Afternoon, Seventh of One, Harvest, 236 CR

In my dreams, I knew I was sleeping.

That had always been unusual for me. Even when the thought occurred to my dreaming mind, I always dismissed it—ah, this would be iconically dream-like, I would tell myself, if only this were a dream, which it wasn’t. Even when the Tricksters had come by those few times, there was not so much an awareness that I was asleep so much as an air of unreality.

These times, though, I was aware that they were dreams, and that was a blessing. They were nightmares, filled with glinting eyes that cut me to look at while I was trying to bandage someone I didn’t know. But the bandages were fighting me, and then my clothes turned into snakes and bit me until I woke up to find someone had left a tray of food next to my bed; and that had been only one of many.

It had been nine times, Kelly told me once I woke up properly. Every three hours, like clockwork, the timing on the spell she’d been left to watch over—Rafa’s work, at a guess, but I hadn’t thought to ask—ticked over, and I was woken up to eat and drink as much food and water as my stomach would tolerate. Eight times waking into a fugue state that apparently didn’t wind up encoding any memories, given that I didn’t remember any of it, and then one waking for real.

Mera was there when I woke up.

Not in my bedroom; that would have been weird and almost certainly improper. The counselor, my counselor, was in the third of the upstairs rooms. When I dragged myself out of my own room, washed and changed into a new set of clothes, I found her sitting in Kelly’s chair as she studiously ignored the correspondence on the desk and stared at the walls.

I really couldn’t blame her. Jannea, the painter who’d left Kibosh not long after my arrival, had done an absolutely amazing job with the paintings. My own room was a faithful representation of the forest glade where I’d met Artemis, beautiful and soothing, and Kelly’s was a view of a city from a hill, with a bay and its shipping in the distance—and the third room was that same city, the city I’d called home, from the air.

They’d taken the picture from a few hundred feet up, a picture of the city glowing with its midnight lights and the bridge—the bridge, a wonder of the world—lit up like a beacon. I’d fallen in love with the city all over again when I saw that picture, and as far as I was concerned, Jannea had earned every accolade they’d bestowed on her; the reproduction was perfect.

“It was a beautiful city,” I said, sitting on the other chair. “I’ll probably miss it.”

“It’s an impressive bridge to have made without magic.” She turned in the chair to look at me, steepling her fingers under her chin. “So how’s the woman who vanquished Death Itself?”

“Don’t even. I didn’t, and everyone knows I didn’t.” I eyed her for a moment in the pooling silence. “They don’t think I did, right?”

“Cleric Veil described you as assisting, as a bridge to a God not often known in Kibosh, with removing a curse that was keeping Adei’s soul from her body,” Mera said eventually, smiling slightly.

“So they’re taking most of the credit, then? That’s a relief. I—is your smile different?”

Mera shrugged, scowling. “Not for lack of trying,” she said dourly. “Your eyes are just fucked up. A lot of you is fucked up, from overdraw and peripheral malice, plus you’re medically dissociated. Which we need to talk about, right now.”

“Medically—ah.” I blinked a couple of times, then sighed as I did my best to stop my eyes from flickering around every heartbeat or two. “I wondered why I didn’t wake up screaming, despite the nightmares. They feel… distant.”

“The nightmares are good for you, gives you a valve.” Mera leaned forward, doing something that made her more compelling, like she had a bunch of cognitive gravity. “You listening?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I managed.

“Right now, in lay terms, I’ve walled your emotions off from yester-zenith. I’ve done this on my own cognizance, as a medical professional exercising duty-of-care, because you needed to rest and recover. Now that you’re awake and on your feet, if you want me to stop, you can ask me any time. Got it?”

I nodded. “Rest good. Trauma bad.”

“This isn’t a permanent fix,” she snapped at me. “I’m already going to get a fucking audit for this shit, not that they’re wrong to do it, don’t go saying shit that implies you don’t actually get it.”

“You’re tetchier,” I noted calmly. “You mostly needled and manipulated me, before.”

“I—” Mera took a deep breath, palms pressed together, then let it out. “I can help you process what happened,” she continued on as if I hadn’t spoken, “but it needs your informed consent. I’ll be digging around in your emotions more literally than last time, is why. You can also wait for Mom to show up, which should hopefully be in a couple of days.”

I resisted the overwhelming urge to tell her no immediately, and then resisted the equally strong urge to say yes. Thinking about it instead, I tried to evaluate how I felt and how I expected to feel, how it measured up against other things I’d seen. “Denied,” I said eventually, “inasmuch as it needs your active mind-reading. But I might still need someone to talk about it with.”

“Huh.” Mera’s jaw worked for a moment before she shrugged. “Your mind, your trauma, your choice,” she said finally. “I’m still going to insist on supporting your consciousness and cognition till our conversation’s over; you need to be awake for a bit. You want the blockers out now?”

“Is Kelly—”

“—in hearing-you-have-a-breakdown range? No.”

“Then yeah, now’s good.”

The reality of what had happened hit me without further ado, like a face full of pavement or a strike to the kidneys when I was already flagging and out of air. I focused on my breathing and tried my best to ignore the sounds I was making, letting the emotions and reactions flow through me, and little by little my racing heart slowed down.

It helped that I was exhausted, almost tired enough to be going back to sleep. It also probably helped that, well.

“That was fast.” Mera’s voice was casual, but her eyes gave her away—there was a piercing, focused interest.

I didn’t say anything for a moment, holding in my mind’s eye the moment of Farmer’s hand being chewed on to no effect other than a horrible grinding noise. “Bigger than most of my experiences,” I said eventually. “More emphatic. But not the first time I’ve been at an incident.” And it helps, when it’s not your first, I thought to myself levelly.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“An incident?”

“You know,” I said vaguely, waving a hand. Farmer no-sold that thing’s teeth, I thought to myself. And those things had some fucking teeth, alright. “Incidents. Maybe someone puts a knife into a friend of mine, maybe someone shoots her. Maybe two trains collide head to head. Incidents.”

For a moment, Mera looked to be at a loss for words. “You… weren’t a doctor, though?”

“A medic, I guess,” I said vaguely. “Mostly it was just making sure people weren’t so busy dancing they didn’t drink water, but I was friends with a lot of folks who were at higher risk of violence. The trains thing was just…”

“Bad luck?”

I shook my head at Mera, startled back into the moment by her prompting. “I mean, yeah, but no? I mean, obviously bad luck to have it happen at all, but… I’d rather have been there than not. I was… able to help.” I’d had nightmares for months, and daytime intrusive visions for weeks, but I’d been able to help, and I hadn’t regretted doing what little I could. “What actually, like, happened?”

“The delvers got too deep, is what happened.” She scowled. “That Kas fellow went deeper than the others, brought trouble back to them, and died fighting it off. The wizard girl that you saved activated the beacon and got hit with some kind of curse for her trouble, beacon more or less did its job and got them out, and the wards shredded the big trouble on the way in. Farmer killed the seven of whatever those toothy gnawer things are and then went through to clean up.”

“That’s… not much more than I already knew,” I said slowly, “except for the fact that there were seven of the floaty lamprey things. And they were what the wards didn’t kill?”

“Don’t know what to tell you, Sophie,” Mera sighed, massaging her head. “I’m no kind of wizard or warrior anymore, I don’t design defenses or step foot into dungeons. I heard people talking about domains, which you can get someone else to explain to you? And pathogens, but I know fuck-all about those compared to you, don’t I? Plus I guess the toxic gas, the heat, the pressure, a bunch of chemical shit that was going on. And whatever was throwing around what sounds like it was primordial malice, but the people I’d trust to really know are kinda busy.”

I looked at her, really looked at her. Her face was drawn and her body language exhausted, and I felt ashamed that I hadn’t noticed either of those before she made it obvious in her voice. “Are you… okay? You don’t look like you’ve slept.”

“Sophie.” Mera mustered enough presence to glare at me, but it wasn’t quite up to her previous standards. “Take a hint, stop asking.”

“Is this a professional conduct thing?” I shook my head, regretting it immediately afterwards when I got a spike of headache. “Hypothetically,” I corrected myself, “would someone who has a medical duty of care to a patient be barred from discussing their own compromised state?”

That got me a smile, almost what I thought of as the canonical Mera smile—the one that said that was the right question, or close enough. “Hypothetically, yeah. If I had any problems going on, making them a patient’s problem would be an ethical violation.”

“Well, I—”

“No.” Mera interrupted me remorselessly, smirking without a hint of humor. “You don’t, because you’re not aware. The hypothetical is so very irrelevant that you wouldn’t bother mentioning it.”

I rolled my eyes, looking up at the ceiling. She wasn’t wrong about what I’d been about to say—I sympathized with that hypothetical service provider and didn’t want to be a burden on her. But… “I think,” I said vaguely, “that’s more like the jerkass Mera who got me to open up last week.”

“You’re welcome,” she said dryly. “So, you’re fine? Going to tough out the trauma and whatever, no interest in further care, I should fuck off to wherever?”

“Oh, get fucked,” I laughed. “You said something about overdraw, and something about Veil, and I can’t remember what you said, so say it again, and also, how is Kelly, is she okay?”

“The reports will say that Veil is a hero, and you’re their equally-heroic sidekick, but obviously still just a sidekick, so not actually equally.” Mera snorted. “Everyone here knows that’s not exactly true, but it’s not like Veil didn’t bring their own God to the party; all praise Naga, who defies, for granting Adei the strength to fight her way back from the brink of death, and none of that is actually a lie. The Trickster is keeping a low profile for now, James is smugger than a girl getting her first vibrator—”

“—you have vibrators?”

“What, does Ketka not?”

I choked, giggling. “She has very clever fingers.”

“Good for you, but don’t interrupt.” She gave me a beat to giggle harder, which I did, unable to help myself. “Overdraw… if I tell you that you have a metaphysical concussion, will that get you to not use any magic, Skills, mystical perceptions, or whatever? Because that’s a totally bullshit explanation, but you really shouldn’t.”

She hadn’t answered about Kelly, which told me everything there was to tell—it meant that Kelly was considered one of her patients. “Why is James so smug?”

“Because he’s totally getting away with doing the right thing? You’re not that fucked up, think it through.”

“Oh, whatever.” I rolled my eyes at the ceiling again, but she wasn’t wrong about my being able to figure it out. James had given me permission to invite the Tricksters in, and one of them had promptly been a critical part of saving someone’s life without a whisper of debt or obligation being voiced. By the time the patent filing revision worked its way through the system, he’d have hard evidence in hand that tendering the invitation detailed in the new version had been the right choice. Best of all, giving Veil the bulk of the credit meant that I’d be able to stay a while longer within that acceptably, expectedly weird zone that Meredith had described. “Metaphysical concussion, huh?”

“If I thought it would help, I would lock you down. But you’d probably just poke and prod at it and try to break it, and that would fuck you up further. Yes! A metaphysical concussion, plus twisting your idiot brain-ankle and tearing a mental muscle.”

“Mundane brain only, yes ma’am.” I gave her half of a beat. “And no.”

“What?”

Yep, that’s exactly the level of smugness that suggests I was right. “I know exactly what you were going to say.” I grinned at the ceiling, a little weirded out by the way my mood was both swinging and vaguely elevated. “And no. No pet names, no affectionate diminutives.”

“Right. Only Ketka gets to—”

“So,” I interrupted her remorselessly, “how long?”

“We’ll reevaluate in six days. That’s not when you might be hale again, that’s when we’ll reevaluate, do you understand?”

“Okay.” I sighed, feeling my mood dropping again. “What did you mean by not being a warrior anymore?”

“You couldn’t remember what I said about Veil, but you remembered that?”

“And who would know what, uh, essential malice is? Can it go into an orb? What happens if you empower a rune—”

“Burning cities, Sophie,” Mera half-snapped, audibly exhausted. “Primordial malice. If you get your hands on any, please just hand it to someone qualified to deal with it. Farmer, if you can. Rafa. Meredith.”

“Will do,” I murmured. That bad, huh? “Why those three?”

“Creation and healing oppose malice, and the older you are in them, the better. And Meredith is already madder than the malice, so who gives a shit?”

“Really?”

“That woman would be a God if she weren’t too furious to take it. She’s not even an Immortal, technically—she’s just too angry to die.”

“She what?”

“Anyway, you need to rest more.” My eyes tracked down to Mera’s smug face, and her smirk intensified. “Do your thing, figure it out.”

“Fine, fine,” I grumbled. There was an emotional void there, one which I realized wasn’t quite right, and I suspected I’d care more about that revelation when I next woke up. “Whatever, fine. I’ll just ask Meredith. I bet she’ll just tell me.”

“Maybe.” Mera stood up to go, and shook her head as I went to try to stand in turn.

“See you,” I said vaguely, feeling the exhaustion sweep over me out of nowhere, and I was asleep before she answered.