounds.”
“Not the dead?” Still a whisper.
“No, not the dead.”
“What heals dead people?” he asked.
“Love, I guess. You can remember people you loved. Everybody will die someday. The only thing you can do is love them and hope they’re happy in the spirit world.”
“Can I have one of those Vaigdan healing wands? Can I heal people with it?”
“You have to be a doctor for it to work. Is that something you want? You will never be able to heal people back to life.”
“But you did. You pressed on that girl’s chest and she came back. You used magic to bring her back from death.”
“Yes, I guess you are right about the bringing her back, but that wasn’t magic, and it doesn’t work every time. You can save life without magic. There are doctors on Earth who save people every day without magic.”
“I will grow up and be a doctor and healer. Then will you give me one of those Vaigdan healing wands?” he asked.
“Yes. Tell Nila when you are all grown up and can heal people with and without magic. He will send for me and I will bring you one.” I had an idea that would stretch beyond my abilities now… but by then I would have a way.
I was healing a little girl who had over a dozen major breaks as well as a punctured lung when the wave came again. Silence fell over the people. All crying, talking, begging stopped. And we waited.
No earthquake. Edward held out his hand and a blockage of wreckage came apart. “The magic is back,” he said. I felt around me for nominal energy and sure enough, he was right. With their power back, people became braver and held themselves together. Soon I was no longer needed, and I passed out.
* * *
“You remembered what I told you,” Vretial said. We were at the apple tree and he sat on the large boulder under it. The pain from healing was gone, but it felt like the energy inside me was swirling and squirming.
“I remembered what you told me, but I didn’t understand.”
“I know you didn’t understand. When your energy clashed with an equall
y powerful force, your magic used that opportunity to help you remember, but you were only seven. You need to see it again, from new eyes.”
“You said you couldn’t send me back there.”
He sighed. “I thought you of all people would pay attention. Mordon saw everything you remembered because you can share memories and thoughts.”
“How are we able to share thoughts when we focus and talk to each other in our heads without magic? I don’t know what it is between us, but I think Sammy and Ron are the same.” Although I knew Vretial couldn’t be trusted to tell me the truth any more than my wife, any answers, even lies, were better than no answers.
“Yes, it appears they have problems with bad translations as well. They say they are brothers. I like that translation,” he said thoughtfully.
“If ‘brother’ is the wrong translation, what is the correct one?” I asked.
He smirked. “Balance, of course. Or equilibrium, or stability. It is such an unrestricted word, that brother works just as well.”
“They say Mordon and I are brothers. I thought I was supposed to balance Divina.”
“According to our people, who have long since died, there exists a mate for each of the Iadnah. It was said that we could never mate with another god because it would throw off the balance in the universe. I honestly always thought it was a myth in order to control us, since the idea that we had to adhere to the balance was preposterous at the time. Then I watched my people fall and I learned that the balance is the only thing holding the universe together.
“Unfortunately, you throw off the balance. You are not a god, yet not a mortal either. It is a mistake I think, that you have the power you do. In order to correct its mistake, the natural reaction of the universe was to create Mordon. Like a mutation, there is a three-way equilibrium. While you and Tiamat are mates, Mordon and you are balanced. The more powerful you become in one aspect, Mordon becomes in another. To add insult to injury, outside forces threatened to disrupt the balance between you.”