The Lost History of Sathyriel, Part Six

OK, this part is going to be pretty long, so I'm just going to post what I've got, even though I haven't come to a break yet. This is the real meat of this part of the story and I am rather enjoying writing it. I hope it's going to continue to be enjoyable, as it's mostly just two people talking for the rest of the scene. One of the things I like about writing this section is that I don't entirely know where it's going. I know how it ends and I know some key points I have to hit along the way, but the conversation mostly just plays out as I write.

Comments blah blah.

There was no way for Joren to know how long he had been scaling the steep rocky face of the mountain. Time seemed to follow different rules in this place. There had been times when what seemed to him no more than the duration of an eye blink had been nearly a day in the waking world. Other times he had spent what seemed weeks exploring a place and awoke to find mere moments had passed since he had first tackled the injury. He had learned to simply disregard the passage of time here and concentrate on the task at hand. The only measure he needed to worry about was the amount of oma he had left.

Joren grunted as a foothold he had been testing proved too shallow and his right foot slipped. Calmly, he shifted his weight to his left foot and his hands and felt for a more secure foothold. He had to admit that he was not enjoying the climb. Physical exertion was not his strong suit, even when his physical body wasn’t really involved. He could have made it easier on himself. Sprouting wings or summoning a wind to carry him up the mountain would have been much easier and faster. But Joren had always made it a policy to work his way through whatever obstacles his patients threw at him without aid. It seemed more honest, and it often told him something about the problem he would be facing.

Slowly, Joren continued to make his way up the mountainside. The going was no easier as he neared the top and he nearly fell more than once. Still, he persevered, pulling himself up inch by inch, keeping focused on the summit. Finally, he grabbed hold of a ledge above him, pulled himself up, and beheld the top of the mountain.

The mountain’s peaked was slightly leveled off, though the ground was still more jagged than smooth. Rough stones and little spires of rock jutted out here and there. The whole plateau was bathed in moonlight. Above was nothing but wide-open night sky. On the mountain top there was only Joren, and Cyra, standing a short distance away from Joren, her back partly turned to him.

Joren was quite accustomed to his patients looking very different when he encountered them in this world. Here, people appeared the way they saw themselves. The elderly could regain their younger bodies; the young often grew older. The infirm often appeared strong and healthy and the well ones at times were sick, injured, or even mutilated. Joren himself looked quite similar to his physical appearance, save for the white-blue glow of his skin. Joren had seen any number of strange alterations to the way people looked when he tired to heal them. But he had never seen a change quite as dramatic as Cyra’s appearance.

Cyra’s skin was white, far paler than the skin of her physical body would be, even awash in moonlight like this. If he looked hard enough, Joren could make out faint traces of scales here and there. Her hair had become numerous slender spikes arcing back from her head. Probably the most dramatic new feature was the wings. They were dragon wings, with dark blue membranes between the long white digits that each ended in pale claws the color of bone. They were unfurled, but lowered so the bottom edges rested on the stone beneath her. She was looking up into the sky. If she had noticed Joren, she did not seem to care.

Joren would have continued simply watch Cyra until she took notice of him, but the strain of scaling the mountain could not be held back any longer. With great effort, Joren pulled his lower body up onto the plateau. He made no effort to hide either himself or his exhaustion. He flopped onto the hard ground, rolled over, and lay on his back, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. The stone beneath him was rough, but just feeling that it was stable and holding his weight was enough to comfort Joren. He checked the remaining oma as he lay resting. From the time he had first battled the dark energy of Cyra’s wound up to now, he had used up almost two-thirds of what he had gathered. It was more than he would have liked, but not so much that he was worried he would need to leave right away. Feeling his strength slowly returning, Joren sighed contentedly and opened his eyes.

Cyra was crouched down next to him, looking at him. Her face was what Joren had expected from the changes to her body: neither human nor dragon, but something in between. The top of her head sloped down into a short snout, much shorter than a dragon’s. She had two small nostrils that alternately flared and shut as she breathed. Her mouth was closed, but Joren had a feeling he would not want to see it opened at him in anger. The scar that had brought him here was still on her cheek, dark against the white of her scaled skin. Her deep blue eyes stared down at him in puzzlement.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Joren Roosdrahm,” he replied as he sat up with a grunt. “I’m a healer.”

Cyra frowned and rose to her feet.

“I’ve had healers working on me. Lots of them. Why are you here.”

“I’m here because the other healers have done the best they could and it hasn’t been enough. So they sent for me to try something different.”

Cyra had turned her attentions back to the sky, gazing out into the stars.

“So I’m dying,” she said quietly. She did not sound surprised, or even all that concerned.

“Possibly.” Joren leaned on one hand as he up and stretched his arms.

“And you want to take me back.”

Cyra’s gaze fell from the starlit sky to the ground far below. Joren followed it, peering down at the darkened earth where he had begun his climb up the mountain. At first, it looked like nothing but a great void, but as his eyes adjusted, Joren could make out familiar shapes. There were trees and buildings and lakes and rivers. He could even see other mountains, though the one they were atop seemed to tower above all of them. The whole waking world lay stretched out beneath them, tiny when viewed from such a great height.

“Is that what you want me to do?”

Cyra whirled to face him, her eyes nearly sparking with anger and indignation.

“Of course it is! Why wouldn’t I want to be healed?”

Joren held up his hands and took a small step back.

“I didn’t mean to assume anything. If you wish to go back to the waking world, we can do it right now.”

“So that’s it?” Cyra’s brow was furrowed with skepticism and there was a slight hesitation in her voice. “You just come and get me and then I’m healed?”

“Possibly,” Joren said again. “Though I suspect it may not be quite that simple.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Joren began, leaning back against a particularly large rock, “most cases I treat could be solves by any good healer. They don’t require anything more than basic healing magic or a few potions and bandages. I just happen to be the healer who’s around right then, so I do what needs to be done. But when people call for me specifically like you friends did, it’s usually because the standard magic and potions and other methods aren’t working. By all rights, the person should be improving, but the body just doesn’t seem to be accepting the healers’ work for some reason.”

Joren paused. Cyra had her arms folded across her chest. She wasn’t looking at him.

“So what do you do?” she asked.

“I try to find out why they aren’t getting better,” Joren explained. “I trained under several different masters – eccentrics all of them – and I learned a different method of healing. I can see certain things: connections between living things, positive and negative energies, sources of pain. It helps me to find the root of the problem. And I can connect with people like I’m connecting with you. I try to help them so they can start to heal.”

“Do they ever die – the people you’re trying to heal?”

“Yes.” Joren’s voice was solemn, but steady. “Sometimes they’re just ready to die or they’re too badly hurt to help by the time I get to them. Then I just try to make them comfortable. Sometime the best thing I can do is to help them to accept that they’re dying, though it’s often little comfort to those left behind. And sometimes I try my best to heal them, but it just isn’t enough.”

“Do you feel bad when they die?” Cyra was almost completely turned away from Joren, but he could see she had her hand up near her mouth.

“Oh yes. Even when I know going in that all I can do is help them die a little more peacefully, it’s still hard. I tell myself I did what I could and mostly I do believe that. But I always do wonder a little if there was some way I could have done more, given more, if that would have made a difference. And talking to the people who cared about the one that died, that never gets any easier. I have a not entirely deserved reputation for being able to heal people no one else can and it leads to some unrealistic expectations. I try to just take it when they get angry at me for not being able to help. I try to think about how much pain they’re in and that I’m just the most convenient target for all the anger they feel. But even when they don’t blame me at all, even when they’re the ones telling me I did all I could, it’s never easy. It could well be the hardest part of what I do.”