The man knelt in front of Alena with permanent grimace on his face, blood still leaking from his mouth and nose, constantly adding to the thick layer of dried blood that covered the skin of his arm.
Alena had worked with the sick before, but there were only so many types of sickness you could see out in the middle of nowhere, and before long you were accustomed to seeing the same injuries and illnesses over and over.
The training that Maximilian and Rethi did, while breaking and destroying parts of their body that she’d never seen wounded before, had shifted her out of the little pocket of understanding that she had about illness and injury.
But this was far different than that. Though, just because she’d never seen it before, doesn’t mean that she didn’t know about it. If she couldn’t recognise this illness at a glance, without even needing to touch the man and see inside of him, then her father would be extremely disappointed in her.
It was a type of poisoning you’d only see from someone around a mix of chemicals typically used in all sorts of factories in cities that have undergone more industrialisation. It was a common illness when her father was practicing in Orisis, when many of the larger capitols were rapidly industrialising based on huge scientific advancement.
The chemicals were cheap and easy to get, and effectively harmless individually from each other. Even her father, and her grandfather’s notes specifically outline that they aren’t quite sure what the mixture is that it creating what is effectively a poison. Some have likely figured it out, alchemists and poison makers, due to its suspected use in long term assassinations that mimic the progression of massive organ failure and massive haemorrhaging.
Because of the upper class almost never having been in the factories long enough, or near enough to the vats or curing stations for various materials that would actually bring along the symptoms. They have no idea the actual reality of the poisoning, and any doctor that they were likely to hire would be at a massive disadvantage, usually because they are senior doctors that work only with nobility and their common issues.
Alena looked over the man, who was somehow patiently waiting despite what was clearly extreme pain. She made an effort to move her body with her observation, to at least give the man the impression that she was actually doing something other than just standing there and watching him die.
His skin was pale, but if you looked in his extremities, you could see a slight discolouration where the skin and flesh was dying from the lack of oxygen supply. He’d die from blood loss and internal haemorrhaging before he’d lose fingers or limbs, but in the case of patients who have been treated for the poisoning with medicine, the fingers and toes would eventually fall off without medication that was extremely hard to produce.
Alena ballparked that the man had either been working with the chemicals directly for at least six months, or working in the vicinity of them for a year. He’d probably been in gradual decline for a few months before this week had seen the man take a massive downfall in health.
He coughed again, even though he’d been desperately trying to hold it in. His throat bulged, almost as if he were going to throw up, but only produced a hacking cough. He turned away from Alena and the radiant man that stood behind her, trying to remain as stoic as he could as his body failed on him.
“You know what this illness is, yes?” Alena spoke finally, addressing the man with iron in her eyes. It was important that they have this conversation, or else he would simply be dead in another six months. The man swallowed heavily against the dry mouth and thick layer of grime in his mouth.
“Yeah,” he ground out somewhat hoarsely, “it’s vat sickness, all me mates have it too.” The man’s voice found a moment of clarity, even with his thick, lower class speech.
“It’s not a disease, it’s a poison.” Alena said slowly, the man nodded, either already knowing or finding it acceptable, “If you work near those vats for long enough, they’ll poison you and kill you. Even a few weeks of working around them will shorten your life by a decade, maybe more.”
The man’s face trembled, losing some of its stoic tolerance to a wave of bitter emotion and indignation. The people of Orisis and Virsdis didn’t understand medicine and illness like her father and mother did. Maximilian came close, knowing the concepts that she could throw at him but not their names or their practicality. But something that the people of the Worlds did understand was the lessening of life, the concept of an action or experience using part of your life energy like a resource. A rudimentary understanding of health, but it was enough.
“So they ‘ave us workin’ in those fuckin’ places ‘cause our lives are cheap?” He wasn’t even looking at Alena when she answered with a nod, he didn’t need to receive an answer after all.
“And any who work in or near those vats will die, at some point. If you go back there, you too will die.” Alena had lowered her voice slightly, trying to sound more matronly than she felt, like how Rethi somehow manipulated his voice into almost sounding regal. The man seemed to buy the act, looking up at her with wide eyes, brimming with tears.
“Then…” he gulped painfully, “you can fix me, you can do it?” Alena gave it a suspenseful moment, then a light nod, lacking warmth or kindness and instead replacing them with ironclad, cold rationality. She was not here to offer him absolution from his illness, she was here to offer him a life forwards, though what would normally be a brick wall ending in death.
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“I can. But I will not accept your return to the vats, to the factory. You will never be healed of the poison again if you are to seek me out. Do you understand?” The man made to nod his head feverishly, the tight mess of brown curls plastered against his skin with the sweat, the stench of which wafted violently from his body.
Yet a flash of divine light interrupted him, washing over his body and buildings around him as if the sun were only just peaking from behind Orisis instead of it already being at the height of its power.
“Again,” the regal voice of her boyfriend rang out, “we ask if you understand the orders of she who heals you? You will not return to the vats.” The decree was powerful, dwarfing her own presence, yet the man in front of her, who might only be a young man but aged due to his weariness, finally turned his eyes away from her and to the shining man beside her, only a few steps back.
Rethi—no, Midday—had washed away all of the man’s eagerness, the moment of absolute confidence made in desperation. The man’s eyes flickered between the two as he hacked up more blood onto his arm. He looked down as the limb, so covered in the mounting proof of his inevitable death and spoke with a weariness she’d only heard out of a few in her life.
“With no work, I ‘ave no money. With no money, my family starves.” He looked back up to the two of them with a sense of hopelessness that extended beyond his own death. “What would ya ‘ave me do?”
Midday’s glow dimmed ever so slightly, but not to any detriment of his decree. The poor man, left with almost nothing to hope for, and a man burning a divine bright stared into each other. Within that connection of their eyes, the sick man finding the golden green of Midday’s eyes, a sympathy or even an empathy was born between them. The man could swear that he wasn’t all that different from easily the most powerful man he’d ever been in the presence of.
Even though the sick man wanted to hate the other man, to reveal to him the suffering of a world that he was too powerful to live within, there was a clear note of understanding in those golden-green eyes. The sick man turned to the masked woman who’d never given a name and nodded solemnly.
A hand was outstretched, touching against his forehead, and in an instant everything changed.
For Alena, however, that instant lasted for an age. As soon as she touched the skin of his forehead, her instincts leapt forwards, grinning with a ravenous curiosity for what lay within its newest toy. She’d never quite admitted to the instincts and the emotions within her that they seemed to embody, not even to Rethi, but Maximilian was a man who was almost impossible to keep a secret from.
The instincts were simply formless energy, but she visualised them as a hungry dog, or a wolf, curious and intensely intelligent in their own strange ways. Yet, they must be tamed for true effectiveness, like a shepherd might use an animal to herd their livestock. She used her mind to slowly guide the bundle of instinct and excitement around the man’s body, mapping it with an exact precision borne of her life shifting abilities and the thousands of hours of anatomical study her father had drilled into her mind forever.
It was unnecessary, to be truthful. There was no use in her mapping his entire body when she could simply move in and fix the prominent issue, yet Maximilian’s words still rang in her mind, a presence she was uncomfortable with, but had found some sort of peace in.
‘If you fix something that may become an issue in future, with almost no effort on your part, are you not adding to further longevity?’ He had asked her. She’d understood him somewhat, but as she looked at the man before her, she came to understand just what he’d meant.
The man’s body was a mess for all sorts of reasons, from environmental, to what he was eating, and definitely what he was drinking. The majority of the damage that the vat sickness had done was in his lungs, stomach, and a lesser amount to other organs but still significant. The liver, kidneys, and all the rest were heavily damaged from alcohol poisoning, likely from whatever swill the poor could buy, or that the rich helped them get their hands on to placate them.
These issues, even if she solved the vat sickness and the damage to his organs, would have killed him in ten years, maybe twenty. As her instincts gleefully attacked the damage in his organs and realigned it all back into order with the exact guidance of her mind, she began to wonder about the man’s future.
Maximilian, being the font of ‘wisdom’ he was, had described to her actions as correcting the course of a poorly growing tree. It’d been simple and reductionist, but sometimes the words reminded her of her mother and the stories shed tell her late at night when she couldn’t sleep. Lullabies of tales about Gods and the ancient tribes of life shifters that once roamed Orisis. Once, long ago, they hadn’t been the horrible, terrible force of ruin that they were today.
Once, the life shifters had been equalisers, preventers of plagues and extinctions. Nature’s acolytes were too concerned with the natural order, the way of things that their Gods had once set into motion. The life shifters were born to defy that natural order, to place themselves firmly on the side of the races of Orisis and to protect the horrifying truths of nature from inflicting themselves upon the people.
The stories were about sacrifice, about an old order of peoples who had given everything to protect the people from the laws of nature, drawing themselves into conflict with priests of the Nature Court—despite both of them striving to heal and nurture.
It took almost no real time for her to complete healing the man, her mind and instinct adept at fixing damage to organs and flesh, though the more subtle components like finding a way for the toxins that were sitting within the blood to be removed from the body were more difficult.
She opened her eyes from the visualisation of the man’s body to the man himself, staring directly at his dumbfounded look. The man’s eyes were wide, taking in soft unconscious breaths that he was labouring over only moments before. He felt an overwhelming tiredness, even on top of his exhaustion, but the reality of suddenly feeling as though he were healthier than he’d ever been was so jarring that he almost didn’t listen to Alena’s next words.
“In a few minutes, your body will rid itself of the toxins that were within your system. This will likely be unpleasant and possibly painful, but you will be fine.” She waited on a response, though the man knelt before her, dumbfounded by the lack of any mysticism or fanciness, “You will want to be nearby a toilet.”
The man gaped his mouth open and closed a few times before nodding, stumbling to his feet without quite being able to tear his eyes away from the two figures, so out of place in the grimy landscape of Crossroads’ squalor.
Could they be? He thought, his mind enthralled by the light that still made it to his eyes even as he turned away to hobble back to his home. No, they couldn’t be. He thought again, his mind trying to wrestle with the whirlwind of conflicting emotions and details, though deep down inside of him he realised that he couldn’t quite deny what he felt, or what they might just be.