To the Waters and the Wild - ch.17
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Daren lay unmoving on the tiles, paler than I had ever seen him. Making his high cheekbones stand out. His eyes were closed but I could tell that he was aware of what was going on due to the faint tension lines around the corner of his eyes and mouth. The clenching of his fingers into the cloth of his tunic was also a giveaway of the pain he obviously felt. But he made no sound.
Fey pride or male ego. I wasn’t sure.
The healer had her hands extended over his chest. Not touching, but hovering as the center point for a green glow. Healing magic.
“Healing magic has one failure. It must combat with the innate magic of one’s patient. That is why healers are so rare. They have to be more powerful than all of those injured, or else burn out.” The prissy tones of my tutor sounded in my head.
Damn. After being dead for a decade that old man could still get to me.
Looking closer I could tell the magic was not steady. It shivered on contact and faded in and out in certain places. Flickering.
As I got closer I could feel the tension. Daren’s power was fighting off what it subconsciously saw as the foreign magic. Unfortunately the foreign magic was the healers. He knew this, I could tell he knew, but he couldn’t stop. And it was painful; the healer was one of the more powerful and even she was having trouble dealing with him.
If this lasted too long the healer would burn herself out and Daren would die. If not from whatever was wrong with him then from magical exhaustion. And in his case, he was magic. If he exhausted everything that he was…
I couldn’t even think of it. There must be something…
Something….
“Sarah.” The strained voice brought me out of my musings. It did not hold the teasing quality of the courtier prince. No. This was the heir. The leader. From his position on the ground I could see that Daren’s eyes had opened, but were feverishly darting from figure to figure as if searching. I realized that whatever was wrong with him must have hit his eyes and he was panicking.
The green glow was even lighter now and the healer was sweating. Frantically pouring power into her hands, even though she knew that she was almost at her limit.
This I could do.
Though I argued often with Daren, I would not see him die.
I placed my hands over the healers, allowing her to remove them with a sigh. Placing him in a kind of stasis, I moved around his power to discover what was wrong. I did not try to heal or force his body to do anything, merely looked.
And when my power brushed up against his. It was glorious.
You ever feel that moment where everything just fits? This was it. Instead of fighting my magic, his power wrapped around mine. Not in a suffocating way, but more like a dance. And everything was so… right.
“Precious” he murmured weakly, reaching up with a hand to touch my cheek.
I lost myself for a moment in the feeling, but when we touched the poison inside his body, everything jarred back to reality and I could feel my individuality once more.
The poison wasn’t the sharp, almost clean, feel of an immediate death. And I thanked all the gods for small blessings. But it was greasy and oily, and it clung to Daren. A wasting death, since it slowly sucked on his magical core while eating away at his body.
This kind of thing you couldn’t simply remove the poison, there were crevices where remnants could hide and spread once more. Similar to the mortal cancer. No. With this you had to remove the castor.
Not just remove, I thought, the stiirings of anger beginning in my chest so hard that it almost hurt. Not remove. Obliterate.
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