“____” speaking

‘____’ thoughts

*____* telepathy

---------------------

The pain was the second thing I noticed when I woke up, the first was the tarnished link to Ormonde. Although I hadn’t been in control I had still been aware of everything that had transpired. I hated to admit it but I had enjoyed watching the voices of corruption panic. It was something Akhan and myself both enjoyed greatly. If only our relationship wasn’t what it was. Ormonde quickly left my back as I untied him and brought him before me.

“You really went overboard this time Akhan. When did Ormonde get hit?”

The purple markings had begun to spread over his skin and currently covered part of his face and one of his arms. They were swollen and blotchy, I was almost afraid to touch him because of the corruption. I didn’t want to make it worse.

“Ok, so I’ve got time then. No, the soul we just got cannot go to you, you know the deal. Yes, I would like your help and I do still dislike you. Any other questions or do I have to wake up Mark?”

The yellow flame in my lantern reduced itself in size obediently and let me draw a portion of it to make Akhan’s knife. The blade of the knife was only as large as my hand, but the carving from the handle continued onto the blade and changed as the blade grew. The handle was shaped like a fetus that had spider like limbs extending from its back that formed the fullers of the blade.

“Yes I know you don’t like Mark but if you keep arguing I will wake him up even though I would prefer to keep all of you asleep.”

The hidden meaning in my words was grasped and I no longer needed to explain myself in order to get full cooperation. Akhan quickly retracted the slime I had been expelling so I could be focused on preparing myself to heal Ormonde.

“We’ve got one shot at this, screw it up and we’re dead as well. Wish me luck.”

I tugged on the link and removed Ormonde’s soul from his body, only raw Arcane and my willpower was keeping him alive now. The first step was to separate his soul from mine, the wedge I had in place sped the unwinding process up exponentially and was the only reason I had a chance of saving him. Funny to think that my previous want to be free would end up saving his life.

Once our souls were no longer interlocked they returned to their natural shapes, his to a sphere due to his underdevelopment and mine to a hemisphere with the flat side facing up. The little sphere was dotted here and there with different foreign colors, mainly black and purple, that signified where the corruption had managed to take hold. I could purify the purple but the black spots were done for, the only solution was to remove them and fill in the gaps.

I pulled a little of my flame from the lantern and fed it to the knife giving it the properties of both our souls. Akhan’s soul dealt with corruption while mine was purification. All of us did absorption. I stabbed the knife slowly into the little sphere; I needed to send out a pulse of cleansing flames first before I knew how much needed to be cut out.

Fortunately, most of the damage was on the surface level, but it didn’t stop me from doing a good cleansing anyway. My flames cordoned off the cleaned areas and the remaining corruption was corralled and eaten by the knife leaving only the fully blackened parts to deal with.

I needed to be careful when cutting these out, one mistake and I could possibly create a chain reaction that would consume Ormondes souls all at once. Yet again I reached for the lantern, but this time I removed the soul of the earth spirit instead of any flames. The earth spirit’s soul had finished being wiped during my failed escape attempt.

My plan was fairly simple, the missing parts I needed would be cut out from the earth spirit’s soul. To Akhan’s and my knowledge this had never been done successfully before and now success was a must with only myself to use as a template.

I began to cut one of the black spots out but my first incision was too shallow and I left behind some of the blackened soul after removing what I had cut. Arcane was sucked into the knife to make it sharper and I had Akhan shrink the knife instead of lengthening it. The knife was now closer to a scalpel and would be easier for me to handle.

The piece of black soul I missed was removed and I was able to fill the hole with some of the spirit’s soul. I severed the piece of soul from the earth spirit and began to stitch it to Ormonde’s using raw Arcane as a thread. It was a tentative remedy and if too much stress was put onto his soul too soon there was the possibility of his soul imploding on itself.

“I really wish I had more power so you could help with this more. Thank you for the words of encouragement.”

With one piece of black soul remove and fixed, I had nine more left. After the third one my hand began to shake from cramps and Akhan had to dull my nerve endings to mitigate the them. While removing the fifth bit of black soul, I cut too deep and some of the corruption spilled out before I could contain it again. The force of the invading material caused Ormonde’s soul to pulsate and I had to wrap it in my own to keep it from spasming. His body was getting weak and I was barely over halfway done.

Saying I worked with renewed diligence would have been an understatement. I had never concentrated so hard before in my entire life and I was doing it for a human of all things. I’m sure whatever gods there were were laughing at the irony of the situation I was in.

The last piece of black soul was removed and the hole filled but I couldn’t rest yet. I took the remainder of the earth spirit’s soul and wrapped it around Ormonde’s. It would be absorbed later but for now it would act as a preventative for if his soul was stressed momentarily. Only the most dangerous part was left now, putting the soul back into his body. If it was rejected he would die and I would join him soon after.

I needed to return the soul to as close to it was originally before returning it to his body and that meant linking my soul with his again. It wasn’t something that I couldn’t do it partially this time either, it was all or nothing. Grinding my teeth, I reestablished the same bond that had been there previously with a few minor changes. If I was going to be binding my soul to something I needed concessions, so I made them. Ormonde couldn’t touch my memories or thoughts nor could he access my soul in any way. Other than that the bond was closer to to what is was probably supposed to look like and he could use all of my powers given we survived this.

The entire procedure of healing his soul took me fourteen hours and having finished, I now needed to fix Ormonde’s body. The infected flesh had reduced itself to look like bad bruising but it was now leaking a viscous green liquid. I couldn’t put his soul back into his body until the corruption that was infecting it was gone or all of my previous work would be undone. There was no option for a second try since I had been running on fumes mentally for almost a third of the time spent healing him so far.

Unlike working on a soul, I had little to no experience on physical bodies and if I was to cut the infected areas out I lacked something to fill them with. I needed to know how much of his body was truly un-cleansable and repeated the same method I had used on his soul. Skin and some of his muscles but nothing down to bone level. The most worrying part was that his blood was carrying the corruption and I would need to find a way to either filter it now or over a long-term basis. However, I didn’t have a large amount of time left since, by my estimations, Ormonde’s body would last at most another five hours before it would die from being without its soul.

“We have to wake Mark up.Well do you have another solution to the blood problem? Right I didn’t think so and Mark can do something about it. I know what this will do to me, less nagging more helping.”

Waking up Mark was close to the last thing that I wanted to do right now, but he could and would help. Some not so subtle prodding and a dark red almost black flame slowly made its way out of my pink flame and rested alongside Akhan’s yellow flame. If looking at my flame gave someone a feeling that I was pathetic and Akhan’s flame made them feel like they were facing their work fears; then Mark’s would be something along the lines of extreme bloodlust sent towards them as if facing a predator. He could help with the blood, it was what he did.

“Mark you know the situation right? Good then can I expect your help? Awesome and yes you can go back to sleep after this is over just take Akhan with you.”

A small piece of the red flame melted off and left the lantern and made its way towards my hand. I could use one of two methods and I was going for the one that didn’t have me puncturing or lacerating Ormonde. I released the fires from the knife and let them slink back to rejoin their respective parent flame. Absolute control was necessary and I had Akhan shut down all the nerves in my body except for what was necessary to function and to control the fire.

All blood goes through the heart and I needed to use that to my advantage to clean Ormonde’s blood as fast as possible. If my body could do as it pleased I would be sweating bullets as I moved the flame into position over the tiny chest that was moving in a pained rhythmic fashion. Ever so gently I pushed the flames inside him and towards his heart. After the brief interim it took to get the flames to his heart I slowly put them to work.

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The fire would eat all the blood that passed through it and spit out fresh blood on the other side. For every time this happened I needed to expend a small portion of Arcane and it was happening thousands of time a second. If I could have, I would have sped up the circulation of the blood, but I couldn’t do that without causing an adverse reaction. By the time every last bit of blood had been filtered and cleaned I was basically out of Arcane.

With his blood cleansed I could now focus on the patches of infected skin and muscle. I took control of the yellow flame once more, creating the knife and shrinking it with ambient Arcane and prepared myself mentally for what I was about to do next.

“Mark, Akhan, you both know what I’m about to do. Need any explanations or justification?”

A brief pause to await their answers.

“No you asshole I don’t want your condolences. Yes, I get it was a joke but is now really the time? Great so shut up and do what I need you to do.”

Akhan was already doing part of his job and Mark wouldn’t be able to do his until I started cutting things. I was ready to start removing the infected parts of flesh from Ormonde and began on his right arm.

The initial incisions were made to drain the inflamed pustules that dotted the tainted skin on his bicep before I moved on to the flesh itself. The muscle here was fine so the skin was all I had to replace. As instructed, Mark stopped the cuts from bleeding and I very quickly had the corrupted section removed.

“Akhan, ready to do the other half of your job? Great. I’m starting now.”

I brought my right leg out from underneath me and pulled my dress up enough so I could get at my bare leg. I braced myself for the pain, even though there wouldn’t be any thanks to Akhan, and started to cut. Unlike Ormonde’s wounds, mine bled since Mark could only focus on one person at a time. The blood was red, not the syrupy blue that was spirit blood, but real mortal blood and it hurt. I was forcing a part of my body to take on a state it rejected and the nerve block could do nothing about pain that came through the soul.

My unskillful butchery of my own leg left me gore covered and very, very tired. As I had with the soul, I filled in the missing flesh and left Mark to connect it the best he could. There would be slight scarring, but nothing noticeable after a few days in the sun.

I wanted to get all the sections that required just skin done first and proceeded to fix Ormonde’s face, left calf, right hand, right foot and chest. After each piece of flesh was removed from myself Akhan would grow it back and Mark would clean it before I inserted it. It was messy painful work and I was coated in my own sticky blood with only my face and upper body slightly clean once the skin infections were removed.

The muscle sections where next and going to be worse than replacing the skin since I had to use the same muscle, not just anything like I could do with the skin. I had to replace the abdominal and forearm muscles with the exact same muscle or else they wouldn’t take and would just rot inside him.

I was going to start on Ormonde’s abdominal muscles and save the arm for last since I was right handed and would most likely need the more time there. The cut was shallow enough that I was able to partially skin Ormonde and see exactly what needed to be replaced. Akhan told me that I would be replacing most of his external oblique aponeurosis muscle; all I heard was that I would be replacing his whole side.

This time I had to have the muscle first before I cut it out of Ormonde. I would be cutting open my own side and to remove muscle instead of skill would be an exponentially more painful feat. Stripping off my blood soaked dress, I turned the knife inward and slowly cut the skin. Once again it was painful, but all I was doing was the start of what could pass for torture. With the skin trying to regrow itself and my side bleeding profusely, I was hard pressed to cut the muscle I needed when I started to slump after severing one side of it.

If cutting the muscle out was an ordeal then replacing Ormonde’s while mine was still gone was a trial for the gods, if there were any. My left side had nothing to support it as it regrew and I was unable to sit up straight. The pain would have driven me mad but the redundancy of such a state would be useless. Replacing the muscle in Ormonde’s forearm went much the same way as the abdominal muscle did and his body was finally cleansed with about twenty minutes left until it started to die.

All that was left was to put the soul back into his body.

With all the care that my fading body could muster, I began to put the soul back into Ormonde’s body. Upon contact the Arcane in the area began to fizzle, sending sparks in every direction due to the lack of compatibility between a human’s body and a spirit’s soul. I pushed a little harder and was met with more resistance, his mortal body didn’t want to accept an immortal soul. I had one option open to me and it would have so many consequences and repercussions I was debating between it and death.

If a soul bond bound till death, I was about to do something that went passed that. I was about to put a piece of my soul into his and his into mine. There were so many reasons I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. I had brought him into this situation and I was obligated to get him out of it in roughly the same condition he started in. There would be no special ritual or ceremony as would normally happen and if any other spirit found out what I had done I would hunted down forever.

I called forth a small flicker of pink flame from my lantern and watched it intently for a moment. Yet another part of myself I would never get back.

The fire moved towards my chest and my soul, entering it. The small glow trailed its way through the twists and turns to our bound souls until it reached the point where they were bound. Like water being forced through a small valve, the glow entered his soul and leaked some of his out in return. I had just put little piece of myself into him to get his body to accept his soul. It was a dangerous move when I had so little soul left to give.

The second the little fire bonded with Ormonde’s soul my body gave out. Fighting against myself, I looked furiously at the lantern that was resting beside me. A large yellow flame was trying to absorb the other two that were trapped in the lantern with it.

My words were a slurred mess as my body was fighting to keep itself under my soul’s control.

“Mark! Contain him!”

The red flame sprang into acting, flaring up and dwarfing the yellow fire in its entirety. Slowly enveloped in the red flame, the yellow flame could do nothing to resist and was thus imprisoned. At an agonizing pace the red flame shrunk back down to be smaller than my own pink flame and went inside it putting both of them to sleep and ceasing their powers.

My mind went blank as the flood of pain that had been held back finally burst forth. I’m not even sure I screamed, I just kind of stopped. My mind had to catch up on almost twenty hours of continuous pain, nerve blockage, Arcane usage, and soul damage.

One thought was prevalent in my mind and slowly grew in strength until it became a command to myself.

‘Send Ormonde back.’

So I did. No fancy bells or whistles, just raw energy expenditure to return him to where he should be. It was done and so was I.

My body was already going into shock and combusting. I stared at my reflection as my skin slowly cracked under the pink flames and flaked away to reveal the nothingness inside. I had one last resort to turn to and I needed to do it before I no longer had a hand to work with.

The soul I had just gotten from the tree spirit left my lantern, my curse, and flew to me. I held onto it with a death grip and flash fried it with my fire. I had just wiped the soul clean without gleaning anything from it. No experience, no learning, no explanations, but the cost was worth it.

I was down to just a head and upper body, my left hand, which was holding the soul, was a hollow shell. Every motion calculated to save energy, I lift the soul to my mouth and ate it.

The soul was integrated into myself instantly, after all, nature abhors a vacuum. With more energy replacing what I lost my body stopped literally burning itself out. I returned myself to the small fireball I had rested in for over a year, it was the best form to recover my strength in and I had many, many repairs to do.

A halfhearted chuckle escaped me, I was in a worse situation than when I had started this endeavor and learned nothing from it. Even the revenge I had gotten was worthless. I thought of what both Mark and Akhan had called me after what I did to them. They had both called me a soul spirit if such a thing could exist.

Bitter memories, mostly from the past, kept me company as I slowly faded. The dark ring around my vision was getting larger, almost to the point that I couldn’t see anything. I closed my eyes and beat the crawling darkness.

It was time to sleep for a very long time.