Distanced from Death
I saw it in my heart, felt it course through my veins, and therefore believed it was truth.
* * * * * * * *
The Academy Hospital stood on the far right of campus grounds, at the center of the Academy Arboretum that was kept between the rest of campus and a curtain of mountains. The path leading across the arboretum to the hospital building was paved with pieces of amethyst in alternating colors. Slices of these polished gems decorated the mosaic bound by glass walls separating the walkway from the rest of the arboretum, forcing all hospital visitors to follow the path that wound around the plants and the trees and the botanists that took care of all the greenery surrounding them. There were no shortcuts.
Szak kept his frustration at bay; even though the length certainly looked excessive, the road had been built to maneuver this way as a health precaution. Amethyst was a variety of quartz that held the ability to push poisons out of the body. Those visiting the hospital would be “cleansed” of common sicknesses upon entering, and then re-sanitized upon leaving.
Besides, his mind was more focused on aimlessly looking for answers for that strange girl’s survival. He was certain that when he held her in his hands—his hands still stained with her blood even now—that she was dead.
She was dead.
She had to have been. There was no pulse. There was no complete heart to beat life, no intact brain to function. Yet, by the time she left his lap, her heart was beating once more. Her skull had pieced what parts it could find together and re-encapsulated her mind.
Innate regenerative abilities were aplenty in Aideyll, with a long list of clans of varying capabilities, but none had the talent to escape death. He had to ask when he saw her.
But how? He didn’t even know her. Could he just ask her, nonchalantly, as if it were an everyday occurrence? Hey, good thing I know you’re alive. I was ready to burn your body and dump you in a pot.
No. If anything, he could only mention it subliminally as a passing and analyze her reaction. I’m surprised you’re not dead.
Maybe that would sound better if they were friends. But, again, she didn’t know him. He shook his head.
And, no. He was definitely not going to ask about Ana. Not yet, anyway.
The Academy Hospital appeared before him, standing as a tall, cylindrical, one-story building built up by a collection of creamy, pastel mint stones shaped like bricks and stacked in a pattern that resembled the scales of fish and dragons. Against the sunset, the chrysoprase blocks unveiled the misty reflection of its inner surface. Amethyst laced around the building where the glass walls ended and freed everyone to explore the hospital and the rest of the arboretum. Its entrance was guarded by heavy topaz doors, chosen specifically to protect those within its surroundings from mind control. Arboretum aside, the rest of the Academy Hospital was pretty much built the same way as the hospital back in Foyersinn and everywhere else in Aideyll.
“Welcome to the Academy Hospital,” a voice called out the moment Szak closed the door behind him. It was a chirpy voice, with a slight accent that took careful consideration on the pronunciation of its vowels. A harpy stood behind a counter, hair shades of brown and caramel tied into a neat bun on the top of her head to keep strands out of her face. She held a bright smile beneath amber eyes as she walked around the counter to meet him, her enormous brown wings trailing behind her as they held onto her shoulder blades. “May I inquire for the name of whom you are visiting, so that you may be directed to the correct area?”
The harpy pulled out a piece of white bark no larger than a hand and gestured for Szak to take it. Her wing bent in front of her, and she plucked out a sizeable umber feather to place it on top of the bark.
Szak didn’t take the bark or the feather. Beside them, a male healing sprite walked by in matching uniform and sat behind the counter, tending to his own business. The harpy reached into a pocket in her uniform and pulled out a bottle filled with a liquid clear like water. Szak guessed it to be sap from the same matriherb as the bark, which meant that the rooms were likely all also labeled by the same related bark.
“Please write the name of the patient on here.” She gestured again for Szak to take wood piece and the feather. “It will reveal their residence, and I will guide you accordingly.”
“I don’t know their names. I’m looking for the two women flown in from the central markets.”
“Ah, yes,” the harpy nodded. She put the bottle away and placed the bark back on the counter, with her feather on top. “Might I ask your relationship to the two?”
“I was the one who tried to save them.” The words were excruciatingly hard to admit. Szak was caught in a pause before he could continue. “I came to make sure they’re alright.”
“How thoughtful!” The harpy’s smile beamed, and her feathers ruffled about. “Root number two hundred and thirty-eight. Right this way!”
Szak followed behind her along the mint-tinted corridors. The harpy did not wear shoes, allowing her to walk with bare claws yellow that curved like those of a hawk.
“They are fine,” the harpy eased. “An assistant is in the citrine room with them. We’ll have a talented eye check their circulation and neural patterns before releasing them.”
Szak nodded. A citrine room was for mental recuperation after a major incident—plenty of those lined the levels of the hospital back home, where soldiers were recommended to visit after every mission. This meant that both women were physically recovered enough to be conscious. The healers in Essensia were definitely quick with their job.
“The hospital has a matriherbal system?” Szak asked instead.
The harpy nodded. “Its roots only reach as far as the violet amethyst that surrounds our hospital. Our singular matriherb stands at the center; it has grown to a size where the roots are too thick to pinpoint placement of our patients with complete accuracy. What we do instead is write the names of our patients on the root that runs along each room, using the same sap visitors use to mark their name on the bark I was to hand you earlier.”
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They walked past rooms of all shades and hues. Szak identified each in his mind as a different mineral with a different purpose, just like every other hospital and how every gem is carefully chosen when Drakonforged into weaponry. Some rooms were left as chrysoprase for the healers, while others were for patients to aid in digestion problems, blood circulation, fatigue, infections, and blood loss.
“How does a Drakonskar know of matriherbs, if you don’t mind that I ask?”
“A part of the border between Oblivion and the Mist is marked by a field of matriflowers. We use it to scout unwanted visitors,” Szak explained.
“Oh, how clever,” the harpy chirped. “Any movement made on the surface above a root is sensed by every flower. Their roots intertwine to pass information. Underneath the dirt, there’s a knitted crust locking the field together.”
Szak shrugged. “Yeah, sure.” It’s not like he needed to know how it worked, just that it did. Whenever unwanted movement happened, all flowers turned and faced in the direction of the touch so that the front line would know where to direct their focus. That was all.
“Oh, but matriflowers are excruciatingly hard to maintain,” the harpy continued. “The amount of water necessary in their environment is close to unnatural. Only areas with consistently high humidity with frequent fog and rain are suitable. Here at the hospital—oh, here we are!”
The harpy entered a room covered with gems of a translucent golden brown. Szak looked down as he stepped through the doorway and saw a thick white root raise as a bump along the surface of the ground, lining one end of the opening to the other. When he fully entered the room, he felt a suffocating weight in the air that made it difficult to move.
“My dear, what has happened?” Szak could hear the harpy ask. He felt his heart beat as if it was both too frantic and too heavy to let him breathe. His first thought was to step back out of the room, but he wanted to kneel on the ground and surrender to whatever had plagued the air in this room, instead.
“I shouldn’t have stopped you…”
The voice was unfamiliar, but Szak pinned it to be the blue-haired girl. The words. They didn’t carry the way they can when passing through a siren. Yet, for some reason, the words she spoke felt to have matched the insurmountable weight of melancholy in the room.
This couldn’t be from her talent, could it? Ivory hair does mean she’s an emittier, but even then—
Szak felt hands grab and drag him backwards, out the doorway. Air rushed into him with his next heave, like a breath of crisp winter air in a snow-covered morning as he fell onto the ground, free from whatever energy was kept condensed in that room. The harpy’s wings swung past him, dragging out the siren.
“I need Reikon!”
Szak pushed himself back up to standing and looked back into the citrine room. There, in the center, sat the blue haired girl, strands dyed brown from blood, digging her fingernails into her left cheek, carving away skin, whispering words he couldn’t hear. He leaned forward.
“… too far from death… we were too far from death…”
Far?
As if she knew.
As if, in some other point in her life, she had once been so close to death, she now grasped the capabilities to understand the discrepancy. Did she mean being far from death now, or earlier?
“… so selfish of me… I shouldn’t have stopped you… I shouldn’t have stopped you… I shouldn’t…”
She kept muttering the same thing over and over again. Szak glanced back. The harpy nurse knelt beside the siren that fell, wings outstretched and caressing her patient with her feathery ember shield.
What could have the siren have said that would make her think it wrong to stop what would have happened?
Or… what did she see? Szak thought back to the burst of Ana’s memories when he first grabbed her. He leaned in closer.
“Caution, Drakonskar,” the harpy said.
Szak turned to the harpy again, about to retort, but—something about the siren just then had caught his eye when she, too, glanced at him for a soft moment. All sirens had yellow and ivory hair with perfect hazel eyes, but there was something about the siren’s facial composition that looked familiar.
And then the answer came to him. From around the corner.
“Iago? Lyly?” Szak stood up, glanced back at the blue-haired girl, bleeding herself out in the room. He turned back at the two of them. “Where’s Seph? Why are you here?”
“I could ask you the same thing, Szakarilis Drakon,” Eulylia snipped. “Yukina is not your aunt. For what reason are you taking up space beside her?”
“Is that…?” Iago stepped past Eulylia. Alea?
“You know her?” Szak glanced at the blue-haired girl and then back at Iago, catching the gold in his eyes momentarily lose its sparkle before responding.
“In passing.”
“The pressure in the room. Can you redirect it, somehow?”
Iago turned to Szak. “Not the way it works, darling. I need a space for immediate outlet.”
“You take energy all the time. Can’t you keep it inside you?”
“Yes, natural energy,” Iago chuckled with a slight shrug. “Talented energy can be a bit finicky, sometimes. That’s what I’m at the Academy for, sweetheart.”
“So you can, you just don’t know how,” Szak snapped back. He turned back to the blue-haired girl, now standing up against the pressure of the room. All around her, citrine crystals spread cracks along the surfaces, at the brink of falling apart.
Does he not see the immediacy of this situation? How can he just shrug so casually?
Iago glanced back at Eulylia, who was humming soft melodies into her aunt’s ear while simultaneously glaring down the back of Szak’s head. It let him smile before he turned back to Szak with a response.
“You think—”
“Watch out!” Szak jumped back from the doorway.
Iago turned, seeing Alea almost colliding into him, and also clumsily stepped back in time to let her run out the room. He caught sight of the fresh blood on her face and arms, but none fell as she zipped past them.
“What ha—” Iago stopped. Szak had already left, following her. He looked back into the room. Blood was messily smeared where Alea had been. He took a step in. Lingering bits of Alea’s talent kept a soft pressure in the room, its energy heavy. Concentrated, almost. Condensed, but trying to dissipate. With an inhale, Iago took all of it in, and with a calm exhale, he accepted the pain tearing his chest apart.
So… Alea does have a psychic talent. He looked back out the doorway. Eulylia was approaching him. Behind her, a healer had arrived and was speaking with the nurse. But this heartbreak I’m feeling… is it hers, or mine, resurfacing?
“She said the girl who ran out of the room was the one who saved her.”
Iago turned to Eulylia, taking in all of her worry and her beauty beside him. All of the cracked citrine pointed sunlight onto her skin from every direction, and she shined as if she were the moon among the stars. She looked up at him when he didn’t respond.
“Did you not hear me?”
“Sweetheart, you know I would displace oceans just to hear you breathe.”
Eulylia let out a soft smile, and then she hugged herself as her smile disappeared. “She would have been dead, if not for the girl.”
“Dead?” Iago asked, alarmed. “Like, murdered? Eulylia, darling, there is no killing in Aideyll.”
Her hazel eyes met Iago’s golden ones. “Unless you choose to kill yourself.”
Iago grabbed Eulylia and pulled her into his arms, gently stroking her head as she broke into soft sobs into his chest.
“Shh… it’s alright, dear,” his husky voice whispered into her hair. “She’s still alive. She’s still here. It’s okay. She’s alive. She’s alive.” He looked out the room. The nurse was walking Yukina away, likely to another room to rest. One of her wings wrapped around her as the other relaxed closed behind her. The healer also left. Iago assumed it was out of urgency to find Alea.
Alea.
Did she know? That Yukina was going to kill herself? Or had it been a coincidence?
Iago patted Eulylia a couple times on the back. She wiped her tears away before looking up to him. When Iago looked down, the sight of her vulnerability kept safe between his arms made him wish they could be this way, forever.
“Let’s go look for her, darling. Perhaps Szak’s caught up to her.”