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    Chapter 15


    A Healer’s Burden


    Misandrei and Garld guided Femira down to the lower levels of the barracks. Femira hadn’t even known of the existence of the underground levels let alone just how deep they went. They’d taken long flights of stairs and passed through hallways and chambers of stoneshaped tunnels directly into the rock below. Stoneshaped passages weren’t considered very secure as a stealthy stonebreaker could easily forge a path in but it would be unlikely for someone to tunnel this deep below ground without knowing for certain there was something here. Gaslamps lined the walls and provided a flickering orange light, casting long dark shadows as they descended deeper into the tunnels.


    “I didn’t know any of this was here,” Femira mused, “I bet you hide all kinds of goodies down here,” she added with a smirk.


    “The most secure rooms are shielded,” Garld advised.


    “Wood or metal?”


    “Thinking of robbing us?” He said with an arched eyebrow and small smile, “mostly wood. Although some have both steel and wooden shielding.”


    “Definitely hiding something good down here so,” she replied, “dangerous game, giving that information to a known thief.”


    “I’m quite confident you’re not going to take advantage of this information,” Garld said, “especially considering we’re planning to give you the most valuable thing we have to offer.”


    They arrived at a set of unadorned steel doors, Misandrei pushed them open and proffered for Garld and Femira to enter. The room inside reminded Femira of a chirurgeon surgery that she’d once broken into. She’d stolen a bloodstone from that job. Not that I got much of the cut out of that.


    There were six beds arrayed along the back wall, along the walls were tables with stacks of notebooks and various surgical tools. Just like the hallways the room was lit by gaslamps affixed to the walls. Five of the beds were occupied already by unconscious men and women in Reldoni military uniforms. Not the red or black uniforms of the bloodshedders, these soldiers were from the general ranks. Femira had originally thought that the varying colours of soldier’s uniforms in the main military was a ranking system like the bloodshedders but she had later learned from Jaz that the colours denoted which Highlord the soldier served. These soldier’s uniforms were purple with black dragonhide elements.


    Sight of the unconscious soldiers gave Femira an apprehensive pause.


    “What is this place?” She faltered, reluctant to walk into the room.


    “This,” Garld disclosed, his arms outstretched as he entered the room, “is where we have been bringing humanity to its next stage.”


    “General Garld has performed over one hundred soulforging rituals since we first discovered the soulstone,” Misandrei explained.


    “You’ve been doing the infusions yourself?” Femira asked, taking a hesitant step into the room.


    It smelled like a chirurgeon’s surgery; the unnatural clean aroma of rubbing alcohol. The smell reminded Femira of the times when some of Lichtin’s thugs would be wounded in knife fights with rival gangs. Lichtin had known a healer that smelled like he drank the stuff more than he used it. Lichtin had some kind of leverage over him because the man would stagger in at any hour at Lichtin’s request to tend to any of the boys that needed stitching.


    “You don’t know much about where I come from,” Garld replied, he went over to one of the desks and began unpacking some journals.


    “You’re Reldoni,” Femira replied.


    “Not the physical where,” he said with a smile, “when I was a young man I had great ideals about saving people. I come from a highborn family—although not strictly a military family. But my mother and father were close friends of King Abhran’s father. My mother was one of the finest surgeons in the King’s employ and I took to her tutelage with a tenacious fervor.”


    “You’re a healer?” Femira’s head spun to him in surprise.


    “I was,” he clarified with a bitter chuckle, “I trained as both healer and chirurgeon. In fact, bloodstone remains to this day is where I am most proficient. I had always trained in the sword as many of my peers had, and my father had not neglected my training in this regard. My father had been King Abhran’s swordmaster, a role that I later assumed myself for Prince Landryn.”


    “So it was your father that pushed you into joining the army?” Femira asked. Garld, gave her a strange smile, one she didn’t recognise.


    “No—my father approved of my choice of profession. I was a chirurgeon for many years as a young man and it was years after his death that I joined the military,” his voice took on a bitter edge. “One of the sad truths I had learned was that the sword can save many more lives than the scalpel.”


    “General Garld is likely the most proficient wielder of soulstone in Reldon,” Misandrei put in, taking up position beside the empty bed, “you are in good hands, Vreth.”


    Femira nodded. She felt a wave of calm wash over her, her resolve tempered. Had she really considered backing out now simply because Garld would be doing the soulforging ritual personally. Who else would she even trust to do it? Knowing that he was a skilled healer was a comforting reassurance. She still had no idea what the soulforging ritual entailed other than it would hurt.


    She glanced over at the unconscious soldiers. They were breathing, and looked to be sleeping peacefully.


    “Who are they?”


    “Potentials,” Misandrei said quickly, “you need not concern yourself with them. They will be gone before you wake.”


    “I’ll be asleep?” she asked, “like them?”


    “Soulforging is… taxing on the body and the soul,” Garld informed her delicately, “we’ve advised you already that the process will be painful. Many fall unconscious from the exertion.” She nodded, nervously but again felt oddly calm in direct contrast to that. What is there to be nervous about? This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Her emotions felt like they were swinging back and forth between irrational calm and very justified trepidation.


    “Are you sure you want to continue?” Garld asked.


    “Yes,” she affirmed with resolution, another wave of calm certainty washing over her, “just got jitters is all.” It was the same feeling she would get before a big job, she felt like she needed to pee. “Let’s get started,” she said, “what do I need to do?”


    “Remove your shirt and jump on the bed,” Misandrei instructed, nodding to the bed beside her.


    Femira had never been embarrassed or ashamed of her body the way that highborn Altarean women seemed to be. Reldoni women were a lot more like her in that regard, she’d often seen women in the sparring yard stripping off to the waist with the men when it got hot in the midday sun. The setting here was a lot creepier though.


    “This isn’t some kind of weird sex slave dungeon is it?” she mocked as she pulled off her uniform tabard. The room wasn’t cold but now that she was half naked, she felt the chill from being so far underground. She climbed up onto the raised bed, little more than a cot but was nicer than some of the places she’d slept before falling in with Lichtin. There were leather straps for restraining hands which she eyed sceptically.


    “Sometimes the body can thrash involuntarily,” Misandrei said, “I can hold you down if you prefer not to be restrained by those.”


    “Yeah, I’d really rather not be strapped half naked to a bed in a creepy dungeon, thanks.”


    “Your eradite too,” Misandrei pointed to the earthstone on the silver chain around her neck, “we’ll need that for the infusion. Some people don’t believe that a particular runestone can be attuned to a person’s edir but I disagree. I think it will go better if we use your eradite for the ritual.”


    Garld was walking over to her as she undid the clasps on the chain and handed it Misandrei. She felt exposed, not because she was half-naked but being without her earthstone. She hadn’t parted with it once since before she’d broken into the Altarean palace. It had become part of her and having someone else handle it made her feel uncomfortable.


    Misandrei had never given her any reason to not trust her. Not only had she figured out her secret, she’d kept quiet about it and continued to train her diligently in runewielding. She was a strict swordsmaster and captain but Femira appreciated her for it, it pushed her to be a better fighter and runewielder.


    Garld was carrying a notebook and a small runestone. It was clear like a diamond, but Femira could see that there was swirling pattern of rainbow colours inside of the stone. She recognised the mesmerising stone immediately as the soulstone she’d found in Altarea.


    “Are you ready to begin?” he asked.


    “Of course,” she grinned, “Let’s get to—” pain erupted from her chest cutting off her words. A searing hot sensation burning across her chest like a thousand needles digging into her. They burrowed into her as she rasped for air. She was mildly aware of Misandrei pinning her to the bed as the pain built more and more. Garld stood over her impassively, holding the soulstone above her, a brilliant rainbow light emitting from it. As the light grew, so did the agonising sensation tearing through her chest.


    She tried to scream, to beg him to stop but no sound would come out, only rasping breathless croaks. The world dimmed, everything fading to blackness but for the intense light of the soulstone in Garld’s hands. Once again, she felt the wave of calm flood over her, overpowering the pain. She could see Garld’s face in the light of the soulstone. He looked sad but determined. A part of her understood that the calm was Garld, that he was making her feel this way. She felt his presence—not just standing over her—but in her mind. She felt a connection to him she’d never experienced before, an unwavering sense of trust and certainty that she was going to be ok, that this pain was temporary.


    She could feel Garld’s fondness for her, it was a bizarre sensation that she couldn’t akin to anything she’d felt before. She’d never had any children or younger siblings she’d needed to care for but she imagined that this is what that feeling was. The feelings of caring and devotion for another person that she felt overcoming her from Garld. She felt his hand press against her head, the calm flooded over her. The pain was still there, growing in resonance with the light of the soulstone. It burned through her. It attacked her lungs and heart and caught the breath in her throat before it could leave.


    The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    She fixed her gaze on the rainbow light above her as everything seemed to fade away.


    ***


    Garld rested a fatherly hand on Vreth’s forehead. Her dark hair was slick with sweat, her head was hot under his touch, her breaths rapid and violent. She had fallen unconscious—thankfully—as this was often the most gruesome part of the task.


    His hand still clutched the shining soulstone, it’s power flowing through him. He looked down at Vreth’s body, the flesh on her chest had been pulled away exposing her ribcage and the organs beneath. The miraculous nature of the soulstone’s power was keeping her alive, kept her heart beating and her lungs inhaling and exhaling as she breathed. It was wonder to see a body exposed yet working. In his time as a healer and chirurgeon, Garld had performed many surgeries and was well used to seeing the inner workings of a person’s body but that had been a pale comparison against this marval. To have visibility on everything that was happening at once was impossible—or so he once believed.


    He didn’t allow himself time to awe at the majesty of the internal human form and instead focused his efforts on the task at hand. He glanced down at his notebook, spread open on the operating table. It contained the runic formula that he had been tweaking and adapting since first uncovering Elyina’s journals. He began to mutter to himself as he read, they weren’t incantations or any such nonsense but it was hard not to see what he was doing as some kind of arcane ritual.


    Garld’s education had been extensive, he had been taught on all the workings of the human anatomy throughout his youth and into his early adulthood. As a practising chirurgeon, he had learned that the knowledge and the application were two wildly different things. knowledge of how to repair a human heart was certainly a requirement to doing it, but the skill and practice of repairing a heart with the regenerative healing capabilities of a bloodstone was another thing entirely.


    When he had first saved a man’s life, he’d felt like a god. He had brought a man back from the brink of death with his skill and knowledge. That was but a faint shadow of what he was achieving now, what he could see now. Where the bloodstone had given him the ability to see into a person’s body and repair it; the soulstone allowed him to look deeper. He could see down past the biological mechanics of the body, past the fibres of muscle and tissue, right down to the very threads of human existence.


    As a healer he had known of the existence of viruses and bacteria, how they both created and defended disease and how the human body was utterly dependent on them, now he could see them. Not only those, but all the miniscule particles that made up a person, how it all connected together in a beautiful matrix. Underpinning all of it, was a pattern of threads.


    He had come to recognise this as the soul. It was like a woven pattern, that was the makeup of what a person was. The soulstone—while he held its power in him—allowed him to see the soul. But not only that, he could change it. His earliest attempts at this had been catastrophic failures, but now—with Elyina’s journals and his own notes—he was close to perfecting it. He began to shift and adapt the pattern, directing his gaze between the notebook and Vreth. He didn’t need to be looking at her, in fact, he could close his eyes and still be able to sense the threads of her soul.


    Vreth’s muscles began to undulate, the bones adjusting and the muscle fibres themselves disconnecting and reknitting. Her ribcage opened and her heart shifted into a more central position, her other organs refitting themselves.


    “Now,” Garld instructed Misandrei, “her eradite.” Misandrei efficiently raised her hand and dropped the eradite onto Vreth’s exposed heart. As the stone fell, its descent slowed in defiance of gravity. It slowed until ultimately the runestone remained still, hovering an inch above Vreth’s heart.


    Golden red light began to emit from the stone and from Vreth’s body, the light coalesced and merged, shining brightly. The light around the eradite grew more intense until it became difficult to look at before descending inside of Vreth’s heart, merging with it. Her veins began glow rhythmically in tune with her heartbeat as her heart beat the eradite infused blood around her body, carrying the power of the runestone throughout her body.


    Through the soulstone, Garld could feel the shift in the fabric of Vreth’s body. She was trying to reject the infusion and her body fought against it as human bodies tended to when you introduced a foreign object into them. Violently, her muscles began to spasm, her limbs jerking against the constraints. Ultimately, Vreth’s own body would have pushed itself to death if it were not for the soulstone keeping actively working to keep her alive and to merge the eradite with her soul.


    The beauty of runestones was that they had their own threads of existence. They were both similar yet completely alien to the strands that made up a human but with instinctive knowledge Garld received from wielding the soulstone, he understood how the pattern worked and how it could be woven into Vreth’s threads. He began to knit them together, throughout Vreth’s entire body at the tiniest scale, each of the strands began to unfold and allow the eradite to lock in before reknitting together back to a perfected form.


    Garld was never aware of how much time passed when he performed the soulforging ritual, it often felt like seconds to him but had been often told that he was at it for hours. Using the soulstone, he reformed Vreth’s flesh over her chest exactly as it had been. Down to her core, Vreth was completely different. He had fundamentally changed the make-up of her soul.


    The formula he has used had been perfected over time so that he did not create abominations of flesh and power, so in appearance Vreth looked almost identical to how she had been. She would likely note the minute differences when she woke, her muscles and bones would be stronger than they had been, the power of the eradite flowing as part of her being rather than through it. Before, her body had been the conduit through which the power of the eradite was harnessed but now she was both the power and instrument.


    He felt the power and light of the soulstone begin to drain away, now fully spent… along with his own strength. His hand was still on her forehead and was wet with both his and her sweat. His legs felt weak and he struggled to keep himself standing. He smiled, stroking her hair, leaning against the bed frame for support. “Another child of Reldon,” he said softly through the exhaustion, “another shield with which we defend our home,” he looked to Misandrei, “she did well.”


    “It is done?” Misandrei asked.


    “Indeed,” he replied, “her vitals are stabilising. Her body didn’t resist as much as others.”


    “She had been using that eradite for years. It was already quite attuned to her—and she to it. Even when I tried to teach her how to use the other elemental runestones, her edir couldn’t pick them up. I think this one had already ingrained itself too deeply in her.”


    “A lot of the King’s scholars consider attuning to a runestone to be mere superstition,” Garld knotted his eyebrows at her.


    “Until proven,” She replied, “those scholars in the Pillar have been reading books on runestone theory for decades but I’ve been the one training runewielders for years.” Garld smiled, he himself had been one of those academics once, discounting the input of those who actually worked in the field. Assuming that all the knowledge in the world had already been discovered, documented and accounted for in the King’s library. Extensive as those stacks were, they were woefully lacking.


    “She had a lot of natural talent,” Misandrei observed as she also checked over Vreth’s vitals, the girl''s veins were still pumping a faded golden light under her dark skin. It would dull further over the next few minutes until the rest of the eradite had diffused into her body. There was no further risk of her body rejecting it, not now that Garld had reshaped her soul. “I’m interested to see how she takes to the infusion,” Misandrei continued, “She could be a powerful force on the battlefield.”


    “I had not envisaged a battlefield for this one,” Garld replied and with effort he staggered over to a chair by his desk, collapsing into it. He gave himself only a few seconds of respite before laboriously lifting his hand to begin writing notes in his notebook, “she will be a tool for stealth operations,” he said.


    “She’s a novice in her combat skills, but she could be a formidable opponent.”


    “I will consider it—Formula seventeen—,” he said, making a mark against a ciphered equation, “—seems to be the most stable. Who else did I try this method with?” Garld asked, not looking up from his notes. Misandrei answered without checking her own notebooks, “Endrin Mattice and Karylle Restores.”


    “Karylle is dead?”


    “Yes.”


    “I don’t think her body had fully taken the eradite,” he noted that against the formula, “Endrin hasn’t been showing any signs of degradation, has he?”


    “Not that I could tell, although with some of the others it had come with increased runewielding. Endrin hasn’t been reporting any signs though.”


    “Let’s keep an eye on him,” Garld determined, closing his notebook.


    Straining against his aching muscles, Garld pushed himself up from the chair and walked over to one of the desks where he placed his notebook in a locked drawer. It was a wooden mechanism, not overly complicated and he didn’t doubt that Vreth could pick it given enough time. He didn’t doubt her skills would keep her out of this room if she knew it existed. The fact that so few knew of this place’s existence was what made it so secure. The notebook itself was written in his own personal cipher and would be near impossible for anyone to crack even should anyone happen across it.


    He lingered for a while at the desk, he didn’t put the soulstone in the desk, something of such unequivocal value would be kept on his person at all times. “It won’t be kept a secret for very long, will it?” Misandrei asked as if reading his thoughts.


    “No,” he replied, “Landryn made a foolish move killing the Honorsword. He has forced us to show our hand to the Keiran. They will soon put the pieces together and realise that we have rediscovered soulforging.”


    “He saved this one though,” Misandrei said, nodding her head to Vreth.


    “There were less violent means to secure her. Landryn opted to kill him because he wanted to. He was tired of pretending that his pride wasn’t hurt each time the Honorswords claimed to be more powerful than him.”


    Vreth’s breathing began to return to a normal pace, the pulsing light in her veins beginning to dissipate. Garld smiled, walking back over to her.


    Perfection… She will be one of my greatest masterpieces. Risen from nothing and placed amongst the highest nobility along with immeasurable runewielding ability… And irrefutably loyal to him. Some might question a thief’s loyalty… or their resolve. But despite what Vreth thought of herself, Garld saw so much more in her. There was a tenacity, a determination and a thirst for power that she has yet to even realise in herself. And Garld was her benefactor, with him she would reach heights she could never have imagined.


    In reciprocation of this, he would hold her unwavering loyalty. He had felt it through the connection, when his edir had merged with hers, she craved for more and so long as he held the soulstone and the knowledge of how to wield it, he had no doubt she would continue to serve.


    The soulstone had returned to its drained state, its light was utterly spent. Once drained, its appearance looked like a cloud of rainbow colours swirling slowly, trapped inside of an uncut diamond. His gaze had pointedly avoided the other five bodies in the room. The cost I must bear for this. but he looked upon them now, they deserved that respect from him. All that remained of them were withered husks in the shape of human bodies. The soulstone had sucked every shred of lifeforce from them in an unrelenting torrent as it powered the changes in Vreth. It was a fair exchange toward the cost of perfection.


    “These men and women pledged their lives to the defence of Reldon,” Garld intoned, “and today Reldon has claimed them.”


    “I’ll ensure their stipends are paid to their families,” Misandrei proposed, “Highlord Nallan’s quartermaster is known to be… frugal.”


    “Highlord Nallan will also want a report on how his soldiers died, we’ll need something to justify why their bodies couldn’t be recovered.”


    “A fire? The Reinish have been deploying more grenadiers at the Tir’Nall border.” Misandrei suggested.


    “The skirmishes against the Reinish are too public, discrepancies might be noticed.”


    “Lost at sea then?” Misandrei offered, “there’s reports of corsairs raiding the towns along the tidewall.”


    “Hmm,” Garld mused “There are rumours that there are Altarean warships among them,” Garld acknowledged, firming his jaw for a moment and considering, “put a small team together and destroy them. Use only full bloodshedders. We can claim we lost these on that mission.”


    “Of course, sir,” Misandrei replied, dutifully.


    “I need to rest,” Garld breathed. The strain of wielding the soulstone for even such a short time wore him out far more than full days of healing with a bloodstone. But he couldn’t argue with the results. A small price for what we’re achieving. He looked back over to the husks of the sacrificed soldiers. It was a cruel joke of the world that lives must be spent to prevent future deaths and Garld would allow his own morality to be the barrier between them and a better world.


    I will carry this burden so that others can be free of it.