The patient suffered from the blue pox in its late stages. Blisters filled with violet liquid covered his entire body, forming a sort of twisted pattern that would have had to come from the mind of a deranged painter. One by one, Auria cut each blister open and carefully cleaned it, draining all the pus away, and sterilizing the wound with alcohol. The surgical suite was filled with the smell of rotting eggs, yet she paid no attention to it. It was not important.

She worked on his body for a half an hour without a pause – each and every blister needed to be cleaned, every drop of violet pus needed to be removed. The man on the table kept waking up for a short periods of time, coughing out bloody mucus from his inside. Auria doubted that he would survive the procedure – the disease was left untreated for far too long.

„His heart is not beating.“ said the assisting medical student with a hint of panic in his voice and at once, he started to massage his chest, trying to make heart beat again. After a minute, he moved to breathe into the patient’s mouth but was stopped by Auria slapping him with the back of her hand.

„Your mouth touch his and you will infect yourself.“ She said in a tired, but still very pleasant voice. „Try to make his heart beat again, do not let your bare skin touch him.“

She grabbed a flask of strong alcohol from a nearby cabinet and poured it over the victim's closed mouth. Then she wet the clean piece of cloth with the alcohol, scrubbed her own mouth clean, then the patient’s, and with a silent curse, started to breathe into the patient's mouth. After three breaths, she flushed her mouth with alcohol, rubbed the man's mouth clean again, and repeated the process.

They did it for ten minutes, swapping their places when one of them had no energy left for rhythmic chest compressions, but the man on the table refused to breathe. With a loud sigh, she threw the empty alcohol bottle into the corner of the room, where it shattered into a million pieces. She cleaned her hands in the sink, both with water and disinfecting alcohol, and then filled up her pipe with a mixture of herbs. She opened the windows to ventilate the room a little bit – the patient was dead, and the breeze could not bother him anymore – and turned to the clueless student.

„He needs to be burned. Call the cremation team, and clean yourself thoroughly. Burn your clothes, along with the corpse. Send another victim.“ She let out a large cloud of blueish smoke. Sweet scent pierced through the reek of death. „And another student. Good job.“ she added.

***

They were trapped in the dark. Walls made of wet wood were covered by white, fluffy fungi. They were dotted with holes and through them, hot air was coming inside...

Squeaking and rattling of rusty wheels mixed with moaning of twisted, malformed figures laying all around. Bodies marked with tumorous growths, horn growths and weeping wounds were pressed together in the mixture of filth, heat and stink. There was nowhere to move. There was nowhere to run...

The carriage has stopped. A wooden wall disappeared and bodies pressed against it fell down from the carriage onto the hot, sandy ground. Monsters covered in golden scales started to sort through the bodies and drag them away, being as gentle with them as with a pile of horse shit in the middle of the road. The moaning of suffering figures was getting more intense...

Her fall to the ground was painful, but not more than what followed. A golden-scaled hand grabbed her, scraping the skin on her upper arm while his other hand hit her across the face. Her once white hair, now darkened with filth, started to change color again – this time to blood red. The world was fading in front of her eyes...

Dragged through the sand... Sharp stones, cutting her skin open... Dry twigs leaving their thorns in her body... A face in the golden, scaly helmet... A smile with yellow teeth, the reek of rotting gums... Spit dripping from her face, her wounds stinging from the golden man's bodily fluids... Golden hand hitting her face, again and again...

Darkness.

***

She woke up screaming. Sweaty and with eyes filled with tears, she still felt all the cuts and bruises from her dream, she still felt like covered in piss, and her stomach was spasming, trying to vomit from the reek around her.

She did not remember sitting up. A woman with coal-black hair was staring at her, with eyes filled with tears, but with a reassuring smile on her face. With a soft tone and sweet, melodic voice, black haired woman calmed Auria down and helped her fall asleep again.

Black haired woman was silently crying long after Auria fell asleep. These dreams were returning more often now, and Naira suspected that they were the reason why Auria wanted to return to the Citadel. The horrors Auria saw... she knew that it was just a matter of time until Auria broke down completely.

She held her hand and silently watched the beautiful, serene face of the sleeping woman, framed by her long, white hair. For the last month, there were barely a few nights when Auria did not wake up screaming.

Naira held the hand of white haired woman and silently stared into the wall. After a long while, she dried her eyes and moved to the table, where she pulled out a leather-bound book from underneath a myriad of blueprints of various devices. She opened it on the last written page and on the bottom, Naira wrote down the date and estimated time of Auria’s latest episode.

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***

Auria woke up to the rainy morning with a strong headache. She sat on her bed and started vomiting, again and again, until the pain faded just a little bit. Not much came out of her, mostly just stomach mucus and a bit of acid, but the convulsions were severe and painful. At the end, she was visibly shivering.

Usually, the headaches were not as intense and she could quickly suppress the pain with a dose of smoked pain-killing medication, but not after a night filled with nightmares. They somehow reduced the usefulness of the medications, making them almost obsolete. These recurring nightmares were the reason for her return to the Citadel - in the beginning, they were not frequent and they were not like any other dreams she had. She remembered them all, in detail, and she suspected that the nightmares were her own memories, bubbling up from the depths of her locked up mind. As the time went on however, the nightmares returned more often, always accompanied by searing pain of the waking world.

„Did I wake you up, or did you come home late?“ she asked Naira, sitting in a comfortable chair by the window, shuffling through pages of an old, leather covered book.

„Both.“ she muttered. „Which nightmare was it this time?“

She sighted, and threw vomit-covered blankets on the ground. She reached for the leather pouch, hanging from the back of a chair. „The carriage.“

„Anything new in the dream?“

Auria shook her head and took out a vial and syringe from her pouch. She was getting prepared to inject the painkiller into her bloodstream, but Naira stopped her. „Please, do not do this.“

„Why?“ Auria asked, irritated. „Today, I am once again going to be covered by pus, blood and fuck knows what else from head to toes.“ She laughed bitterly. „My day started with vomit on my lips and my bed sheets.“ She raised a syringe filled with milky white substance. „This... filth, this might be the difference between death and life for dozens of people, Naira. I can not work with a headache like this, you know that.“

„There are other medics, Auria. Take a break. You are slowly killing yourself. Do you really need it, or is it just an eagerness, a wish for another dose, that I see in your eyes?“

„Fuck y...“ Auria let out a long sigh and with a short, violent scream, she threw the syringe against the wall. The needle broke, but the vial miraculously survived. Sudden movements made her body spasm and vomit again. „Do you like it, watching me in this state?“

Naira replied too quickly for Auria’s taste. „No, Auria. But it is still better than being high from that toxic filth that you wanted to inject yourself with. Light up the pipe. Fight through the pain. We have returned here for you to find an answer to your nightmares, to your pain. So start looking for them finally, and stop running.“

With those words, Naira left the room. Auria was left staring into the wall, and without really thinking about it, she lit up the herb packed pipe. After a while, the pain in her head changed from a sharp, stabbing sensation into a dull, constant throbbing.

***

Stink of machine oil, burnt gunpowder and volatile chemical compounds filled Nairas lungs with every breath she took. Once again, she was tinkering with her newest toy, her latest creation – a high caliber revolver gun she almost lovingly called Chimera. The weapon was a peak of mechanical engineering of her age, and Naira knew it – not many mechanics from the Citadel could even replicate her work, yet alone invent it on their own.

The genius was in the details. The weapon on its own was of a simple design, based on that of rather widely used revolver pistols able to host six rounds in the revolving, cylindrical magazine, but Naira needed something more.

She made Basilisk with one thing in mind – versatility. She – along with her former partner – used to tinker with the idea of gun ammunition that had other purposes than merely killing a target. Blinding ammunition, sonic ammunition, corrosive ammunition, stunning ammunition... Yet for a long time, she was unable to make it work.

That was, untill she made Chimera.

She loaded a prototype into the chamber of Chimera, aimed at a figurine on the other side of the room and made her shot. The ammunition broke open inside of the chamber and after a loud and surprised scream, she was left blind.

This was not my brightest moment... she admitted in her own mind. But if I made a sort of eye protection... And if I made it bigger, perhaps in the form of a thrown explosive...

While the blindness was slowly fading, all that she could do was to think. To think about Auria, her outbreaks and nightmares... About what she must have endured as a child to block everything behind a dam in her mind... But the dam started to crack, and drop by drop, her memories started to leak through.

Perhaps her father Iarvahr would be able to shed some light into Aurias mysterious childhood, but Naira doubted it. She remembered the day Auria was brought into the citadel, a small child cradled in long, thin limbs of a Haraag... but Naira was merely a child back then, and more than anything, she remembered the huge, segmented body of Haraag, its six legs, four arms, and huge, chittering mandibles… Its bronze carapace glittering in the sun, Haraag only handed Auria over to Iarvahr, said a few words in strange language and left promptly. Naira therefore doubted that Iarvahr knew more about his daughter's past than Auria herself did.

She was her best friend. Her sister. They stood by each other for years, supporting each other through hard times, through pain and suffering, as well as through love and joy. Thanks to Auria, Naira met the man that would later become her husband, the man that would put a child inside her belly... His sudden death caused her misscarriage, and Naira... Oh, how she wished that she died with him. Each day, every day, her thoughts moved closer and closer to death. She had nothing left. Love of her life, perished in front of her eyes, and their unborn child, the last piece of him she had left in the world...

Auria saved her life. Auria did not let her die. Thanks to Auria, the last five years of Naira's life were pure misery, an unending cycle of suffering and anguish. Auria asked her if Naira liked to see her suffer... Both of them knew the truth. Both of them were horrified by it. None of them wanted to admit it.

The blindness was fading slowly, and she needed something to clear her mind. She thought about how she recently felt kicked by a muse and ideas for new inventions and mechanisms often sprang to her mind – usually, she wrote them down into a small, leather covered journal. It helped her to clear her mind to list through the ideas, discard the useless ones, or elaborate on the ideas behind inventions that could be of great benefit – either to her personally, or to the people of the Citadel.

None save Auria knew about her private workshop and she wasn’t usually bothered by any visitors. Sometimes, it made her feel lonely... but every attempt that Naira had to get closer to somebody, to find a friend, ended with her shutting the other person off. Auria was the only close friend, the only family she had left after the death of her husband... Despite the torment and pain she felt every time she was left alone with her thoughts, despite her blaming Auria for all that, she could never bring herself to truly hate her. Yes, Naira was often cold to her, but she still loved her. And there was nothing that would ever change the love she felt towards a girl she grew up with, towards a girl she traveled half the known world with.

Her mind wandered. Unable to focus on anything in particular, she blindly patted down the workbench until she found a small, sharp knife with a thin blade. After a few seconds worth of consideration, she made a small cut through the back of her forearm, away from all the major blood vessels. Shw did not want to cause any permanent or serious injury to herself, she just needed something to concentrate on – a little bit of pain, to keep her mind focused away from all the dark thoughts.

The physical pain helped, as it always did, and after the blindness faded completely, she promptly returned to her tinkering.