Leo fell an inch to the table, small inklings of life flooding through his shattered form: small breaths which pushed up his caved in chest at odd times, listless fluttering's in whatever remained of his eyelids, the sections that hadn't been melted shut, small twitches in his legs, likely the healthiest part of his entire form.
Back when he’d first cast Inferno back at Zerital, Kiva had the chance to inspect him first hand before the stasis was placed on him. But back then, she was so panicked she hardly got the chance to inspect his wounds at all. Now, though, as Kiva’s hands sunk into Leo’s broken body, she got the full picture, every little detail. And even as bad as it looked, somehow it felt even worse. At the slightest touch his skin started to flake off, rubbing char into the hands of the healers that were tending to him.
His skin wasn’t just burnt, it was practically ash, dust barely even clinging to his muscles, which themselves were no longer even attached to the bones. Somehow, the tendons connecting his body together had completely evaporated, meaning he was little more than a loose sack of meat pooled together on the table. How he was alive wasn’t just miraculous, it was impossible. Injuries like these should’ve killed him ages ago. Hell, there wasn’t a single organ functioning properly throughout his entire godsdamned body; his heart weakly beat at irregular intervals, his lungs collapsed inwards every time his shaky, airy breaths left his body before reflating by the power of some divine, and his kidneys, liver, and spleen were completely dormant, not a single indication that any of them were working at all.
What was she even to do with this? She was used to healing battle wounds, tending to warriors in their final or not so final moments, but this was unlike anything she’d ever done before. She was out of her depth. And she was starting to sweat. And her breathing was picking up. And Leo was fading. And and and-
Suddenly, a wave of presence rolled throughout Leo’s body, wrapping tight around his vitals like great invisible hands. They clutched at his organs, stopping his heart completely before manually overriding its beating, keeping it at a steady base; digging into his lungs, providing supports to keep them from collapsing; and pulling at his organs stuck in fallow, dragging them back to life like machines whirring to life.
“Focus, Kiva,” Wimbleton said, his voice leveled, almost calm, but his eyes were still completely closed. “Rebuild the organ tissue first.”
“R-right,” Kiva carefully poured her magic into Leo’s body, pushing down her questions, and focusing entirely on the task at hand.
If she wasn’t cautious, she’d ask too much of Leo’s body, potentially causing it to strain itself until it stopped working completely, or the tissue might grow in wrong, and she’d have to redo it, or she could give too little and Leo dies before she can properly fix him. He was stable for the time being, but that was only a tentative measure. And although it was an unbelievable amount of stress, more than Kiva had ever experienced in her entire life, a panic unlike any other she’d ever known, she was confident. She couldn’t restart organs, but generating tissue? That she could do.
Kiva expertly wound her magic through Leo’s body, guiding it with her presence into every little crevice, focusing on the points with the greatest damage and degrading the damaged tissue, replacing it instead with new, healthy tissue and reintegrating it with the rest of his body. One by one, she danced through his internal organs, sowing them back together like a magical seamstress.
Then, when she was confident in the functions of the organs, she spread her focus: moving between muscle groups; blown arteries, vessels, and capillaries; and remaking from scratch his decimated ligaments and tendons, slotting them into place in an attempt to reattach the bone to muscle. But for as much as she succeeded, more problems just kept popping up. The presence keeping Leo’s organs functioning tried to withdraw, but the moment it did several blood clots solidified next to Leo’s heart–a heart attack. Kiva dropped her efforts on the rest of the body, quickly working to destroy the clot as the presence soothed Leo’s aching heart, redoubling its efforts to keep his organs functioning. The longer they went on, the more medical emergencies stacked on top of each other, clots across the body, rapidly fluctuating blood pressure, muscles tearing themselves apart, the weaker Leo got, and the more it took to artificially sustain him.
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“I can’t get his muscles back together!” the dwarf on his right arm called out, wiping the sweat that had accumulated on his brow with the crook of his elbow, not daring to remove his hands for even a moment.
“Neither the spine, the cord is injured in a dozen places,” the dwarf on his head said. “And his airway keeps collapsing. I can barely keep it open,” the dwarf finished, Leo’s neck visibly rising from a deflated position to a proper height.
“All I need is material-stroke in the left hemisphere,” Wimbleton said, nodding towards the dwarf on his head, who panicked and jumped to find and break the clot. “Make me the human parts and I can- he’s bleeding. Mend the vessels by his ankle-make him look human again,” Wimbleton nodded towards the dwarf on his left leg.
“But I-he’s waking up!” The dwarf on Leo’s head screamed, much paler than when they’d started the operation. Sure enough, Leo’s eyes, still listless, slowly began to open, his weak muscles fighting with a newfound level of vigor.
“He can’t wake up yet,” Wimbleton said, deep crevices settling into his forehead. “Cool his body, 5 degrees colder,” Wimbleton nodded towards Karfice.
“5!? You’ll kill him,” Karfice shouted, hesitantly moving his hands to Leo’s torso.
“Now.”
Karfice’s hands twitched. He was hesitating. They didn’t have time for this.
“Do it!” Kiva shouted, attempting to press the forming migraine throbbing on the right side of her face out of her mind.
With every passing moment, she was growing more lethargic, abnormal weights settling into her limbs, and a strange heat rising in her chest. Simultaneously she was on fire and colder than the top of the Thalian, light headed and pounding with pain. It was agony on every front, and all of it only distracted her from the task at hand.
Karfice pressed his hands into Leo. Instantly the boy’s body temperature dropped, like 400 lbs of ice had just been pumped directly into his veins. At once he dropped back to the table, falling fully unconscious once more, not even the slightest twitch anywhere in his body. They’d shocked his body asleep. Unfortunately, that meant his whole body. Just as he slumped back onto the table, everything nearly stopped dead, blood slowing to a crawl, heart skipping several beats, lungs catching at their peak.
Karfice staggered back from the table of ice, swaying slightly before collapsing to the ground. He’d only been running on adrenaline this entire time, and with so much magic used so quickly, his body couldn’t sustain itself any longer. And he was only the first. At the head of the table, the dwarf tending to Leo’s head slumped forward, fighting to keep himself awake before falling backwards to the ground.
“Kiva, you’re on head. Left leg, give me skin. All other healers stabilize his vitals. I’m putting him back together,” Wimbleton said.
Kiva tore from the chest, wildly sprinting around the edge of the table to get to his head. She listed to the side as she ran, nearly crashing into the dwarf on Leo’s left arm, but she pulled herself together at the last minute, composing herself enough to leer over Leo’s body, hands pressed either side of his skull. One last push, that was all they needed. Now or never…now or never…now. or. never.
Everything she had and beyond, no matter the cost, the exertion, the pain, the moment was now, and she would not let Leo die by her side. Kiva’s magic wound through the boy's body, doubling, tripling, quadrupling its hold, infesting itself so perfectly into Leo that she could hardly even tell who was who anymore. They were one in the same. They breathed together, coughed together, died together. Every function they didn’t have, every failing on the healers account simply would not stand. Kiva rended control of Leo’s organs from Wimbleton, declaring–demanding–Leo stay alive. Every moment his heart pounded she felt it, every moment his lungs expanded she felt it, every moment his diaphragm contracted she felt it. Every function, vital or no, under her stern gaze, would work. There was simply no other eventuality.
Only, she couldn’t sustain this effort. In one last ditch effort to save Leo, completely forgetting about the pain in her own body, she’d drained herself of every last bit of magic she had left, and she did not feel good. The last thing Kiva saw as her hands were ripped from Leo’s head, as her vision faded to black, was Leo’s body risen half a foot into the air, his black, red, and plump pink flesh boiling and shifting in an unnatural pattern. The world went black.