27 – Rough awakening

When Ishrin woke up, he found the two girls curled up in two corners of a makeshift shelter, sleeping an uneasy sleep. He put on his helmet and checked their auras, seeing that they were weak and small, with ripples of disruption spreading through their magic and destabilizing it. Their bodies were emaciated and pale, with large bruises and scars running across their arms and legs. Their heads were almost completely bald.

He took a deep breath. His mind thought about the radiation sickness victims he saw on Ober III during a visit at an underground research facility, about how much they suffered and how impotent the healers there had been until he finally managed to find a ritual to help them. By that time, however, it was too late. When he came out of his research room everyone was dead, even the scientists and the technicians. It turned out that another radiation leak from the reactor had melted the brains of everyone in the facility except for his, for he was too powerful to be affected. He ended up learning a lot about the world that day, about the powerful and scary forces in motion in the universe and about how insignificant everyone was in the face of death. True, his power protected him, but the same couldn’t be said about the technicians or the general overseer of the base, so full of power and yet just as powerless as anyone else in the face of calamity. Perhaps there was a hierarchy of power in the universe, true power as opposed to fake power. Perhaps not. The Keeper had been able to pluck him out of his world with no effort, after all.

He shook his head and returned to the present. The fact that he was trying not to think about what was in front of him was not lost on him.

He hoped that it was not too late to save the girls and immediately set to work. In the far corner of the room he saw something twinkle and, struggling because his head hurt like it had been hit with a sledgehammer, he spotted there a tall stash of monster cores, neatly stacked and organized by tier, all the way up to 12. His eyes lit up. Not wasting a single moment, he called for Liù and—

“Oh.”

With quick movements, he grabbed all the crystals and opened his inventory. He struggled a bit to make the window to his storage open properly but he forced it, and eventually it yielded, and he took out a bunch of ingredients in great hurry and began to draw. He placed the two unconscious bodies in the center of the ritual circle and began to perform, wasting no time, using all of the crystal cores without care for excesses. The girls were on the verge of death, and if he wanted to bring them back he needed to spare no expenses.

The light show of the ritual slowly died. Ishrin rushed to the center and took out a healing herb from his inventory and fed it to the girls. Lisette first, and then Melina.

“Come on.” He muttered. “Swallow.”

He moved their jaws with his hands, softly, guiding the herbs down their throats with a touch of telekinesis and sat to watch them. Every now and again he took out a small crystal and placed it on their chests, muttering things to himself that were barely audible and grunting. At times he seemed satisfied with the progress, at others he seemed distraught.

“Come on! You can’t die on me!”

Slowly he noticed some color return to Lisette’s face. He crouched down on top of her and observed her aura closely, looking for any permanent damage to it.

“No cracks. That’s good.” He said. “Now you only need to heal your body.”

Then he went over Melina’s.

“You…” he said. “You are a tough one to deal with, huh?”

There was a crack running though her aura, like a chasm where the magic flow was disrupted and irregular. Ishrin looked at it long and hard, trying to figure out what to do to help her. He probed it and touched it with his own aura, trying to get a feel of the damage. As soon as his own magic touched Melina’s however, a ripple spread through her aura like an earthquake, and the crack widened.

“Oy.” Ishrin recoiled. “Easy there, girl. It’s me.”

The aura seemed to relax, its defenses lowered somewhat. He tried again, getting close while also radiating a sense of peace and safety through his own magic, manipulating it with great expertise and control. He touched around the crack with gentle, repetitive movements, pulling the two ends together and mending the damage with his own magic. A streak of while, the color of his own aura, began to run through the crack and settled inside of it, filling it until the flow of magic was restored. Pulling back, Ishrin dried his face from the sweat and realized that several hours had passed. Lisette was now awake and was sitting with her legs crossed, eyes closed. He got up, checking on Melina’s aura one last time. The flow was back, but the color green was now forever stained by the milky white of his own touch. It never mixed as it flowed, remaining as a streak of white that churned and churned, always visible like the streaks in a block of marble.

***

Melina slowly opened her eyes, struggling against her heavy eyelids that felt like they had been glued shut. A pang of hunger struck her, and the sweet scent of food tickled her nostrils. Her eyes took a moment to adapt to the light level of her surroundings, but soon the green and white and blue blotches that she saw became trees and clouds, and sky. Not far from her she saw Ishrin and Lisette cooking something over a campfire, sitting on two wooden logs and chatting among themselves.

She got up from the surprisingly comfortable bed she was resting in. Her steps were unsure, like those of a newborn animal only now learning how to walk, but with every step she regained her strength and balance, and by the time she reached the others she felt completely fine. Just very, very hungry. Ishrin greeted her with a warm smile and offered her a bowl of soup, which she gingerly accepted. Seeing that she was eyeing it with a hint of fear in her gaze, Ishrin chuckled. She felt something inside of her, as if her own mind was reacting to his emotions.

“You should be able to keep it in your stomach, this time.” He said.

Beside him Lisette glared at her. Melina didn’t notice her.

“You saved us!” She said, almost refusing to believe it. “I thought you were mad at us. At… at me.”

“Yeah, of course I saved you. No amount of ‘mad’ with you will ever make me not save you. Are even serious?” he said.

“Oh…” she stammered. She felt the warmness and tenderness of those words in a way she never did before. “I—I—Thank you. I don’t know…”

Ishrin smiled. “Shhh… it’s fine. Eat.”

Melina grabbed a spoon and ate a small sip of soup. The flavor and heat immediately spread through her body, invigorating her and giving her strength.

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“Where’s Liù?” She asked.

Ishrin frowned, and Melina felt her own heart break as if she was the one who lost her summon. Behind him she also saw Lisette give her a death stare.

“I think she’s gone.” Ishrin said. “I tried summoning her again, but I got no responses from the elemental plane of Light.”

“But—” Melina stopped eating, the soup all but forgotten. “She’s an elemental. She can’t die!”

Ishrin shook his head. “She shouldn’t have been able to heal me either. And yet…”

“She can’t be gone!” Melina protested, refusing to accept the reality of the situation. “Maybe she went somewhere. Lisette, didn’t you see her light go somewhere after she healed him? I am sure I did!”

Lisette’s face was stone. “Melina, please stop.”

“I’m serious!” Melina yelled. “Ishrin, she is still out there. She is still out there!”

Melina broke down in tears, all her the anger in her voice dissipating like an illusion and leaving her a sobbing mess. “She is still out there,” she repeated in a small voice.

Ishrin closed his eyes. “Melina, please. Let’s put this behind us.”

“I’m sorry!” the girl cried. “I’m so sorry, Ishrin.”

“I know.” He said.

***

Their return trip to Noctis was done in almost complete silence. Ishrin didn’t have anything to say, as did Lisette, and Melina felt too guilty to even try to engage in conversation. She could feel his emotions like they were an echo in the back of her mind, and she felt the internal struggle happening within him: Ishrin felt torn between being rightfully mad at Melina and wanting to forgive her. He knew that he was being too harsh on her, and that it wasn’t all her fault. She was taking the blame for it all, which didn’t help either because every time he looked at her, he was reminded that Liù wasn’t there anymore with him, and the loss hurt. The silence was unbearable without the presence of the little flying imp who always loved to bother them.

“I’m going to disband the party,” Melina said.

Lisette grunted.

“Don’t be so hasty,” Ishrin said after inhaling loudly. He pressed two fingers on his forehead to deal with the raging headache he was feeling, spurred by the mess of emotions swirling in his mind.

Melina’s eyes lit up. “You don’t want me to?”

“It doesn’t make sense.” He said. “The expedition was a disaster.” Melina recoiled, but he held up a hand. “However, disasters are something that happens when you go on dangerous adventures like we did.” He paused, looking in the distance to clear his head, or perhaps to look for the right words. “For starters: I put you in a position of responsibility when I made you leader, but that was my choice and I almost forced it on you. It doesn’t make any sense to blame you for acting as a leader. Yes, we disagreed on what to do next, but ultimately you were the leader and I was not. Secondly: you couldn’t have known what was going to happen. You thought you were doing the right thing. I could have stopped you but instead decided to roll with it.”

He inhaled, massaging his temples. “You know why? Because I too thought it was the right thing to do. But I wouldn’t have done if I was alone. That much is true. Living a long life made me a cynical and taught me that selfish people survive longer than good people. Because yes, you are a good person. Remember that. It’s not easy for me to say all this. But it’s important. And third and last point: we went in underprepared, with no intel on the mission and no way to know if we were going to be in over our heads, which ended up happening. For this I take full responsibility. I acted as if I still were as powerful as I was before coming to this world, but I am not and it’s time I finally accepted it. Okay, Melina? You understand?”

Melina smiled, blinking away the tears. “Thank you.”

She rushed and went to hug him right, and she felt his heart and his heat for a few moments before awkwardly letting go.

“We will need to change things around.” He said after a while. “I don’t want a repeat of what happened to happen ever again if I can avoid it.”

“Me neither.” Lisette said, looking straight at Melina in the eye.

She knew, from that one look, that Lisette had not forgiven her.