Sera’s eyes flit open slowly to a searing pain in her shoulder and the sight of the stone ceiling above the bed in the living chamber. She tries to move her arm, but finds it wrapped in place against her chest. She manages to look down, and sees the fur blanket covering her body, naked but for proper cloth bandages around her shoulder and arms. Sera feels the light pain in her shoulder, and it takes her a moment to remember what happened. Sera remembers being shot by the arrow, and Vey yelling something shortly afterward, and the smell of iron.
Sera shakes her head further away, and reaches her free left arm to her shoulder, and carefully touches the spot where she had felt the arrow. She winces at the tender sensation, and jerks her hand back across the wound in surprise, which only causes more pain and a sharp cry from her dry throat. She feels her breaths get harder and heavier as she begins to panic, the inability to move and pain from trying to do so ever escalating her hyperventilation. Sera only manages to get a hold of her breathing when she starts losing consciousness from the lack of oxygen. The brief feeling of slipping back into unconsciousness is what finally reminds her that she is, in fact, alive.
This realization causes her to freeze in place for a moment, her neck and ears feeling ice-cold despite the warmth provided by the blanket and feather pillow. She blinks twice, and doesn’t try to move around her body this time, and instead simply tries to listen to the things she can’t see. Sera hears the sound of something brushing and scratching against paper, and the sound of something hollow-sounding tapping against wood. She hears the familiar sound of bone tapping against the stone floor, and a quiet, lightly frustrated voice murmuring to itself. Sera closes her eyes again for a moment, and opens her mouth to speak, but finds that her tongue is too dry to do so. She closes her mouth again, and tries to think of a way to tell Vey that she needs water.
Sera quickly finds that she doesn’t need to ask, as she hears Vey’s feet walk over to her, and she finally sees the skeleton, leaning over the bed and looking down at her. She wonders how she can tell that it’s looking at her, Vey doesn’t have eyes, only sockets, but eventually she spots why. There are two small pinpricks of blue light in the middle of its eye sockets, and they appear to move around, in what Sera can obviously tell is ‘looking’. She wonders if the only reason she never noticed before is because she was never this close to Vey’s skull before. Vey holds one of the wooden cups up to her lips, prompting Sera to drink from it. Once her mouth is finally not desertified, she tries to open it to speak, but feels a skeletal finger cover her lips.
“One day, give or take a few hours. Rest.” Vey’s voice from this close is the most natural sounding Sera has ever heard, and she stops trying to speak. “It’s stopped bleeding, but don’t move any more, or you will open it.”
Sera tries to nod, but finds Vey’s cold hand holding her chin in place instead. She closes her eyes, and wonders to herself why Vey didn’t just let her bleed to death, or barring that, why it seems to be giving her polite bedside manner. Sera feels Vey carefully poke at the bandage, and feels it pull back when her face contorts in mild pain. She opens her eyes again to find Vey’s hand right next to her face, brushing some of her hair out of the way of her eyes. It’s only from this distance that she sees that each finger ends in an unnatural sharp pointed claw, rather than rounding off like ordinary fingers. Abstractly, she knew this, but seeing it magnified in motion causes her immense discomfort. Doubly so when she realizes that Vey had to have treated her wound with those hands, without scratching her.
Vey stands up, and traces a bony hand down Sera’s chest to the edge of the blanket, and pulls it back up over her ribs, finally letting it rest just before her shoulders. Vey wonders if she will recover fully from the wound; it knows individuals with classes can recover from almost anything if given a few days of rest, but it also knows that the process takes much longer for unclassed individuals like Sera. Vey stands once more, and walks back to the table. Vey sits down, mentally sighing as it does.
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It had taken over three hours even with the minor healing potion and proper medical supplies from the invaders to properly dress the arrow wound. Simply pulling it out was actually the hardest part of the process, as the only way Vey could think of trying to do so would only cause more internal damage. Vey had settled on pinning Sera’s body to the ground by straddling her chest, and pulling upwards gently, which had only worked marginally better than simply yanking. The tense minutes of trying to stop the bleeding via pressing bandages to the wound had been nerve wracking, not that Vey has nerves to wrack. The process of moving Sera to the living chambers hadn’t been easy, neither had been trying to undress and clean the blood off of her.
Vey commended its own patience at this endeavor, and with hindsight it had been both educational and satisfying to apply its knowledge of mortal anatomy in general and Sera’s in specific. Vey only wished that it hadn’t been so damn uncomfortable watching Sera’s injured form, and doubly uncomfortable not knowing if she would be dead or not when Vey came back from re-coordinating the defense efforts and patrols, as well as cleaning the blood off of itself. It sent two skeletons to check outside the dungeon for any gear the adventurers might have left behind before venturing in, which turned out to yield a fruitful haul of preserved food for Sera, two more backpacks of adventuring supplies and books that had been deemed unnecessary weight for the task the adventurers planned to undertake, several tents, and four bedrolls.
If it wasn’t for the elf-shaped crack in Vey’s proverbial glass, it would consider the invasion of its home to have gone incredibly well for it. As it stands though, Vey is beginning to wonder why it had been so angry at the invaders when it saw Sera’s limp body in the doorway. It had felt a bit of guilt at its fellow undead being destroyed by the invaders, and it had definitely wanted revenge, but it wasn’t personal then; that was just the way of things, when it is kill or be killed, use every tool and tactic available. But it wasn’t personal, not until that moment. Vey had read all of the books the adventures had brought, and has long since memorized all of the books it already had, but still can’t come up with a reason for why it feels this way.
None of the mortal emotions Sera taught Vey about fit the description either, the closest matches being her description of ‘love’ as ‘a desire to protect and care for another regardless of circumstance’ which Vey discarded on account of Vey’s indifference to her actual life. The other one that matches a bit more closely, but is actually more uncomfortable to Vey, was how she had defined ‘possessiveness’ as ‘a desire to keep something to oneself, even so far as to lash out at others over it’. Vey is struggling, even now as it works on its newest spell, to come to terms with the fact that it wants to keep the young elf, in the way it remembers reading that the God of Fire and Iron keeps a dragon as a pet.
As Vey is now, though, it wonders when it developed this want, or if it had always been there even without Vey acknowledging it. As Vey idly introspects in between pages of spell matrixes and circles, it realizes that it would likely have a similar reaction to its outburst if it found its magical research destroyed, or its favorite book(the one about a bunch of different plants Vey has obviously never seen) burned to ash. That feeling of wanting had probably always been there. It had only questioned its feeling when applied to Sera because… Because why? Why is she different to Vey? Is it because Vey can’t consider her to be a thing, but a being, the same as itself?
Vey walks back over to Sera’s bedside, resting on a chair it had placed there to make it easier to give her water. Vey found it fascinating, initially, that it could get her to swallow water even while barely conscious from her injury. Now, though, it had begun to feel like a chore, an activity to distract itself with while it thought on other things. Vey watches Sera’s eyes open and lock onto Vey’s for a moment, before allowing herself to drink slowly from the cup in Vey’s hand. Vey wonders once more how long it will take before she can at least eat and drink on her own again. It really wants to be able to lose itself in its research again.