Toren Daen

The woman attacked with far more speed than the teen had before. Fire burst from her feet, launching her toward Norgan. My brother barely managed to deflect her first blow, staggering back from the force.

The woman jabbed with absurd speed, lightning coating her fist. I tried to push her hand out of the way with a burst of telekinesis, but a tendril of the lightning shrouding her hand sparked, lancing off and shattering my spell before it could have an effect.

The blow collided with Norgan’s jaw, an audible crack of thunder and bone echoing across the dim alleyway. Norgan flew back, nearly colliding with me. I screamed, hurling a slew of rocks with a telekinesis-enhanced throw at our assailant.

The woman waved her hand nonchalantly, lightning snaking out and striking each of my pebbles before they could hit her. They burst on contact, causing small puffs of dirt-brown dust to pop in the air.

Undeterred by being blown across the alley, Norgan rocketed forward once more in a gale of wind, trying to land a hit on the woman. He threw a flurry of wind-pushed punches and kicks, becoming a whirlwind of force. The woman ducked and weaved around him, not even striking back. She was toying with Norgan.

I searched the alleyway desperately for something I could use, finally remembering the metal brooch I clutched desperately in my hand. It had drawn blood from how tight I had been gripping it.

I let that anger fuel me. I concentrated my telekinesis rune as much as I could, trying to shrink the surface area of my push as much as possible, which would simultaneously increase the force I could apply. Several seconds passed as I focused more intensely than I ever had on my spellform.

“Norgan!” I screamed over the roar of his wind, “Strike two!” I yelled, hoping he would hear me. We had developed codes for different formations, and I damned well hoped he remembered them now. If he didn’t, we were dead.

My brother disengaged quickly, allowing me to finally see his jaw. It was clearly dislocated in some way, painfully set to the side. Blood trickled from his mouth in several places.

My years of experience at the Healer’s Guild surfaced as I looked at his jaw, a dozen different ways to set a dislocated joint flashing through my mind. I banished them all.

With a cry, I hurled the brooch, the spiked end aimed straight at our enemy. A glinting blur was all I could see over the flash of blinding white mana.

I exhaled deeply, most of my mana expelled in that single pulse of telekinesis. I had never tried to channel the area of my push to such a focused point before, and I was feeling the drain.

I slumped against the brick wall as my vision cleared from the flash. I heard a flare of wind as Norgan skidded to my side. Did I get the woman with that brooch? Were we safe?

When my vision finally cleared, what I saw caused my heart to sink. The brooch had embedded itself all the way into the woman’s left shoulder, causing a small stream of blood to leak down her black clothes. Lightning crackled around the metal, clearly having pierced whatever electric defenses she had. The woman was looking at the brooch in shock, clearly in disbelief that I had managed to hurt her.

But the strike was too high. If I had aimed a bit lower, it could have nailed her straight in the heart. The woman growled, glaring back at us. Slowly, she began to pull the brooch from her shoulder.

Norgan rushed forward, refusing to allow the opening I had made to go to waste. He yelled, a strained, awkward thing with his crooked jaw, but it was full of desperation.

The woman didn’t let him.

She ripped the spiked brooch out in one fluid motion, spraying blood across the ground. In a painfully smooth act, she withdrew the stiletto on her belt, and with speed beyond anything I had seen before, rammed it toward my brother’s sternum. She was fast as lightning, but I could swear she moved as slow as water as she drove her blade into Norgan’s chest.

I shouted in anger and fear, stumbling over to my brother as he fell in slow motion. The fact that I was in the middle of a battle fled my mind amidst a rush of panic and horror.

No, no no no. I fell to my knees by my brother, laying my hands over his chest wound and trying to staunch the bleeding. But it was so much. So much red. I couldn’t stop it.

It wouldn’t STOP.

Norgan coughed weakly, specks of blood flying from his dislocated jaw. His eyes were glassy and distant, overcome with fog I could not ward away. They cried out in silent terror of the growing dark.

My experience as a healer was pushed to the forefront of my mind. I automatically analyzed the wound as I had a hundred others, but with an unfamiliar frantic fear. Sternum wound at the center of mass–certainly pierced the mana core. The wound went all the way through the body. Too much blood. Severed artery. Probably the thoracic aorta.

It would be fatal.

“No, no no no,” I stuttered as red began to pool around me. So much red. “Come on, Norgan! Come on! This wasn’t how you were supposed to go,” I began to sob. Tears trickled from my eyes, subsumed by crimson as they struck my brother’s chest. Norgan weakly raised a hand, his distant eyes focusing for the briefest of moments.

He laid it on my shoulder, gripping it weakly.

Then his arm fell and his breathing stopped.

A void opened in my chest as I struggled to process what just happened. “Norgan,” I said weakly, tears pattering his chest. “Come on, brother,” I said. “You can get up. Just like you always do. Come on,” I sobbed. The healer in me wailed in agony, the dual failure of saving my brother and failing a patient encompassing everything.

A snort sounded from above me, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from my brother’s body. ”To think, this was all it took to break you,” the woman muttered with disdain. “You hurt me. You hurt the scion of Blood Joan. But killing you…”

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I finally looked up at my brother’s killer, still on my knees. She loomed over me like an aspect of death in her pitch-black clothing, casting a shadow across me as she blocked out the sun. A stream of blood leaked just above her heart, mocking me for how close I was. I couldn’t even muster anger. I wasn’t sure if I could feel right now.

“No, I won’t kill you. That would be too easy.” The woman shifted her head. “And it gives the brat time to hunt you down. To avenge his own loss in this slum,” she said bitterly, talking more to herself than me.

I was akin to stone. If I stayed here, maybe the wind would weather me like a rock amidst a stream. I didn’t feel like moving.

“You will die, peasant,” the woman said with a restrained chuckle. “And you’ll die in regret.”

She walked past me to the fallen form of the teen.

A minute passed by and I knew she was gone. I was alone with the body of Norgan, broken at the corpse of our first and last victory.

—

The guards finally reached the alley minutes later, but Norgan’s corpse had already begun to cool. They led me to the Healer’s Guild in solemn silence, a few of the guards carrying my brother’s form in a shrouded bodybag. My feet were lead as we walked, each step requiring more energy than the last.

When we reached the Healer’s Guild, Greahd, the kindly receptionist that had always greeted my brother and me when we entered and helped me improve my mastery of the violin, watched with a shocked and horrified face as the bodybag was taken into the back of the hospital. I sat numbly for several hours in the lobby, Greahd’s concerned attention making me hurt all the more.

Couldn’t she see the emptiness of her actions? I thought with rising anger. Nothing she does will bring Norgan back. It’s all empty platitudes. If Duena had only run faster, the guards might have been there in time. If the Healer’s Guild cared at all, their guards would’ve been there to stop my brother’s death.

My suffering was interrupted when the tall Doctor Trelza came in from the back. He was a stern and harsh man, worn down from his decades-long work tending to the wounded and dying in the poorest district of Fiachra. Spotting me, he strode over purposefully.

“Toren Daen,” he said.

I looked up at the man. “Doctor Trelza,” I replied harshly. The Healer’s Guild had failed me. We were so, so close to the Guild when we were attacked.

And nobody came to help.

Trelza tilted his head, unused to the bite in my words but looking unphased. “I am required to give you this,” he said, handing me a letter. A stamp of winged basilisks wrapping around a staff kept the accursed envelope sealed.

I knew what this was, even without opening it. It was mandatory for every lost life at the East Fiachra Healer’s Guild. A letter to the deceased’s next of kin, outlining legal requirements and options for burial, cremation, or something else.

The paper seemed to burn my skin as I ripped it from Trelza, shoving the letter into my pocket. I glared at the doctor, who still stood over me.

Norgan and I had worked with this man for nearly three years, assisting him in his operation of the Guild. We fetched bandages, tied off wounds, and tended to recovering patients. Our work was needed direly and paid well for how gruesome some of it was. And for this man to be handing me the letter declaring my brother dead? After all the times I watched him hand the letter to another family, watching them break down in grief?

It wasn’t fair. It was a betrayal; something that should have never happened.

“Do you enjoy this?” I hissed, glaring at the man. He rarely displayed any sort of emotion, staying stern and focused on his profession. Even as he watched families break apart from loss, he gazed on with apathy. I thought this was because he was masking himself from the pain. But in my anger, I knew differently. “Watching people break when their loved ones die? Watching them suffer?”

Trelza’s expression didn’t change at all.

“Is that why you deliver these fucking letters? To watch people fall apart?” I yelled, drawing the eyes of Greahd and a few other healers. “You always do this. Always write that letter! Stamp that Vritra-forsaken seal!”

I didn’t remember standing, but now I was chest-to-chest with Trelza, glaring at him from less than a foot away.

Through my unending tirade, Trelza remained silent. It only fueled my anger further.

How dare he look at me, I thought with burning rage. How dare he stand before me when I’m alive and my brother is dead! How dare he give me this fucking letter! How dare he stay silent!

My yelling finally grew hoarse as my throat gave out. Still, Trelza continued to stare me down.

“Well?” I finally spat. “Do you have no defense?”

Trelza regarded me for a long minute, meeting my red-rimmed eyes. “I write those letters because I am the only one who can, Daen,” he said with a disturbingly monotone voice. “I stamp that seal because nobody else should. I deliver them because, when people grieve,” he continued, a note of something I couldn’t distinguish entering his voice, “They need somebody to hate.”

I flinched back as if struck. The doctor waited a moment. “Every single healer gives everything they can in their work here.” Trelza looked past me. “But sometimes we fail. Sometimes we aren’t fast enough.” The doctor met my broken expression once more. “So I give them somebody to blame. Somebody they can tell themselves failed, instead of the good people of the Guild.”

I slumped back into my chair, his words ripping the anger from my sails. In its place was a hollowness that grasped and clawed at my every thought.

“You are not wrong to be angry,” Trelza said in his distinctive monotone, a strange attempt at consolation.

I wept for hours more, curled up on the lobby seats of the Healer’s Guild. I sobbed long after Trelza was forced to return to his duties as a healer, tending to people who were still able to be saved.

Norgan was gone, taken from me by Blood Joan. Couldn’t they have just left us alone? Gone on their merry way?

Within the storm of my mind, I hated Duena. If she hadn’t been visible, Norgan wouldn’t have rushed to save her. If Norgan hadn’t tried to save her, my brother wouldn’t have been killed.

I hated the Healer’s Guild. They should’ve been able to do something. To help somehow. I knew that a body could be resuscitated several minutes after death sometimes. That the healers couldn’t do that, even when my brother was long dead, caused my gut to churn in anguish.

I hated the guards, who couldn’t police this city worth a damn. The poverty, the crime, and the lawlessness that happened in East Fiachra could so easily be stamped out if they only cared.

But above all else, I hated Blood Joan. They had killed off the remnants of my family decades ago, but I hadn’t known them. I had no emotional connection to people long dead and far removed. But then they had tried to unwittingly finish the job.

And from what that murderer had said, that little fire-cloaked brat would try and kill me later. To mend his wounded pride.

I slowly got to my feet, wiping away a trail of tears.

I won’t let them have the pleasure of killing me, I thought with growing anger. I won’t let them recover their pride. They won’t get to.

I stalked out of the Healer’s Guild, ignoring Greahd’s worried shouts. Blood Joan wouldn’t get to finish the job. I would make sure of that.