2.7

Jewel was not sure exactly when breathing started to actually work again.

But one moment her lungs flopped and folded and pulled painfully on the haphazard jumble that had been made of her ribcage uselessly, sucking hard on her crushed throat.

And then the next her chest burned with the clear, frost-parched wind of autumn, driving chill and pain down her throat and into her chest in a great billowing gust. But more importantly, it filled her lungs with air.

Gloriously crisp just before winter air that was a bit out of place in early summer but Jewel was not going to complain about the gift rushing through her lungs.

Honestly Jewel would have been happy to breathe mud if she had too, maybe pond scum or bath water would have been a bonus. To have actual air of any description was just too much good fortune to complain about.

It was like an entirely different kind of fire running through her body. Veins were coming alight with a fierceness that almost smothered her Wyrmfire.

Eyes twitched, nostrils flared and her body shuddered without needing to be dragged around by will and Wyrmfire alone.

Instead things properly just happened because she did them.

Not acting as an intermediary holding her slack body and forcing it to move like a tool rather than a body one inhabited.

She was wet and the storm and the mud around her sang with joy at it. And she too was full of joy as flesh seemed to come awake in lethargic surprise to still be existing and actually there inside her.

Everything was painful but it was a living pain that was bracingly joyous despite its terrible overwhelming depth.

In time, she even managed to do some things besides breathing.

Hearing and seeing were two of them!

“-old you the neck was the most critical issue!”

Tsulogothulan’s overly round and at the moment incredibly common-sounding vowels were a feast upon the senses.

But honestly, anything at all was a delight to hear instead of the constant pounding of stale blood in her head.

“Fascinating, by any normal reckoning she should be quite utterly dead. For any other creature several hours of trying to live without breath at all is death. I wonder what’s different for Wyrms.”

Even Lord Fizzbunches’s dry dissection of her own suffering was a joy.

Jewel blinked the rain free of her eyes and slowly turned her head. Finding it curious (and painful) how her lower jaw had already been facing towards the wizards.

“Gzlya?”

Speaking with your jaw dislocated to the extent it is more loosely associated by flesh and tendon with its proper place made even that much speech terrible in its shooting pain and also, of course, utterly unintelligible.

The sound of rain in the branches occurred with a far colder and unseasonal quality announcing that the Autumn Wizard was somehow present but not visible from this angle.

Jewel however could see two of the wizards.

The impeccably dry Fizzbunches, seated upon a rock where for reasons beyond her no rain would fall.

Wetness just failed to touch him in a way that seemed more a fundamental law of the world than a simple state of things, even in this utter downpour. She wondered if that made it difficult for him to drink and thus was why he put away so much small beer during meals.

By contrast, Tsulogothulan seemed to be so eagerly welcomed by the wet mud, muck and downpour of rain that the clothing seemed wholly more solid and almost like it was just a blink away from eagerly sprouting tall reeds and bubbling over with frog, fish and heron.

The humanity of their posture all but lost now, everything about them obviously being far more a sculpture of some tall reedy bird or a moss twisted tree bent by humidity than anything in the shape of a man or woman.

It was laughable to think Jewel had ever thought the Bog Weird was anything so human.

“Oh you're awake Lady Jewel? I would recommend against moving much, or even trying to speak to be honest. Just slow careful breaths. As that seems to be doing you the most good of everything else we tried. Just rest and we will see what we can do about the rest of you.”

Jewel could agree to that. Simply laying in the cool jovial mud and friendly rain and only moving as much as was required to inflate her lungs in the jumble that had been made of her ribs sounded quite good.

Although she thought maybe she should go a bit easier than she had been with the breathing.

Very slowly now in fact if her heart would just settle down and stop panicking with the sudden abundance of breathable substances.

She did understand its worry over never having more again, truly. But the desperate muscle did not need to empty her blood of every single scrap of good feeling and set her aching to gasp as big and heavy as possible.

That made her pain considerably worse than just simply existing entailed.

At this point Jewel was pretty sure there was barely a joint or part of her body entirely put together the way it was supposed to be, besides the wholeness of her individual bones and the unbroken scales of her hide. Which was a bit of a puzzler when it came to how one was even going to fix anything.

A conundrum that was giving the trio of wizards pause as well.

The Bog Wizard slid through the mud, totally in their element. Appearing in great wet splashes at one side of Jewel and then pouring back into the mud before sprouting on another side to peer in a truly avian manner at the mess the boar had made of her with that singular eye.

“I must confess I’m not sure where to go next after this, Fizzbunches, The neck was obviously needing to be pried open so air could flow. But the rest? She’s a terrible mess. How are you feeling, Lady Jewel?”

“Eaaahegh! eghah!”

In horrific pain Lady Sorcerer! Thank you for asking! But she was still so heady with the joy of simply having anything going in and out of her lungs that was a trifling matter. Even flapping her tongue around ached and hurt in sympathy to the truly astounding amounts of screaming pain coming from everything to do with her jaw.

Fizzbunches jumped from his stone to land on her tumbled ribs. And wasn’t that a new form of pain, but not atrociously overwhelming pain. Jewel was finding there were nuances and qualities to pain that she had never imagined existed before.

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“Since breathing is doing so much for her, I say we work at her ribcage next. Euewyn, I want you to push as much of the north wind as you can down her throat. Tsulogothulan? With me as I pull these ribs into a proper place and set them to heal.”

Oh, that did not sound good. Jewel found her previous admonishment to her heart a bit hypocritical. Go on oh dear little clenching fearball of meat! Beat with all your terribly painful vigor because both of us are about to be-

!!!

Jewel was pretty sure the only reason she did not thrash out of her position sunk into the mud was because nothing in her body could manage better than minor shivers with the state she was in.

So much inside her chest was bruised terrible soreness now.

This was only an improvement in contrast to how terrible having most of one’s ribs flipped, twisted over and sometimes even shuffled under each other had been.

And it did make breathing in full lungs a less arduous affair.

Barely.

All of the muscles inside were quivering and strained into nearly exhausted jelly after no longer being over extended and sprained by improper relation of their anchoring bones in her chest.

Jewel didn't even know she had muscles for breathing there until today.

But their abused presence and complaints made it clear she absolutely did, and she promised she would find something nice and soothing to do for them as soon as she figured out how.

Maybe a good submerging in a bath?

Until then…

Euewyn was more than welcome to keep sending that slightly-biting wind down her throat, please. She could barely muster the strength to inflate her chest even half as well as the Autumn Weird was managing.

But eventually Jewel was forced to do it on her own as the Wizards went back to puzzling over just how to put the scrambled puzzle that had been made of her skeleton back together and in which order.

Jewel turned her eyes (the only thing that only sort of hurt, instead of absolutely hurt) to find Muriel sat in a heap breathing hard in the rain, just sat in the mud getting her leathers horribly muddy, leaving her sword to rust!

She wanted to draw attention to that, Muriel had been very strict with Alexander about proper care of swords.

But no, after fully seeing the shock, misery and relief in that face. The way that it was more than rain that made her face look so wet?

Muriel was breaking down in a way Jewel had never seen before.

Because of Jewel?

Because of Alexander?

ALEXANDER?!

“Alelahaha!”

She tried moving and was promptly admonished for it. Not that she even mustered the motion to shift Fizzbunches where he was pacing up and down her flanks staring at the state of her spine and then hips.

“Lady Jewel! While I’m certain it won’t make it any worse for you, please stop moving, this is going to take quite a great deal of time as it is!”

She stopped flailing as hard as particularly lethargic moss, but tried speaking again.

“Alelahaha!”

Her tongue slapped around in her gaping jaws and half the time met the loamy taste of mud and torn up grass, the other half doused in the soothing humor of rain and storm.

She could see Muriel trying to draw herself together and pry her backside out of where it had sunk into the mud. If this was not serious Jewel would have accepted the pain that laughing involved.

“Alelahaha! Eh ah Alelahaha!”

Which seemed to fall deaf on all ears, or the equivalent amongst the wizards and Muriel.

“Well fine if you insist I guess we will work on the jaw next. Now stop trying to speak so we can do this right the first time. Tsulogothulan!”

And this time Jewel was able to stay just barely aware enough through the blinding all encompassing pain to see what happened.

She had to admit that if you told her she was going to be healed by magic, she would have expected it to involve a whole lot less mud in her mouth and paws all over her face and a lot more shining light and warm fuzzy feelings.

Or maybe some kind of herbs?

But the sudden, densely packed wet earth was quite good at shoving, twisting and holding her dislocated jaw from every side.

And Fizzbunches could press almost as hard as the boar did with those dainty little pads on his paws.

Which made her head ring with an all-encompassing pop as her jaw was forced despite its protests back where it was supposed to go.

It was a whole lot less magical than she had been expecting. Although there was the way that despite her entire mouth, nose and everything below her eyes being filled with rain and mud it came away from both her and the cat’s paws entirely clean leaving her tongue feeling kind of weirdly tingly from the absolute absence of flavor.

“Aughnclagh Blecgh!”

Oh my, her mouth all hurt almost as much to use as her ribs did for breathing!

“Ahw ohhww! Alahs- Ahem”

Jewel sputtered and struggled, suddenly, hilariously finding her mouth and tongue just a bit too confined and feeling small after so long letting them hang loose and over stretched. A few wet slaps and a gulp of soggy mud was nice though.

Okay, again!

“Alaxandur! Whur Alaxahndur!”

Which got Fizzbunches’ yowl of annoyance and stomping with his dainty little paws down her neck to examine the horrific mess made of her many shoulders.

Tsulogothulan however looked over at Muriel who had finally found her way over (still bereft her sword! Don’t leave it in the mud! What if Alexander saw?!).

Before saying the words that made Jewel relax so much she forgot to breathe and got yelled at and her lungs filled with more icy sharp autumn wind.

“He's fine, Lady Jewel. He rode near a gallop through the storm to get help.”

A gallop?!

In the rain!?

Her Idiot brother was lucky he didn't break his neck!

Why If he had been anything but fine she would-

Jewel did not know what she would do.

But it would be incredibly unladylike and improper!