I got dressed. Went to bed. Drew the bedcurtains tight, turned my tablet’s light on full, and inspected the scar. There they were; a lattice of stretch marks that I’d seen on nobody else but Chelsea, and that certainly shouldn’t be present on something healed by Malas.
Here was the thing. I had used my healing potion down in the labyrinth of dreams, where I’d gotten this scar. But this scar had come from the tooth castle, right? And that had been hours after I’d used the potion. We hadn’t stopped to treat our wounds after the tooth castle.
So. Possible explanations.
Possibility one: coincidence. Maybe scars just sometimes looked like this, and Chelsea having healed hers with my potion wasn’t actually relevant. We just happened to have scars that had healed similarly.
Unlikely. I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen this on any other scars, and the stretching made logical sense for skin healed over open muscle, which was what would happen if someone used the potion on a cut too deep. Anyway, after the whole labyrinth of dreams adventure, I’d woken up covered in Malas’ magic. If a potion hadn’t healed this, Malas had, and his magic didn’t tend to scar, and definitely didn’t scar like this. I’d kind of assumed that this particular cut was too deep or mangled and had scarred anyway; even the kuracar had limits. But everything else had healed just fine. If I’d gotten this along with a bunch of other tears tumbling down a tooth slope, and it was too much for Malas to heal without scarring, then shouldn’t I have other little scars, too, rather than a single obvious scar and a bunch of perfectly healed wounds?
No; it couldn’t be a coincidental similarity. Just to be sure, I looked up my healing potion on the intranet and poked around until I found an actual description of what happened when it was used on deep wounds. The scarring pattern described matched mine and Chelsea’s perfectly.
Possibility two: after Kylie and I had fallen unconscious after creating the familiarity link, Max had treated our wounds, and had used the leftover healing potion in my first aid kit on my arm. Also unlikely. There was simply no way that Max would use a magic potion in ways it wasn’t meant to be used unless there was a very good reason to do so. He was too fastidious about procedure and too cautious with magic. He would’ve just cleaned and wrapped the wound for Malas to deal with.
I pondered messaging him about it, but we were in the middle of Assassin Lookout. This didn’t seem the best time to distract everyone with another weird mystery.
Possibility three: Malas had treated the wound with a skin healing potion. I dismissed this one out of hand, for multiple obvious reasons.
Possibility four: I’d used the potion a couple of hours before we got to the tooth castle, so maybe it was still on my skin and had acted on the wound. This possibility seemed promising, but some research into the potion showed that it lost most of its potency almost immediately upon application, and would definitely be useless after thirty minutes. There was simply no way we’d made it to the tooth castle that quickly. It had to have been applied fresh after getting the wound, and I… hadn’t done that.
Possibility five: I’d gotten the wound earlier. I had assumed, from the general look of the wound, that I’d torn my arm open on the tooth slope, but that was an assumption. Perhaps I’d injured it earlier in our trek, before treating our wounds with the healing potion?
No, that was also pretty unlikely. I would have noticed a wound that deep. I wouldn’t have put the potion on it; I’d have just bandaged it. Even if I had put the potion on it, or it had gotten there by accident, I would definitely have remembered that wound, remembered tending it. It definitely hadn’t been there when we’d stopped to treat our wounds.
Possibility six: Someone? Else?? Had tended the wound??? While I was unconscious???? Unless the janitors were running around applying random potions to people, that didn’t make sense. There’s been Max, and the janitors had found us, and they’d taken us to Malas. There was no one else in the chain to provide improper healthcare.
Had I fallen on top of my bag when I’d collapsed under the power of Fionnrath’s Destiny, broken the healing potion, and doused my arm in it accidentally? Maybe? That was the best explanation I could come up with. It was flimsy. Really flimsy.
There just wasn’t any reason why the scar on my arm should exist.
I stared at the scar for awhile longer, until something else odd occurred to me. When I got up, the area behind Saina’s bedcurtain was quiet and dark. I listened carefully for her breathing (because I was on bodyguard duty and needed to make sure she hadn’t somehow been kidnapped or killed while I was having a personal crisis), determined that she was there but asleep, and headed for a random stone wall.
Here’s the thing. The scar was two semicircles a little way below my thumb, one on the inner arm and one on the outer. It wasn’t surprising that, tumbling down a slope made of teeth, I’d cut my arms up pretty badly. But I’d climbed, and fallen down, a lot of steep slopes and rock walls since then. I’d picked up hundreds of little scrapes and bruises, and not once had I scraped or tore open that scar again. It just wasn’t in a place on my arm that was likely to get hurt like that.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
I placed my hand against the stone wall, like I was climbing it. The scar on my inner arm could sort of make contact with the wall in that position, but not the outer one. I let go of the wall and pulled my arms over my chest and head, like I was protecting myself during a fall, and leaned against it – now, neither of the scars were anywhere near the wall.
I spend some time, trying to find a position where sliding down a wall or slope could put scars under my thumb like that. In the end, I found two possibilities – with my arms stretched over my head and my back against the wall (I hadn’t slid down the tooth slope on my back), and if I tucked my arms all the way against my chest and twisted them all the way around at an awkward angle so my thumbs were sticking out (which would have cut up my thumbs and face far worse than my arm). I’d been assuming that the tooth slope had done this, but I just couldn’t see how, physically, that had happened.
The wound hadn’t existed before we’d treated our injuries. The only thing likely to cause it after was the tooth slope, but I couldn’t see how. And after the tooth slope, nothing had happened that was likely to cause that kind of injury until I’d fallen unconscious and ended up in Malas’ care.
Maybe I had fallen on my backpack when passing out after the familiarity ritual after all. Maybe I had fallen, and my flailing arm had broken my healing potion, and the cuts weren’t from a tooth castle at all but were from the broken glass. Semicircles where the circular jar had cut in. Maybe. They weren’t quite circular enough, a bit too stretched out and wide, but if I’d been flailing around…
Well, Max had been conscious at that point. I’d have to ask him if he remembered.
It was stupid, I knew, to be fixated on some dumb scar when I was on bodyguard duty, already dealing with an actually important mystery, but… well. I had vague memories of one of those stupid dream with the spellthing in them, telling me how much easier it’d be for me to figure things out if my scars itched and demanded my attention. It was probably just random nonsense from my subconscious, but… maybe it meant my actual, literal scars? Maybe this was important?
There was no reason not to try to figure out the things that didn’t make sense about it, anyway. After the full moon. For the moment, I went to bed and got some sleep.
Saina was a bit distant the next morning. Friendly, but distant. I wasn’t sure why until I remembered that the night before, she’d maybe-maybe-not made a bit of a move and my response had been to freeze up, run off immediately to have a shower, and then spend the rest of the night hiding in my bed and not talking to her. Oops. I should probably say something about that, but somehow I didn’t think ‘it’s not you, it’s this weird scar on my arm that I just suddenly got obsessed with’ was the kind of explanation likely to improve the situation.
Besides, I might have been misreading the situation. Maybe she wasn’t making a move at all, and if I said anything, I’d just sound like a pathetic, creepy idiot. Better to just ignore the whole thing and passively hope that she tried again more directly and unambiguously, and I would definitely react in a chill and cool way and not in any way freak out or do anything awkward. Yeah. Perfect plan. I’m so mature.
We settled into watching Star Trek: The Next Generation for the morning. Our personal day cycle was out of sync with Duniyasar’s; we were a few episodes in when night fell over the point of power and everything was lit only by the full moon. I knew this, because I could feel the itch of Kylie’s magic getting just a little bit excited as she went to her lesson. I did my best to put the feeling out of my mind and focus on the show. Saina, on the other hand, was not particularly focused on the show. She was instead frowning at her own partly curled hands.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Trying to cast an illusion of something that isn’t a butterfly.”
“Have you ever succeeded at that?”
“Technically, yes. I can also do several moths, and one specific species of solitary bee, for some reason. Whoever trained this spell like this was an absolute weirdo.”
“It’d have to be over several generations, right? To specialise it to make such detailed illusions of something so specific? So, what, your spell just happened to belong to a lot of really dedicated entomologists in a row?”
She screwed up her nose. “More likely, it belonged to one really dedicated entomologist who biased it, and then a series of people who all decided that if their magic was going to railroaded then they’d at least be the best they possibly can at the developing niche. It’s a lot more common than you might think, generations of people hyperspecialising a spell to uselessness because committing to the existing specialisation is easier than fighting it. Or maybe the spell was specialised from the start, dreamed up by a thousand biologists struggling to write their PhDs on rare species of butterflies they never get a chance to see.”
“Ah,” I said. “You’ve thought about this.”
“You have no idea.”
“Well, at least you have a cool elemental designation,” I pointed out. I gave a mock bow. “My Lady of Light.”
Saina giggled. “You honour me, Sound Knight. Who would the rest of our pit comp team be? Captain Star and… hmm… the Stone Soldier?”
“See, that’s the kind of thing we should’ve based our team name on. We sound so badarse.” I ran my tongue over my teeth, which were almost buzzing. Kylie’s spell was getting pretty excited. Not enough to make me afraid, I didn’t think either of us were about to collapse or anything, but it seemed like the supermoon thing must be giving her a boost after all.
“What about your friends?” Saina asked.
“Mm? Oh yes. Maximillian Acanthos, Lord of Steel. And Kylie, the Air – ”
And then I stopped talking, heart in my throat, because a lot of little details had slotted into place and a difficult puzzle suddenly made perfect, beautiful, horrible sense.
“We have to get to Duniyasar,” I gasped. “Right away.” I made for the door.
“Kayden, what’s – ?”
“It’s not you. You’re not the one getting assassinated under a full moon tonight. Kylie is.”