I had been out cold, clear into the dim light of the next overcast morning. The troupe having been forced into making an emergency roadside camp for both Trilles and I to recover while harvesting the corpses of the shrieking deer. My body fucking hurt. My mind was exhausted. And once again, I was laying naked on a table inside of a tent. This time it appeared to be the mess tent serving its secondary function, which only happened when we suffered multiple major injuries in combat.

  I was inside of a makeshift private room of sorts. One made by dividing up the tent’s interior with scrap canvas from other old tents we’d lost over the years. At least either Everrnak or Marguerite had had the decency to cover most of me with a sheet. And my head had been rested on what felt to be a bundle of folded fabric. It was just barely soft enough to be vaguely comfortable.

  I tried to move my arm and instead my entire body jolted and I cried out in pain. I could tell right away that I had only been partially mended from my worsened injuries. Just enough to keep my body alive and functioning. It was as my nerves were slowly starting to settle from their fury that I finally heard it. A low and miserable groan whimpered out from behind the curtain separating my part of the tent from someone else.

“T-Trilles?” I called out weakly.

There came a deep sniffle and then I heard him clear his throat.

“Sorrel? Y-yeah it’s me, bud. It- It, uh...Ah shit, man, I’m all fucked up right now. I just- I can’t-”

Trilles’ words had been cut off by the dam breaking and unleashing his pent up need to sob. I could only imagine what it must be that he was going through.

  The deer had taken a large chunk out of him and disconnected his arm from his body in the process. Even if the lost bone and some shreds of his flesh had been recovered from the deer’s stomach, there wouldn’t have been enough to reattach anything back to him anyway. No. If he and I were both laid out and able to talk it meant that the puppet apprentices had succeeded in awakening their ancient master. And he had fulfilled his obligation to mend.

  If he were faced by something so trifling as missing parts then he would simply replace them. Trilles sucked back his snot into his nose and began to cough and clear his throat.

“Listen,” I started, “I know it must feel awful, what he’s done to you, but it’s important you don’t let it break you. I’ve seen it before. The way he replaces things. For now just try to be calm and, if you’re able, focus on drawing your mana away from his while you’re awake. It should help keep your mana from trying to reject it and reduce the pain. If you can get your body to accept it then you’ll be alright. Trust me. Okay?”

“I-I just...Augh!” he spat angrily, “It just feels so fuckin’ nasty! And sweet child of the Goddess does it look fuckin’ freaky’n’gross’n’shit, man! And you mean that sick fuck just casually does shit like this to people? Sorrel, man, what the fuck?!”

He was angry. That was good. Anything but sorrow, paranoia and fear. It would be crucial for an unforeseeable amount of time to keep him away from those three emotions. Otherwise we would certainly lose him to madness.

“Trust me, Trilles, you don’t even know the half of how messed up that man truly is. And, I mean, you’ve heard all of those different voices he can use during our shows. Everything about him is the true epitome of unsettling.”

“Yeah?” he asked, oddly meek, “Y’know, if you’ve got any good stories I wouldn’t mind listenin’ to ‘em, bud. Anyways what I mean is I could really use like a bit of a distraction, y’know? It’s just that, I mean, I can feel them. And it’s- Augh! It feels so nasty, man! Havin’ all of them little white fingers twitching away where my shoulder was. And I can feel the damn palms flappin’ around. How many hands did he have to go’n’shove in there, y’know? And I can feel it all tuggin’ on my skin when everything moves like it does and it’s like his mana is whispering weird things into my own and I just really and truly hate everything about it! I’d rather not even still have my arm, truth being told. Not when this it what it took for me to keep it!”

He carried on with his rant for quite a while longer before he’d remembered requesting I tell him a story. Something about the abrupt way he had stopped, before reminding us both of his request, had me realize much more clearly than before that most people never really let the man speak his full piece.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  As my injured and hurting troupe mate settled, somewhere beside me, I told him some of the more humorous tales I had of our mender. At some point during my second story, Marguerite had come to feed me a hearty bowl of soup. Trilles had sounded disappointed that his had come from ‘one of them spooky bird faced freaks’ and was sure to complain about it in the rests I would take between my tales.

  By the rise of the following night, Trilles had recovered enough to leave the tent. I was still laid up and barely able to move. More than once, I had visitors come demand the bird masked apprentice securing my privacy move to let them in. Without fail, all were shooed away by a the silent sentinels in their shifts watching over me. At one point, Fastrada’s eldest daughter had stopped by with a parcel. An unknown apprentice had apparently taken it from the girl after being told it contained the mended and washed rags which had previously been my heavily damaged clothing.

  I had called out a haggard thanks to the girl before she had dismissed herself. I couldn’t tell if Fastrada’s act of gratitude had come from the curses I wore on my hands or from my decision to recklessly protect the troupe while already injured. Either way, it was very welcome news. And I would have been lying to myself in saying that it hadn’t caused me to smile.

  With nothing better to do, I used my pain to further the reaches of my new fortification skill. Sending threads of my mana up and down each piece of every section within my body. Slowly passing the hours by. Still, despite the severity of my injuries and the time it would take to heal them properly, Boss Strise had already gotten the others to finish cleaning our kills and was chomping at the bit for us to go.

  Much of the excess meat and organs had been sold to passing travelers while all of the bones had been kept. Boss Strise wouldn’t abide us sitting idle for much longer. Not when those deer skulls would fetch him a tidy sum of coins in the hall of Barken’s adventurers’ guild. And besides that roadside camps, in the dense ocean of trees between towns, were hardly safe to maintain for more than a moon or two at best. We had already overstayed our welcome in that spot.

  It had been early on, the following morning, that old Marguerite had brought me a final bowl of hearty deer stew. After I’d eaten every last bite of the tough, gamey meat and drank down the pungent broth, the soup witch helped me very slowly into my newly repaired clothing.

  As she lead my left leg into a tube of about equal parts blue denim and beige canvas she had told me, with a mischievous wink, that she had added a little something extra to my bowl. Just a little bit of her special broth, she had said. Something to help me with the pain.

  She fastened the clasps of my overall straps and batted at my hands while I tried helping her put my cap back on my head. At some point, without really having noticed it, all of my pain seemed to have just dropped away. My body felt light and free and Marguerite pushed me back down to sit on the table. Apparently I had forgotten about my boots. For some reason she hadn’t wanted my help with tying the laces.

  She walked me through the clouds rising up in my brain and out of the tent. I was giggling and playfully tugged at the straps on my overalls. When the feeling went away later we were going to have to have another long talk about spiking my soup with the ‘special broth’ just because I went and broke some of my bones into little tiny itty bitty pieces again.

  At least everything looked all glowy and nice for the time being. And all the mana just felt so nice and warm and like smiles on my soul. But people kept smirking whenever they looked me in the face and all I could do was chuckle like a drunken idiot. Before I could grow too embarrassed by my state I was sat at the front of a familiar cart and told to just sit still and watch the pretty dragon.

  And so I did.

  For untold hours.

  While blathering on about nothing and everything to the poor soul trapped there beside me.

  Until my head fell back against the wooden board behind it.

  I didn’t sleep but felt deeply at rest while the wagon jostled along down the road.

“H-hey,” came the shaky voice of the young man sitting beside me, “Um so I know you’re like kind of all messed up right now or whatever, but do you- Do you think maybe we could talk for a bit? I mean, I know this is probably a weird thing to say, but I can tell you aren’t really sleeping and, uh, I could really use some advice. Y-you know, man to man or whatever that old muscle guy says? And, well, I don’t exactly get very many chances to talk with people.”

My eyes opened, curious to face this speaker whose voice I’d only ever heard through puppets or in hushed twittering and tweets from within a steamy tent.

  My head had cleared from some of the soup witch’s special broth and its mind numbing fog. Faint aches greeted me again across my body. I adjusted my position to better face the sparrow.

  He pulled back his hood with his free hand and then moved it to grasp the front of his mask. His hair hung in wisping locks, it was a dusty pink in colour. And then he took the covering off from his face. Round and watery green eyes meeting my own.

“I just feel so lost,” his voice carried a note that was both sweet and gentle, “And, like, I don’t know what to do anymore. I mean do I even really mean anything to those two or is everything between us just physical?”