Chapter 107: Lucky to Be a Monster

In the empty room, Arawn sat with a knife in hand and stared at his arm. It would be so easy to lower the blade and set it against his flesh, but it had been half an hour since he had made the resolution to do it, and he had still to start.

He wanted to learn, but a part of him refused to accept that this was the only way. How could it be? It was just too horrible to even consider.

And what about the monster him? Would it accept his self-mutilation lying down?

Usually, he turned only when he was in mortal danger, but who was to say that it wouldn't happen if he was tortured? There wasn't a single scar or any other mark on his body, which meant that the ether creature healed everything instead of just the mortal wound. It was quite an obvious statement as to what it thought about his well-being.

"Too cowardly?" Sylvester asked from the other room.

Arawn had thought that he was reading his book and not paying any attention to him, but apparently it wasn't the case. He lowered the knife and put it on the small table nearby. It was time he accepted that it wasn't happening; he couldn't harm himself even if it was in order to learn.

"I'll find a different way," he said while standing up and coming to stand by the doorway.

The doctor lay on the couch with eyes open. His color wasn't good, but he didn't let that stop him from scowling at Arawn. "Of course you will. It's always simpler to spout nonsense instead of facing the reality."

His eyes flashed with some emotion, and he sat up against the back of the couch. "Come," he said while motioning for Arawn to enter the room. "Get over here."

Not liking the note of threat in his words, Arawn hesitated. There was something wrong with Sylvester at that moment, but he couldn't put his finger on it.

"Hurry, or I'll change my mind."

Still uncertain if he should, Arawn crossed the room and came to stand by Sylvester. After healing over ten mortal wounds, he looked like a shadow of a human. His cheeks were gaunt, his eyes sunken in, and his skin papery. There was even a feverish quality to the way he moved in quick jerks.

When Arawn was about to ask what he wanted, Sylvester pulled out a dagger from beneath his pillow. Arawn jumped back, stunned to see the doctor attack him, but Sylvester just scoffed at him and place the blade against his own skin.

It cut through flesh without the slightest resistance. Blood trickled out of the wound, pooling around its edges. "Heal it now," he said in a voice as if he was suggesting Arawn should clean the room.

"Have you went mad?" Arawn demanded upon rushing forward.

He dabbed a handkerchief at the wound to stop the bleeding and glared at the doctor. "You know I don't know how!"

There was a mocking smile on Sylvester's face. "Didn't you say you want to learn? Try it then. You're not learning it without practice."

"I'm not gonna hurt others to learn something!"

His words fell on deaf ears, however. Sylvester closed his eyes and leaned his head against the handrest. "Knowledge always has a price. You heal this wound, or you never come to bother me again about wanting to be a doctor. Make your choice now."

Arawn stared at the pale arm that was criss-crossed with scars. Another one would be unnoticeable among the large collection of the old ones, but it would be different. It would signify Arawn giving up on his dream to help people by healing them.

The decision probably didn't have to be so black and white, so yes and no, but in a way, Arawn could understand Sylvester's disgust for him. He wanted an easier way after seeing the horrors instead of suffering through them like everyone else did.

Did that make him a coward? In a way, maybe, but at the same time, why did he have to be constrained by someone else's rules? He couldn't accept that something in the world could have been created in such a way that to do good, one had to first do a lot of horrible things to oneself or others.

The cut stopped bleeding, but Sylvester showed no inclination to heal it himself. If Arawn didn't do anything about it, he would let it heal or scar as it wished.

'There's nothing to lose in trying,' Arawn told himself, trying to push himself into doing it, but he couldn't help but want to avoid it. What if he made the situation even worse? It would be fine if that happened while working on himself, but what if he did something to Sylvester…

Hesitant, he still called to the ether in the wound. It jumped to his fingers like always and covered them in a curtain of light.

How did he tell it to heal though? Normally, he just sent it outwards with the motion of the hand and that's it. There was no subtlety about it.

"Wish for it to return home," Sylvester said in a calm voice. At some point, he had opened his eyes and was watching Arawn. "And if that home is gone, rebuild it. Ether is not alive, but it has memory of where it resides. Use it."

Following the instructions, Arawn focused on the white dusting on his fingers. The ether looked as nothing more than light under his command, but he forced himself to think of it as small creatures that had agency. They had memory, so he could make them return to where they came from and restore it to what it once was.

While learning to hold the ether without releasing it, Arawn had learned that words have no effect on the ether, so he gave his command in his mind. He wished for the ether to restore the wound to its original flawless state.

The moment he sent it forward, Sylvester pulled his hand away and slapped him on the head. "Look what you're doing! There was ether from the bed and your clothes in your gathering! Do you want my arm to turn into wood?"

"It can?" Arawn asked in surprise, forgetting all about being hit.

"Of course it can! Ether can return anything to its 'original' form, or what it thinks is such."

"Why nobody uses it like that then?" Arawn wondered aloud.

His mind ran over hundreds, no, thousands, of possibilities that Sylvester's revelation had opened up before him. If humans could change their bodies, what else could be done? Changing one material into another? Could he become rich in a day if he changed stone into gold?

"Who said they don't?" Sylvester shook his head and extended his arm again. "It's simply too hard to make a perfect change. Messing up, like what you would have done if I hadn't stopped you, is easy. Mixing up materials can be done by anyone, but a perfect changing of one item to another with ether is almost beyond what anyone can do.

"So drop your fantasies of becoming rich without any work. It's not happening. By the time you learn to do it, you could have already become a combat mage; and if you didn't, congratulations, you've just wasted your life."

With a frown, Arawn stared at the cut on Sylvester's arm. "What's so wrong about being a doctor? You've never said a good word about your profession."

"Because there's nothing to be said. If I were bad, I'd work for some minor noble in the middle of nowhere and pretty much not exist. If I am good, I am an accessory to be flaunted by the king and his closest nobles. They all fight to own me.

"Agency? Choice? That's not part of a doctor's vocabulary. You're not even allowed to help who you want since you have to save your energy in case your precious lord gets injured.

"Respect? Now that's funny. Anyone who is not a combat mage is instantly a nobody. If you cannot defend your family and what you hold dear, what are you even worth? Oh, and don't look at me with that affronted look. That's the way things are."

Sylvester laughed hollowly and smiled at Arawn, but there was not the least bit warmth in his expression. "If you weren't a monster, do you think anyone would have cared about you? Would you have survived the first dungeon you had been thrown into?"

When Arawn grimaced at the memory of his first massacre of prisoners, Sylvester nodded. "Thought so. You don't even know how lucky you are. While the rest of us have to bow down and scrape on the ground before the powerful, you can stand tall without even doing anything. Even if you'll learn to heal, you're gonna be a combat mage first and a doctor second."

"I—"

Arawn started to speak, but no words came to his mind. He wanted to say he wasn't lucky, that his life was horrible, but the scars on Sylvester's arms sealed his mouth shut. What did he really know about living a life of not being able to lift his head up?

In every prison and dungeon, everyone soon learned to fear and stay away from him. He was lonely, sure, but never under someone's heel. The idea of being afraid of someone was laughable to him. He was afraid FOR them, not OF them. The power imbalance was always in his favor.

"Try again," Sylvester said, relaxing against the headboard once more. "You have a couple more attempts before the ether scatters too much."

A vortex of emotions swirled in Arawn's mind, but he slammed a door in his mind, closing them away. He didn't know what to think or feel, so he would do so later. Right then, he should help Sylvester or he was going to have another scar.

With single-minded focus, Arawn called to the ether. This was a lot easier than trying to understand what he felt about being called lucky to have the power he couldn't control by a person who knew it and still thought so.

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