บท 189: Chapter 189: A more close than near death experience
Chapter 189: A more close than near death experience
Mercury awoke on a soft bed that was entirely torn up. He had moved and thrashed in his dream, even manifesting the Dream of Starvation. The Blanket of Dreams was still entirely intact, of course, given its high grade, but the bed itself was horribly damaged.
He didn't have the capacity to feel bad - really, he barely even registered it. The world swam. His ears rang. He could barely feel himself. There were boxes in front of his face, system notifications, but the words all blurred.
Slowly, he crawled to the edge of the bed, then his paw slipped, and he crashed into the floor. The impact barely registered against the stinging pain in his… oh, it was his everything wasn't it? Even the bits of him that were outside his physical body ached.
Gritting his teeth, Mercury crawled towards the bathroom. A hot bath. That would make him feel better. Searing off his skin, maybe. It felt disgusting on him right then.
<Adaptable> triggered already, changing him. No, it had been triggered all along. Strangely, so was <Survivor>. Oh. His fur seemed to be falling out. Was that… was that supposed to happen?
Mercury looked at the trail of white and red he'd left behind. That was… that was a lot of blood. Oh, he really wasn't supposed to be bleeding so much.
All he felt was… a vague irritation. Then he shut his eyes. The world still swam. Colours blurred and distended. Not even the mana felt real, instead blurring together into one big sea of worthless information. His ears flicked around on his head helplessly. All he got was dizziness, and the feeling that he was about to fall over.
Then he smacked into the floor. Somehow, despite only crawling. He grit his teeth. Stubbornly, he triggered <Itinerant> and <Intuition> in order to find his way through the room. To the bathtub. That was the goal.
<Intuition> told him to lay down and heal, but he firmly shoved that aside, commanding the Skill to guide him instead. Then, he crawled. Somehow, he made it to the tub, and somehow, <Itinerant> let him glide into it. With a burst of <Clarity>, he turned on the water, feeling the hot liquid pool around his legs.
Scratch that, it was still his blood. A few seconds afterwards, the hot water mixed with the red, iron liquid. Mercury felt hot pain prickling against his legs. His skin felt raw and wounded. He shouldn't have any wounds, yet he was bleeding so much and felt raw. It hurt.
But he could ignore that. <Adaptable> felt like it was finally awake, firing from all cylinders. It increased his heat resistance, changed his skin to have stronger barriers, molded his fur as it kept falling out, desperately holding onto it and regrowing it. The Skill drew upon Mercury's stockpile of building blocks in <Nutritional Preservation> to reconstruct his entire body as it continuously fell apart.
Usually, <Survivor> would have taken care of that, but Mercury could guess what it was busy with. There was, after all, a distinct amount of spiritual damage he had taken. Survivor most likely kept his mind from falling apart.
The heat reached his stomach, then, lighting that part of his body up, too. It felt like sensation was returning faster to those parts the water touched. Desperately, he bowed down and stuck his snout into it. He drank long, deep gulps, acting on instinct.
His entire body felt dehydrated, and the water vanished the moment he consumed it, feeding his Skills. Instead of taking the dirty, bloody, mess from the tub he quickly swapped to the water from the tap. He drank, deep gulps of it, the rest of the scalding liquid flowing down the sides of his neck, drenching his fur.
Mercury drank until he couldn't drink no more. Then he collapsed. His muscle density reduced to the minimum possible at his level of strength, letting him float. His Skills cannibalized that extra muscle in order to restore his wounds. His skin tore, then restored itself, then tore open again, like the blueprints on how to restore it were all wrong.
Eventually, the mopaaw shut his eyes. His mind was muddled, and tired. He floated atop the water, softly. There was a rushing noise in his ears… was the tub spilling over? He couldn't bring himself to care…
Time drifted by. A minute, then a dozen, then there was more noise. His ears hurt, though, so he couldn't tell what. First, a loud thump. He felt it in his bones. Then a couple more, then a kinda long, drawn out noise. Then a startling crack, suddenly close by, and a few more thumps.
With as much effort as Mercury could, he opened his eyes. The world was awash with pale browns, reds, and blues. The room was a mess of blood, water, and wood. Above him, a figure moved, carved from a darker brown. Mercury tried to focus. This seemed like someone he knew…
They were… talking? Certainly making noise. He couldn't understand any of it. But the figure seemed concerned. It brought a painful smile to his snout, as the skin around it cracked. He feebly raised a leg to give a small wave with his paw. Then his strength rang out and it splashed back into the water.
Despite the softness of the impact, Mercury could feel a crack going through him. Was that… a bone broken on water?
A moment later, the thought was washed away. His eyes were just too heavy to keep open. But he really wanted to stay awake, though…
Now, there was a second figure in the room. The first lifted him up and a carefully crafted bowl of wood, scooping up him, and the mess of things he was floating in.
Mercury's thoughts slowed further, then.
- - - - - -
Arber looking down at the feeble, broken creature in their arms.
How had it happened?
What he was carrying would barely qualify a living. Really, he would be generous to call it a heap of flesh. The skin was clinging to the bones like the poor thing had been starving for days. Despite that, the body was still constantly breaking open and knitting itself back together.
There was hardly even enough blood left to leak from the wounds. The bowl he carried the thing in was full of blood and fur that had fallen out. It was a sad sight.
So how had it happened?!
The tree spirit rushed through the halls of his own body. He brushed by servants within a moment, the wind tearing past them once, then a second time when Alice followed. A second passed, and the hero had caught up with the tree's avatar.
"Where are we taking him?" she asked. There was no amusement to her voice. It was the way a true fae spoke, the way they talked when they broke the mask. It was inhuman and careless, simply focused on the very next instance of importance.
"To my heart," Arber said. It would have been through gritted teeth, but the avatar lacked a face, and thus, lacked teeth to grit.
The hero was stunned, misplacing one of her steps and falling behind for half a second. She was, however, blindingly fast and caught up less than a moment later. Still, in the time between that reappearance, the poor mopaaw had grown yet thinner.
"You would let a stranger into your heart?" she asked, shocked.
"I would do my duty, Hero," Arber hissed. "If I were to spit in the face of this companionship, I would be forever unable to live with the consequences. Death is better."
Then, another voice, cold and calculating, cut through the silence. "You will not perish under my name," the lady Witness spoke. Her voice was commanding, overbearing, and ultimately, filled by fear. She was terrified. Because she knewi that no one had entered the mopaaw's room.
"I will not," Arber agreed. "Because he will not harm me."
The lady's face fell, her eyes narrowing in rage, her arms tensing behind her back. Magic was being half-woven, ready to complete at a single decision. "He is void-touched," she stated.
"That much is true," Arber agreed.
"You will not let a void-touched into your heart, Arber!" she commanded.
Then, the lady Witness blocked his way.
Arber stopped, and a second ticked by. In that second, more of the pitiful creature's flesh was consumed to sustain its life. Its magic was being consumed, too. "Do not stand in my way, lady of the House."
"I will-"
"You will break your oath?" Arber hissed. "Break customs? All of it?"
The lady took a step back, shocked at their intensity. "Do not speak to me in such a way," she whispered, but there was a lack of conviction.
"Do not impede my Duty."
Another step back. Arber moved forward, and she stopped the avatar once more.
"You disobey me, you bring shame-"
Alice spoke. "<Empathy>."
The lady Witness crumbled, suddenly weeping. It was a Skill to let one feel another's pain. Not quite that, it made one empathetic to another's situation. A kind Skill to foster understanding.
A hundred eyes cried on an expressionless face, and Arber brushed by their lady a moment later, disappearing down the hallway.
"He's in agony," the hero cooly remarked. She reached out. "<Share thine Burden>." She crumpled, too, falling to the floor and writhing in agony.
How had it happened? How had Mercury managed to move in that state, let alone take a bath?
Arber discarded the pointless thoughts and simply raced faster. Blood sprayed out of the bowl as he accelerated, and half a dozen seconds ticked by, then they stood in front of a door.
It was enormous, beautiful runes carved into the wood - no, the wood had grown with those circuits. It was flawless, but Arber didn't regard them, instead, within a second the door slid open. It only opened far enough for Mercury to pass through, the thin bowl being passed through the gap.
Then, Arber's avatar crumbled.
- - - - - -
Green life pulsed through the air.
Mercury felt it - taste it, smelt it. All at once.
He could tell what was happening, the barest hint of consciousness clinging to his mind. He could tell that the very air was replenishing his stamina, giving his body back resources he so desperately needed.
It let his emaciated flesh become slightly more firm. <Adaptable> consumed the resources, each tiny piece of stamina consumed optimally by his other Skills. How was he still thinking? Ah, <Clarity>. What a strange Skill to recognize itself…
More notifications popped up, but he ignored the chimes in his mind, as his body worked desperately to heal. The air felt good to breathe. He drew it into himself, accepted it into his storm. <Rainfall> consumed it all, faster than Mercury ever could.
His health ticked up once, and he couldn't read the numbers, but he was sure they were rather low. Mercury felt himself be passed around, removed from the liquid he floated in, and placed upon a soft mat.
Against his inner eyelids, the green glow became brighter. He wanted to see what it was, that warmth, that glow. It felt so alive… something deep down in him wanted to consume it, but despite his exhaustion, despite all the injuries Mercury had, that was the kind of influence he would never yield to.
With a flicker of annoyance, Mercury crushed that foreign thought, remaining <Unbroken>, and opened his eyes.
The word was so beautiful.
A radiant orb of green sat above Mercury, pulsating with life. Lines of power drew that magic around the room. <Clarity>, somehow, as if enhanced by his death throes - which he had entered by now, amusingly - let him see it all at once.
Dozens, hundred of glowing mannequins moved around the room. Each one went about their tasks with perfectly synchronized purpose. Slowly, Mercury felt himself being lowered, then a liquid touched him.
Soon, he was submerged in what he would describe as dull green sap. It was thick and viscous and he drank a bit of it. It helped. He drank more, conjuring new air in his lungs. Heh, he could breathe underwater, then.
Then, he pushed the errant thought aside and focused on the world. It was wonderful, miraculous even. The sap tasted delicious, if a little bland, but he could tell that it filled up the reservoirs of <Nutritional Preservation> at truly prodigious rates.
Despite it all, he felt the world grow more blurry, with <Clarity> desperately holding it together at its edges. Mercury smiled faintly. He slipped into ihn'ar so quickly he almost stunned himself back out of it, but the practiced technique made the world light up even more.
Everything around him was one huge construct of so many tiny parts he hardly understood, but at the core of it, there was a connection to something he knew. <Grass>. This was Arber, then. He smiled wider, despite the fact that his mouth tore even more, turning the dull green a murky, darker shade.
He felt a little closer to his friend, and he understood. Plants, generally, wanted to thrive. They were okay with taking resources from one another. But that didn't mean it was unkind. Arber, for one, was perfectly capable of sharing. To be stronger together…
Would there be a cost to this healing? Mercury bubbled forth with laughter, releasing tiny bubbles of air, slowly rising in the liquid. No. He knew there wouldn't. He could tell Arber was freely giving this, he could feel their worry, their thought on betrayal. That he would come back around and abuse this weakness.
For another moment, the foreign thought rose at the temptation, but it was crushed into less than dust a moment later.
'Ah, I really do have an eye for people,' Mercury thought with a smile, closing his eyes.
The radiant beauty was a little bit too much, and he decided to simply listen to the dull sounds around him.
Seconds ticked by, first a few then a dozen. Mercury heard footsteps around him, drank the nectar, and focused. He wanted to live, after all. That was a truth he held close to his core, surprisingly. He was a <Survivor>, and he really, truly wanted to survive.
Eventually, after maybe… three, five minutes, there was a sound within Mercury and he realized it was his heart.
Another laugh bubbled forth. He had done it, then. Lived without a heartbeat for… probably ten minutes or somesuch? No wonder the world had been so dull.
Within another two minutes, <Adaptable> had restored his brain, and suddenly things grew clearer. His sight more sharp, his hearing more complete. The world around him came into focus again. <Intuition> still told him he was falling apart, but it was now ever so slightly outclassed by his passive regeneration.
The damage to his <Astral Body> had been immense, then, but Mercury couldn't help but ride the high.
His body felt so warm right now that he knew for a fact it was flooded with hormones. His brian had probably released about every bit of euphoria stored in his body as it reactivated, alongside a thorough dose of adrenaline. It was as though he'd ridden a hundred thousand death defying roller coasters at once.
More minutes passed, maybe five or so, until he was lifted from the sap. His fur felt sticky, but <Adaptable> quickly changed that by giving it the ability to absorb liquids into his metabolism. That… seemed like something it couldn't have done before! He digested the sap still clinging to him, then opened his eyes again, staring up at that great volume of green.
Arber's heart.
Mercury could tell immediately. It was so obvious he was shocked he couldn't tell earlier - then again, he hadn't exactly been using his brain, very literally.
Slowly, having been raised from the liquid, Mercury's eyes started watering from the euphoria. He drew in a breath of live-giving air and laughed.
"Take fucking that, Death! You're never getting me!!" he howled, beaming with happiness.
The words left him panting, having torn open his lungs again, but his Skills reabsorbed the blood, and reconstituted the organ. There were so many notifications they could make his vision swim, but he shoved them aside. Instead, he turned his eyes to Arber.
They glinted maniacally, with that unbridled happiness that came from surviving the verge of death. Mercury smiled brightly, then hopped down from the platform he'd been laying on. His legs wobbled, buckled under him, fractured and broke, then reconstituted themselves.
It was a moment, a pinprick of pain, washed away by all the pain killers in his biology right now. Instead, he laughed again. "Oops! Sorry about that, Arber," he said, then went into a giggling fit.
"You live, Mercury," one of the mannequins said. This one wore a pirate hat, and Mercury knew it held his friend's main consciousness. Now, calling them a friend was, perhaps, premature. They were a fae, after all, but they had also saved his life.
"I do. Because of you, I assume," he said. It was… hard not to thank them, but he was still in the fae realm.
"My help was certainly instrumental, you scallywag," they chided, though there was some light humor in their voice, as well as some low exhaustion.
"It is acceptable," Mercury said, doing his best impression of a posh accent, then burst out into laughter. Arber laughed with him, the walls rumbling, and the green heart pulsating.
They laughed for seconds, then minutes, until eventually, it fizzled out. Mercury was finally digesting the released hormones, his high fading slightly. Then, he felt tuckered out.
Within moments of the laughter ending, Mercury's shaking legs gave in and he collapsed onto his stomach. It hurt, and his skin opened up again, but his bones didn't break this time. How lovely. He stared at the ceiling, suddenly tired beyond belief.
"Mercury. Stay awake."
Arber's voice tore him from his rumination. Right, he did need to do that. But he was so tired…
He banished the thought. With a not insignificant degree of effort, he split his mind, three ways. His two newer zeyjn got to sleep. But the largest third of his mind, the one with fourty ystirs, remained awake, and focused.
Slowly, he turned to Arber. "Wide awake," he said, slurring his speech slightly. He focused on his jaw, on the muscles in it, then tried again. "I'm awake." The syllables came out rough, but he said it properly.
"Good. Stay awake. You might die if you fall asleep." Mercury blinked at him. "Not kidding. Your heart might relapse into standing still."
Suddenly, Mercury felt a much stronger desire to stay awake.
"How did this happen, Mercury?" Arber then asked, their voice suddenly much more shaken. "What did you do to get this hurt, this easily? You spent one night here. No one entered your room. And you came out bleeding, dying, void-touched and with your very basic building blocks changed, to the point where Skills meant to make you more resilient barely kept you alive.
"Scratch that, they didn't keep you alive, Mercury. You were, by every metric, dead. For ten whole minutes. Then, you decided to come back!"
For a moment, Mercury tried to speak, but the tree avatar continued instead.
"You're also-" Arber started, then interrupted themselves. "Have you… touched the void, Mercury?" they eventually asked, saying the words so very carefully.
Mercury blinked. He… definitely had, hadn't he. "I have," he nodded, readily agreeing.
Arber flinched back, sinking into themselves. "Have you, then, noticed any thoughts about wanton destruction?"
A small smile flitted across Mercury's face. "Why, yes, I have." Arber took a long, careful step back. "For a brief moment, I felt the desire to break this place." They turned serious, a hundred mannequins suddenly turned towards Mercury. "I crushed that influence."
The wooden mannequins regarded him, stock still. He felt they would have blinked if they had eyes. "You… crushed it?"
"Just like that, yes," Mercury nodded. "My mind is mine, and mine alone."
Now, the tree regarded him with newfound respect. "Fascinating."
"What is?"
"Your… resistance, to the call of the void. Fae inflicted with it usually become ravenous and destructive immediately. Yet, you already almost opened a gate to it within my boughs, and now, you speak of having survived it so easily."
Mercury smiled. "What? It's just <Nothingness>."
He spoke the word with the whole gravitas that ability included, and felt reality trembling at the seems. He called its name, and <Nothingness> wanted to answer. Hungrily, as it always was. Wrathful, as it usually was.
"Amusingly," Mercury continued before Arber could interrupt him, "that was the only reason I lived, Arber. Because guess what." His tone turned darker as he continued. "A fae was in my dream. It tried to take my star. It nearly killed another star. It hurt my teacher, who gave me that name."
By now, the tree was staring at him, frozen once again. The wood had changed colour, too, the dark browns growing faintly lighter as Arber paled. "A… fae, in your dream?"
Mercury nodded. "In my dreamscape, Arber. You understand, these are abilities I would have preferred to not have shown. Yet, here we are." His tone was sharp, and he almost felt bad. Then he remembered he was supposed to be safe under Hospitality.
"There are… very few fae who would so blatantly disregard the sanctity of the First Visit. Any challenge would have to come with offers," they tried.
"It offered me a wish, and I declined. Then, it tried to take."
"Do you… remember what it looked like?"
Mercury's lips twisted into a snarl. He would never forget that thing. Not after what it had done to old Uunrahzil. "Oh, I do. In fact, I have a piece of it right here."
This time, Arber was swifter. "Do not, Mercury. Please. Keep it. I… You have my apologies. I failed you, failed as your retainer. But, please, do not take it out here."
The mopaaw stopped. He took a deep breath of the air, suffused with life. "You took a risk. In healing me, I mean, didn't you?"
Arber nodded. "I did."
"Alright. I… don't think it quite makes us even," he said, and Arber confirmed it. "But it's a start. I hold no hostilities against you, Arber, but if you continue to try to make up for this, I would appreciate it quite greatly."
The tree spirit nodded.
Silence hung for a moment.
"So… who attacked you?"
Mercury explained. "Large, eight limbs, kind of an antler-like construct for a head?" He added some more details, but that was the gist of it.
Arber, however, seemed upset enough by this description. "Well, Mercury. I can only guess that what you meant is one of the seats of the empty thrones."
The mopaaw huffed. "Oh, fucking lovely. Aren't those the ones I got a cryptic warning about?"
"Indeed they are. Because they're supposed to be dead."
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