Rhys stood over the prone body, shuddering slightly as the light of Pelor filled him for the fourth time that day, setting his shield nearby to glimmering faintly. Ezra convulsed as the healing spell swam into him, pushing back the poison from the damned arrow that hit him on their escape. It was a never ending struggle; within hours, the wound would begin to fester again, seeping poison in blackened veins radiating away from the stomach wound.
And there was nothing he could do about it. Rhys had learned healing on the Wall, spending day after day walking the battlements with the men of Peron. He’d ridden out more times than he could count when some new emergency required the reserves to scramble for whatever was crawling out of the Fein. The attacks had been grievous towards the end, but the confrontation with the shambling horde on midwinter had been the turning point, the moment that he had been freed to go back to his childhood home at the behest of a man he hadn’t heard from in near a decade.
A man who was, by all accounts, dying in front of him. Rhys watched the tissue trying halfheartedly to knit around the puncture site, and felt a tinge of despair. He didn’t have the ability to heal this wound, not even the ability to stabilize it. Keeping the pestilence in check was draining more and more of his strength every day, and, soon, he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demands of it. If they didn’t reach a senior member of the priesthood soon… there was a very real chance that Ezra would die, and that the shadowy creatures who had been after Ezra and his book would win after all.
With a quiet curse, Rhys stalked away from Ezra’s sickbed. If the book was part of this mystery, then it was possible that there would be something in it about the poison used. He laughed bitterly to himself there; he thought of this as a poisoning, but really had no proof of that. It could easily be a spell or something even more sinister. There was no way that he could figure it out in these conditions, unless luck held and there was something in the book. He made a litany of it in his head as he walked to where it had been left on Jeth’s departure: “Please. Something. Anything. Let me heal this man, and let us find the shadow men who dealt it. Please. Anything.”
Heart beating, he picked it up. The worn leather of the cover clung to his sweating palms as he slowly opened it, turning page after page, searching. After the first dozen, he began flipping through quickly, barely scanning the pages at all. They fanned, the moldy scent of the book spread, aged paper with a bare hint of strange spices, until they were all past and the back cover was closed. He sat still, book in lap, breathing deep and choking back his disappointment.
Rhys couldn’t read a single word of it.
1 comment:
YES. More of this please. Well done. I hope to alternate between journal entries and scenes from between game play.
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