There was only pain and agony. She felt her insides burning, her veins filled with boiling oil and her skin being pricked by countless thorns at the same time. Her heart was madly pounding, her muscles felt like waking up for the first time after ages, contracting in tormenting spasms and each and every bone in her body felt like being broken repeatedly, again and again and then... again. Then...
Her vision went black.
Iarvahr watched the whole process with sadness and pain radiating from his teared up eyes. At first, he was pleasantly surprised that she woke up after such a short time, but all this pain, all this madness... to see a child enduring such agony, it was almost too much to bear. A thought of ending her misery with a sharp blade has crossed his mind more than once.
He was shivering from fatigue – for many long hours, he was cleaning the wounds of the child in front of him, trying to get rid of all the pus and filth oozing from her tiny, almost fairy-like body. He did not even dare to estimate what exactly the thick grayish ooze was, but it felt unnatural and smelt of machine oil used by machinists and mechanics all around the Citadel workshops. But she was not from Citadel, and there were no machinists and mechanics outside of Citadel walls. Alchemists were enthusiastically trying to determine the origin and purpose of the ooze, but to no avail. One thing was almost certain – it was not made by her own body.
Her wounds were healing quickly, without any complications caused by inflammation or infection. She was very strange, this little girl – he doubted that even himself, at his physical peak, would be able to survive such wounds. But she... despite all the torment and pain she was suffering from, she endured.
Watching her sleeping silently, he filled his beautifully carved pipe with herbal mixture and lit it. It got him thinking...
***
Her second awakening was accompanied by a lone, short cry. A flash of memory, her remembering the pain of her abused body, perhaps the only experience she had of the living world. Pain, agony, and torment.
She tried to pull her hands from underneath the heavy blanket that was covering her. After a bit of painless struggle, she was successful and for a few moments, she watched the thick, heavy smoke dancing between her fingers, gently caressing her pale skin.
She tried to sit. Every movement was a painless struggle, as if her muscles were not used to do anything, yet they were fully formed and strong. Sle felt like moving through thick honey – a sweet product of bees she had no idea how she knew of...
Bees, small insects living off of flowers, armed with painful stingers they lose in the defense of hive...
Flowers, miracles of nature, colorful, aromatic, poisonous, toxic, healing...
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She looked around the room she woke up in. It was simply furnished – wooden chair without cushion, small table, a bed with large pillows and thick blanket, a window made of glass. On a table, there was a large bowl with heavy smoke rising from it in curly, almost flame-like patterns.
She knew those things, all of them... their names, their purpose, but she did not remember them until she saw them.
A raven landed on the window sill and pecked on the window glass with its beak. It was looking right at her, with its head tilted to a side in a curious manner.
A heavy door opened silently and a tall, broad shouldered man with a shaved head walked in. His eyes immediately widened when he saw her sitting and after a moment, a warm smile spread across his face. Intuitively, she returned the smile.
He made a strange, unfamiliar noise with his mouth. Judging by the fading smile on his face, she must have made a strange face, but she composed herself right away and smiled again. He pointed to his face and body and with a clear voice, he slowly said „Iarvahr.“
***
The day she woke up was designated her birthday, and her age at the time was estimated to be seven years. She was rather intelligent, a quick learner. Her memory was a rare gift that most scholars would have envied her... yet no one would pay the price of the recurrent, debilitating pain she felt in her body, or frequent migraines so severe that they were able to bring her to the very edge of madness. More than once, she tried to end the pain in the most drastic ways – a sharp blade here, a fall from the window there... Once, on the second anniversary of her waking up, she ran head-first against the stone wall of her room, which led to a week-long state of unconsciousness.
The only thing that seemed to numb her agony were the pain medications in the form of mildly narcotic drugs, but to dose a child with such things... Iarvahr taught her how to light up a pipe, how to clean it and maintain it, and how to properly mix the herbs and medicine. He hated himself for that at first but in time, after whole months without pain, he saw the greater good it brought.
***
When she was seventeen, she passed the exams of the Citadel’s university medical wing with flying colors, which made her the youngest medic in the history of Citadel. She celebrated her eighteenth birthday elbow-deep in the belly of a wounded child during the siege of Korvul keep and a week later, she defended the same child with her own body from a potentially lethal blow from a Whisper-infested soldier.
Half a year later, she followed the war-medic contingent accompanying the Cryotan expeditionary force into the barren lands of The Silent Fields, and more than once, she found herself in the position of a pathologist rather than medic, dissecting the strange, thin, sheet-like bodies of Whispers, in the search of their weakness. Her reward was a jagged scar spreading across her right forearm carved by the venomous claws of one particular Whisper that was much more alive than it first appeared. Barely surviving the event, she was released from the war-medic contingent with a shiny medal. Before she left the army encampment, she gave her medal to an unknown, unnamed soldier that lost both his hands in the conflict.
She spent her twenty third birthday piling up rotting corpses in the squares of Antiga, covered head to toe by pus, vomit and dark, sick blood. The blood rot was a cruel, tormenting disease, and people fell by hundreds. In the company of her close friend she considered a sister, she saw more death in an hour than a seasoned soldier saw in a lifetime. She was trying to keep her best friend alive a year later, her white robes stained scarlet, trying to fix all the damage that miscarriage has caused on her body.
Again and again, she thought of heading back to the citadel. The world was filled with pain, rot, reek and gore, with ever present decay of human spirit and flesh, cruelty, violence and war, always followed by blood, tears, vomit and in the end, the sweet release of death... She always slapped away the thoughts and did her duty. To heal, to help, to mend the broken and sew up the torn, to burn out the filth and clean up the putridity. In the daylight, her world was devoid of all color but that of blood, and her dreams were filled with screams of those already dead, or cries of those alive, begging for death. She never faltered, not once. Her name was Auria, and – same as all other medics from the halls of Citadel - it was her duty, her purpose, to heal the world. But she could not be far from home forever, and a time came when she could not properly focus on her work anymore. Her nights became filled with recurring nightmares, and pain numbing drugs were slowly becoming less and less effective. A time finally came, when she could not run from herself anymore.
Her twenty eight birthday was…