Ulric had fallen asleep or fainted, or some combination of the two while his Shadow tried to sob quietly. When he awoke, she was gone. He didn't see her anymore after that, and he was glad, for a variety of reasons. Mostly because he didn’t know what in the Hell he’d ever say to her. Or how in the Hell he’d ever make up for his failure to be a decent person. Regret tasted about as bitter in his mouth as the ashes that made up his former apartments.
The coming days fell into a rhythm that was, to virtually all of Ulric's sensibilities, Protean. And not the giving of fire part, the liver torn daily from his flesh by an eagle part. He was in pain all of the time, especially in his limbs, which had been least covered and had the greatest surface area exposed to the explosive Incindere spell that had destroyed his apartment. Only pharmacology preserved his sanity: the pain was heavily mitigated by a concoction that Ulric would call "The Morphinator". He didn't know what was in it but he was going to start producing it at an industrial scale as rapidly as possible. Even that didn't completely remove the hurting, it just kept him from being in so much pain that he inhibited his own healing by doing aggravating little things like screaming himself hoarse.
Second to the destroyed tissue was the ailment of being bedridden. Not only did he have to experience, again, the misery of persistent pain, but he could do nothing, could go nowhere, could speak to no one. The boredom that accompanied complete inactivity was not mind-numbing, that was the drugs. No, the paralysis of his injuries left him with nothing to do but think. Stew. Marinade in the profound suck that was current existence. He couldn't move without depleting himself, the first two days. Small, minute adjustments of his limbs took concentrated effort. His jaw had lead weights in it, turning his head was an effort. Needless to say, he was being spoon-fed a thin gruel, twice daily, though he could drink as often as he could summon the strength to raise a small glass, which his keepers kept full, though he wasn’t sure why they bothered at the moment.
Iriel’en medical care for his burns was thorough, efficient, and, as rapid as the gene treatment and tissue scaffolds used in the Before. Sano mages proved their worth, Ulric now had them weighted as Iridium. As the worst of the damage was healed away, still his strength wouldn't increase because it was being consumed to quicken the rest of the healing process. Ulric slept as often as possible, more to escape tedium and regressive depression than from a desire to rest. The usual quickness of thought, the racing connections that made up his normal existence was muted, sluggish, and tended towards fantasy. The Morphinator did not assist in this regard.
His treatment was simple, straightforward, and the most stupendously awful thing to happen to him in either of his existences.
The bones in his upper body had been set cleanly. That was sort of like having a tooth pulled, a jerk, a pop, and a wash of sharp pain that dulled quickly into a background ache. That happened on the second day, before any of the rest. No magic, until the setting was done and then to facilitate the mending so that it didn’t come apart. Sano magic dulled pain, as it happened. More like, the Lifeweavers knew how to turn pain off so that aggravated nerve endings remained silent as they were stitched back together into the nervous system proper.
Most all of the healing mage's time, one Doc Yessiree, was spent on the burns. And, what burns they were.
This Healing was different than the broken arm from earlier or Brighteyes' bites. Burns destroyed the tissue completely, such was the reason pyromancy was a choice for offensive magics. There was nothing to heal, those parts were just gone, transmuted to charcoal and dead shit. And that dead shit had to come off, before anything else could be done.
The first time Nurse Pretty Voice came in to debride him was a horrifying memory that would stay with him forever. She unwound the bandages, the brown cloth unspooling from his limbs and body easily enough, and, in its absence, left him extremely chilled. Turns out skin is mostly what keeps you nice and insulated.
Then she removed the silk which was actually a bunch of thin strips aligned linearly down the long axis of his limbs and torso. These did not want to come away, they were adhered to the mangled tissues beneath, weeping coagulants and blood. Think a full body wax, but, you know, without your skin. Yeah…let that just settle in nice and deep like.
The only saving grace for this process was in that the silk had been treated with a wildly powerful analgesic. As a matter of fact, one of the herbs in his former room proved to be the base for this salve. Most of his belongings had survived by virtue of being bundled into a [Steelwood] sled wrapped in [Forest Lord] hide tarp. As such, these were almost completely unharmed by the destruction of his room. A duty salvaging what could be salvaged came across it, knew what they were looking at, and made an executive decision to toss that shit into the war effort, which made it directly to Ulric's wounds promptly. He could kiss whoever found it.
The herb was rendered down to oil and this oil mixed with the body matter of a variety of monster made up of congealed Aquae mana. [Amoebians] they were called. Ulric listened to the descriptions and immediately knew what they were called in his lexicon: Slimes. So, with the painkilling herb oil and the powdered slime mixed into a paste, the slime acting as a bonding agent, both physically and magically, they could then treat the silk applied to wounds.
The silk itself, a product of a wasp pupa that was, apparently, farmed in a combination of beekeeping and silkworm cultivation, drank in the body's mana from damaged mana vessels and redirected it back into the body. It also stimulated coagulation so it was doing double duty on keeping your inside things from turning into outside things.
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Incredible stuff, those silk bandages, they definitely kept him from succumbing to the initial burn shock. That's what kills you first, from major burn trauma, just a simple loss of fluid volume as the various capillaries and interstitial fluids sort of just seep out of you, to say nothing of the blood. He still hated them. Hated them with his entire being. They had to be removed every single time his wounds were treated and that was twice daily. He couldn't actually feel the flesh coming away on them but he could sense the…pressure…he could see the bits of himself stuck to the silk, and it drew bile into his throat.
Next came the actual debriding. With a stiff hair brush wielded with a callous heart and an iron grip, Nurse Pretty Voice scrubbed his burned flesh, her face set like a serial killer, pitiless.
Ulric could no longer bring himself to see Nurse Pretty Voice as anything but an existential threat and would, for the remainder of his life, avoid her like a nuclear waste barge. The dead and dying tissue had to come off, it couldn't be healed. It was just in the way. A Sano mage could repair damaged parts of the body and, by that same token, their magic could remove those parts that were beyond repair. But it was exorbitant from the perspective of a Healer's mana capacity. Yessiree was already working himself to death, along with the other Medicos and they weren't going to risk losing any lives just so Ulric could be saved a little, or, actually, more like a fucking lot of, pain. So, on come the brush and scraped away the surface layers to find the healthy tissue beneath. He understood why it had to be, but that didn't make it any easier.
The Morphinator tried, tried so hard but the debriding turned out to be beyond even its capabilities. Especially on those charbroiled areas. His chest and back weren't so bad, second-degree burns with the odd third degree in places, where an especially energetic stroke of mana had impacted through his clothes. But the fourth and fifth-degree damage on his limbs…Ulric shuddered, remembering those first few days. He probably said a lot of things he didn't really mean about Nurse Pretty Voice, her family, and her speculative relations with livestock though he remembered nothing specific between the first stroke of the brush and the last. All was pain between.
When that was done, when Nurse Pretty Voice's terrible, terrible work was complete, Doctor Yessiree came in and laid hands. The Sano mana was literally rebuilding him, one layer at a time. They did it slowly, he was so weak when they started that trying to do the healing all at once would just kill him, pulling away resources his body didn't have to try to close the wounds.
Magical fire wounds were particularly nasty because, in addition to the sheer physical damage, they impeded the Sano healing process. Something about fire being a purifying force that destroyed the memory of what the matter had been before it was burned. Whatever. The end result was that healing fire damage was a sonofabitch.
Yessiree's mana washed over the wounds as a crystalline mountain stream, bone cold but incredibly refreshing, calming irritated nerves and giving rise to new growth. By necessity, these operations had to be done in sections, the coverage was too great. Whenever that soothing Sano left his body, he was, in piecemeal fashion, restored to an approximation of health. The Doctor pushed his recovery to be similar to what his wounds would have been if he'd merely been dipped in boiling water for a moment. Unpleasant, but survivable for one with his vitality.
They must have put the project that was Ulric at the first on the list and last on the list, to give Yessiree time to recover in between his more minor healing efforts throughout the day. Another reason the treatments were taking so long was that, other than rendering Yessiree unable to help anyone else for an entire day, which would kill more than one Elf who needed him, Healing the wounds in a single big jump would also cause a much greater degree of scarring and loss of strength. Orders from on high had come down to see to it Ulric was returned to his condition before the assault. He didn't know who was calling the shots now that Bald'rt was out of the picture.
At least Ulric wasn't in some typical white hospital room. He'd been moved to the Arcaneum on the second day. Apparently, he wasn't the only one who noticed his mana values jumping around and, Yessiree being a pretty sharp guy, reached the same conclusion that Ulric had: his body was accelerating its healing with ambient mana, which meant, the more saturated his environment was, the faster he would recover. Doc Yessiree immediately stashed him in the place with the greatest concentration of mana in the fortress, the auditorium stage floor of the Arcaneum, where he had learned magic from the Dragons of Iriel.
He noticed the difference immediately. Subsequent healings made greater progress and, on day four, they stopped using the debriding brush and treated silk strips. In what Ulric would have described as a medical miracle, his horrific wounds were closed and soft, pink, hairless skin was standing in sharp contrast to the tanned bristly skin around it. Ulric's beard and braid were gone, sacrificed bravely during the attack to save his cheeks and head from worse damage. He was bald but, at least, he hadn't come out of this like Vader, Sithian Lord of the Dark. Everything would grow back, given time.
The Morphinator disappeared into the sunset, his job done and Ulric bid him a fond fair well, wishing that they could have but another day together. That was mostly just a soft chemical dependence talking.
It was another two days of less intensive healings and bed rest before Ulric was able to move around for more than a few minutes before becoming subject to intense dizziness and nausea. For six days he had been virtually paralyzed. Ulric had only once gone this long without moving, when his legs had been smashed in his car and the surgeons thought that a series of operations to install pins and rods might salvage them.
He had also been, outside of treatment, alone. It turns out, normal Elves cannot handle the kind of mana density found inside the Arcaneum for very long. They get mana sickness, like he had when he was first Reforged. That little nugget of information put a different spin on who had been selected to join him on his journey to his glade home. Only Elves with a more well-developed core could withstand that kind of mana concentration for long. The end result was then that no one who wasn't directly involved in seeing to Ulric's wounds would even enter the place. He hadn't been alone in a long, long time now.
He'd forgotten exactly how much he missed not having to concern himself with another's thoughts, feelings, or perceptions. Especially not a spiteful She-Elf intent on circling him like a wolf checking to see if its prey was wounded. It was relaxing. He found himself missing Hal'et though. An easy laugh, a gentle touch, and, sometimes, a wild, exuberant lay.
On the seventh day of his recovery, after the chokingly sweet Docter-Nurse couple flirted their way out of the Arcaneum, Ulric forced himself out of bed, to stand next to it on the Auditorium floor. There, he struggled through the set of balance exercises Idra had prescribed. He stumbled. He fell. He did his best rendition of a newborn gazelle, with legs that didn’t know the meaning of the word support. It took two hours. But he finished it, all ten repetitions, sweat pouring off of his body, soaking the thick, soft fabric of the white robe he'd been given once the brown wraps and silk hell strips were done away with. Ulric grinned, triumphant on shaky legs. He could do no more for hours but repeated the routine that evening, and it went no better.