Chapter 12: Healing up and moving in
Felix Sythias’ POV (continued):
I winced. Dad never cursed.
He picked me up and started looking me over, taking in all my scars and burn wounds. It was incredibly weird to be picked up like that. Like I was a little dragon toy, rather than the size of a horse.
“Hey! Calm down, I’m fine. Really! I am! Put me down!” Dad didn’t listen though and only after he had thoroughly checked me over for injuries—aside from the obvious one—did he put me down. I started explaining what happened before he could ask.
“There was a monster, it broke my wing. I had to cut it off. You will want to look at it. The monster, not the wing. It was level twenty-three,” I rattled off.
Dad held up a hand to stop me. “That won’t be necessary. I’m really, really glad you’re okay, you foolish boy.” He glanced at my stump. “Mostly, anyway.”
“I am too, but why are you so early? I didn’t expect you to come flying down until the afternoon.”
“You weren’t the only ones attacked by high-level monsters. Others were… less fortunate.” He shook his head in that strange way he did when he tried to clear his mind. Like he was dismissing a sheet of paper. “I’ve been very busy dealing with the mess and didn’t know you were also down here until just a few minutes ago. It was incredibly stupid of you to not take an emergency beacon. I could’ve been here moments after you’d been attacked if you’d sounded the alarm.”
I squirmed under his glare. “I know dad. I’m really sorry.”
He sighed and shook his head. “We’ll talk about this later, okay? And I’m not the only one you need to apologize to,” he said, glancing at Alex.
He was right of course, and I nodded. I’d need to apologize to Alex properly later. “I will,” I said. “But I have to know, why were there so many monsters? Did the suppression field fail?”
“It didn’t. We don’t know what happened. All we know is that whatever happened, it wasn’t a local effect. The entire world was affected—that's why I was so busy.“
It wasn’t really a satisfying answer—something which dad clearly agreed with, going by the frown on his face—but it was all I was going to get as dad turned to Alex. He gave him a quick but thorough look over, and Alex squirmed a little under his paper-sharp gaze.
“You must be Alex. Felix has told me all about you! I’m glad you seem to be doing alright. I’m Elias Sythias. It’s nice to meet you,” he said and held his hand out for Alex to shake.
“It’s n-nice to meet you, too, sir,” he said back, shaking dad’s hand. His eyes were wide, and I saw him shaking slightly. It saddened me a little to see him so… I wasn’t sure what he was. Afraid? In awe? Whatever it was, I didn’t like it, even if I understood it. Dad was just dad, after all. I didn’t want my friend to be afraid of him.
Dad, for his part, just smiled reassuringly at him. Then he turned back to me. “Let’s get out of here, shall we? We’ll need to visit Elena. She’s a little busy right now, but I’m sure she can slot us in.”
All things considered, this impromptu camping trip hadn’t been that bad—if you ignored the injuries and attack. I had fun hanging out with Alex. But we were hurt, and I was tired, and Alex was probably sore from sleeping on the ground. So even if it had been fun in some small way, neither of us had any desire to stay, so of course we agreed.
Dad took out a piece of paper and rapidly wrote out a simple contract. He had both of us sign it—which took a little convincing Alex on my part. The moment the pen came off the paper, the fire went out and both of us hovered into the air behind dad—just like the contract had said. When he started running through the sky on his trail of paperwork, we were dragged with him.
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“Well, let’s deal with the simple injuries first.” Elena said, looking Alex over. “You have a nasty cut on your back, some bruising, and a bump on your head.”
She put her hand to his chest, and most of his injuries simply vanished. I felt a little jealous of that. Then she handed him a mango. “Here, eat this.”
He looked at it questioningly, so I explained.
“It’s full of slow-acting healing magic,” I told him, having had one myself many times already. “It will keep you healthy and fix any remaining issues. It’s safe, you can eat it.”
He tentatively took a bite out of the nightmare fruit and made a sour face. Yeah, I didn’t like mangoes either. He swallowed and took another, much larger bite, eating half the damn thing in one go. Elena turned to me.
“Let’s see. Well, I can tell you that I’ll have to cut away the burnt tissue at the very least, and a bit of the stump, too; it’s a jagged mess. Alright, let’s get a better look.” She placed a hand on my snout and grimaced. “Ugh, that’ll never be pleasant. Looking through your body is like swimming through a bowl of pea soup. Hmm, you have some rather serious internal bruising and quite a few fractures. I’m surprised you can still move at all, let alone with so much ease.”
The pain meds had helped a lot with that, but they’d been slowly wearing off for hours. The only reason I still moved so easily was the high inbuilt pain tolerance I’d been born with. And even then, the pain was starting to push my limits.
Elena’s hand glowed and pulses of warmth coursed through me. It was like waking up well rested in the early afternoon sun during a nice summer day on a warm beach surrounded by all your friends and family all smiling at you. A little weird, but overall very pleasant. I immediately felt better, the soreness and aches in my body fading away.
“There, I fixed most of the fractures and bruises, and got rid of any infections,” she said with a little bit of panting. “Now let’s get to those other wounds…”
She ended up cutting away the burned parts of my wounds and healing them enough that they scabbed over, then most faded entirely. A few deeper gouges were only partially healed, and it would take some time for them and my scales to grow back. Then she sliced off the tip of my stump and healed that as well. The gruesome wound scabbed over and a new growth appeared in the middle. It would grow back in time, and her magic helped speed up the process. I wasn’t looking forward to it. It itched.
“Are you sure you can’t just regrow it instantly?” I asked, already knowing the answer. I was not looking forward to several months of having to walk everywhere.
“You know I can’t. My magic isn’t as effective on you. It’s the pea-soup thing all over again. It’s like your mana is resisting mine. Simple injuries like the shallower cuts and the fractures are doable, but I can only speed up healing on the larger injuries. At least you’ll still benefit from my Skills and will keep most muscle memory.”
I sighed. The slower healing hadn’t been much of a problem before, as I’d broken a few bones at most doing dumb stuff, but I was really starting to hate it now. It wasn’t fair that on top of everything else, I was also inherently resistant to foreign mana—including healing magic. At least I wouldn’t have to relearn how to fly when it was all said and done.
I shook my head to clear my mind. “Alright, thank you.”
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She handed me one of the horrible fruits as well. I swallowed it with a single bite, only chewing on it once. I shuddered when the juices of it hit my tongue. That would never not be unpleasant. The slow healing would stimulate the growth of my new wing, though, speeding it up considerably, so it was worth it.
“You’ll want to come every week to get another mango, but you can just go to one of my minions for that.” Elena said. In the background one of her minions protested their new title.
After that she shooed us out of her office. Once outside the hospital, I stopped Alex and motioned him to step away from everyone. I wanted to talk to him before we met up with dad again. He did so and followed me to a small bench next to the entrance, where we sat down.
“Hey Alex? I wanted to apologize again for getting you into this mess. I know you said we’re both to blame and I won’t deny you that, but I do want to say sorry for my part. I really should’ve known better than to take you down to the forest when I didn’t even know your capabilities, let alone without telling anyone where we were going and forgetting a beacon on top of that. I’ll make sure none of those things ever happen again.”
“While I did say we’re both to blame, that doesn’t mean I blame you,” Alex said. “You were feeling down and not thinking straight, and really, who could’ve expected that dire bear to suddenly come out of nowhere? It sucked, but we’re both fine now. So let’s just take precautions so something like this never happens again and call it even, alright?. Though I can’t promise I’ll be up for doing this again anytime soon.”
I chuckled. “That’s fair. I don’t think I’ll be going down there any time soon either—even if I could actually fly down.”
“That’s probably for the best,” he said, then stood up and gave me a quick hug. It seemed that was becoming a thing we did. “Thank you for apologizing, Felix, even if it was a bit unnecessary. I really appreciate it. Now, come on, let’s go. Your dad is waiting for us.”
We walked down the stairs that led to the entrance of the hospital—really, who thought stairs outside a hospital were a good idea—and met back up with dad, who had waited for us. He was doing paperwork on a large desk made of even more paperwork. Forms and requests floated around him like usual. Everyone wisely gave him a wide berth.
He looked up at our approach, and I gave him the thumbs up. He smiled, and finally knowing I was safe and okay, he stored his paperwork desk and made to leave, but I stopped him.
“Please make it quick Felix,” he said. “I hate to go like this, but I need to get back to my office. Things are very busy with this incident.”
“Do you think you can set up a meeting between Alex and Sìnna? She’s his mentor,” I said, nodding my head in Alex’s direction. “It’s the least I can do after this whole mess.”
He materialized a piece of paper into his hand, wrote a little on it, and handed it to Alex. After that he rushed off.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Alex asked. I took the paper from him and looked it over.
“Wait, apparently. When Sìnna—I mean professor Vuillio—responds, it will show up here.” As I spoke, a time and place scribbled into existence in the box labeled ‘Response.’
“I have no idea where that is,” he said.
“Huh. It’s her home. Come, I’ll show you. Get ready for a long hike though; it’s quite far from here. Also, I hope you like squirrels.”
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We walked all the way to her house, which was an hour and a half long hike from the healers. The longer we walked, the more I hated my innate resistance to foreign mana. It really didn’t help that the stump was itching. I also didn’t like crossing all the bridges without being able to fly. What if I fell? I knew the chance was small; tiny even. But each bridge we crossed made me worry more. Luckily time flew by as I chatted with Alex, telling him about anything we came across. Soon enough, we’d arrived.
Sìnna Vuillio’s house was surrounded by trees and small buildings. Students roamed around the place, carrying cages, squirrel feed, and wheelbarrows full of squirrel dung. I recognized someone from our class, though I didn’t know her name. She scowled at us when we walked past.
Alex had been lucky to get Sìnna as his mentor. I’d sat in on a few of her mentoring sessions while I was younger and she was hatchling-sitting me while dad was away. She was great and would help Alex get his class choices in order in no time at all. She’d even help him with his Skill-choices if he wanted help with that. Not every mentor wanted to do that. Quite a few had strange notions of ‘finding your own path’.
I thought that was stupid. Finding your own path didn’t have to mean you couldn’t get advice.
“Hey, thanks for showing me the way,” Alex said once we got to the garden gate. “I know it sucks now that you can’t fly, so I appreciate you doing it anyway. What are you going to do now?”
“Go home and sleep, mostly. Then tomorrow I’ll move my stuff into the tower. What I can reasonably carry, at least. I’ll do the rest when my wing regrows.”
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, then gave me a quick hug before walking to the door. Hugging was definitely becoming a thing we did, it seemed. Halfway there, he turned back around. “She… she won’t actually turn me into a squirrel, right?”
I just grinned at him, and he sighed. After walking the last few steps, he knocked on the door and was let in by a servant. I turned around and started walking back home, which gladly was not all that far away from here.
When I finally got back home, my legs were exhausted. I hadn't walked this much in one day since I learned to fly almost a decade ago. When I got into my room, I realized another big issue. My room was designed like a large birdcage, with things to climb and perch on sticking out of the walls. There were three lofts with various purposes, as well. There was the reading loft, the equipment loft, and the sleeping loft. The sleeping loft had my nest-like bed and sat at the very top of the room. Because of course it did.
Luckily, my room was designed with flightlessness in mind though, and the walls were covered in talon holds—little nooks or sticks I could grab onto and climb the walls like a spider. I sighed and started the climb to the top.
Once I was on the sleeping loft, I set an alarm enchantment to wake me up the next morning and collapsed into my bed.
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A sharp, shrill sound woke me up. Immediately awake, I shot upright and scanned the area for monsters. I breathed out a sigh of relief and slumped back down when I realized I was safely in my room and the sound had just been my alarm. Time to get up.
After a few minutes of mustering up the motivation, I crawled out of bed. I stretched my limbs and almost jumped off the edge of the loft to glide down before I thought better of it. That would’ve been a dumb reason to visit the healers.
I climbed down the wall like the spider-dragon I was and went to my shower. There I washed yesterday’s dirt off of me, brushed my teeth, and gave my scales a quick polish.
I grabbed some jerky from the kitchen and ate it while I figured out what to take with me to the dorms. After creating a long mental list, I then had to figure out what I could actually take with me to the dorms.
I wanted to bring all my books, the anatomy poster, and of course Drugu, my favorite plushie. There were some other things I’d like to bring as well, like my extra saddles and pouches, some jewelry I had—mostly bracelets—and more. If possible, I would’ve taken everything. But it wasn’t possible, so I limited myself to the books, the poster, and Drugu.
There were still a few problems, though. The biggest of which was that I simply had way too many books. It was practically a personal library. Most of the money I’d saved up over the years had found itself falling into the pockets of the various bookstores around campus. It was mostly fiction, but there was quite a bit of educational material as well. My favorite remained Reptiles and where to find them, and I would definitely take it with me, so I put it on the pile. I also placed At the end of the rainbow on the pile, having just picked it up the day before. It had luckily survived the fights without a scratch.
I went through everything and filtered it down to ten books, still twice as much as I could carry with me. It wasn’t an issue of weight—I simply didn’t have all that much space in my saddle bags. Damn. I sighed and went through the pile again, sorting it down to four. It was the two books I’d placed on the pile first, as well as a copy of The big book of mana Affinities and A guide to Worlds. Usually these books wouldn’t take up so much space, but these were printed especially large just for me and my unwieldy talons when I was younger.
After that there remained only the problem of the plushie. Would I take it with me? Surely people would make fun of it if they found out, and they would find out because it was too large to fit into any bag, meaning I’d had to carry it on my back. In the end, the choice was simple. Yes, I didn’t want people to laugh at me, but I want Drugu with me even more.
With that all done, I put the books into the side pockets of the saddle, rolled up the poster and strapped it to my back together with Drugu. While I could carry more with me, I was going to be running back at a trot and anything I’d put on my back would just be falling off constantly. And yet, despite running, the journey to the dorms would take almost two hours. With one last glance around my room, I set off to the dorms where I would be spending my nights for the rest of the year.