Heal (II)

*CLICK*

The sudden sound of metal crashing against metal jolted her awake, her right hand pushing forward in a stabbing motion as if she still had her prosthesis to protect herself from harm.

“Wuh—What? What is happening?” Alice asked in confusion, quickly brushing away the sleep from her eyes as reality crashed upon her, waking her up like a cold shower. Maath was finally ready to molt.

The young woman immediately turned to look at the Queen, her eyes widening upon the sight of her dark and raised exoskeleton, the many cracks on its surface already showing the silvery-white material gently moving beneath it.

“Oh damn, It’s time!” she exclaimed as she jumped to her feet, running towards her gigantic patient, ignoring the remaining Thinkers silently staring at them from a few meters away, already assembled to witness the healing process.

“Okay Maath, I guess you can’t talk anymore so you’ll need to speak with me by clicks. I already somewhat understand the meaning so no worries.” She frenetically reassured her as she paced on the edge of the pond, “Now, I need you to crawl into the pool. I’ve made sure it’s large enough for you and this way it will be much easier to remove any risk of contagion once I start working. I’ll also need you to work with me. I’ve recently tried to use the Lumen on Skitter after he had already developed a core and they worked fine but, and the same time, they didn’t fuse with him because his power fought them off. I need you to accept the glimmers as they clean you of the Illness. Don’t fight them. They shouldn’t be able to change you but even if they did I can make it safe.”

The words came out in an avalanche, all the things she had prepared in her mind while she slept came out in a smooth and continuous river of recommendations, suggestions, and reassurances until the stream ran dry and she stood there, silently watching as the Queen slowly crawled into the pool and controlling the glimmers with her powers as not to spill a single particle out of its borders.

From her position on the edge, Alice could see the coruscating specks slowly converge towards the platinum titan, already attacking the dead flesh and infectious pus oozing out of her sores and abscesses. The young woman took a first step into the water before stopping in front of the Queen’s orb-like eyes.

“Maath. Whatever happens, I just wanted to thank you for what you’ve done for me. Even if it was an exchange. You’ve been one of the first nice things that has happened to me in this horrible world and I’ll be forever grateful. I just can’t keep living like this. Even with all the safety you’ve offered me I still couldn’t stand remaining here for an unknown amount of time.

I’m sorry, and thank you again.” she murmured, a few tears streaming down her eyes which she quickly brushed away from her face with the sleeve of her dress as her expression turned into one of pure concentration.

“Now, let me pay you back.”

With a tearing and cracking noise that reminded Alice of torn sheet metal and crushed cars, the dull exoskeleton split apart and out of it crawled a new Maath, her body still soft and misshapen as she dropped in the water with a sonorous splash.

The human girl could immediately spot the stark difference between the healthy portions of the Queen’s body and the ones tainted by the illness, their surface already covered in dark striations and layers of coagulated pus that had managed to find its way between the two layers of carapace.

As soon as the Queen’s true body touched the waters, the young biomancer threw the entire collection of smaller cores into the basin and pushed forward into the pool, ignoring the cold sensation on her skin in order to immediately establish a link to the Lumen and the magical crystals themselves, using their power to control the salvific fluid.

For the moment, she ignored Maath herself, feeling the shape of her own body as it displaced the thick and luminous liquid, but moving around it, directing the immense stream of glowing particles under her control to slam against the remains of dead carapace, only focusing her efforts on digesting the infected parts and cleansing the healthy portions of metal from the corruption surrounding them.

She winced as she felt the first of the cores fizzle out into a fine powder that was immediately dissolved by the water but, with that single loss, the remains of the molt were finally purified.

“Maath. You may now eat your molt. You’re gonna need those nutrients to fight back the Illness” she said, a smile reaching her lips the moment she heard the first crunching sound of the ruler eating her fill as she waded through the water.

Her body was submerged up to the torso in the radiant glow when she finally touched the lower side of the Maath’s thorax, the rest of the titan towering over her, as tall as a small house.

It’s finally time.

Alice Desare raised her hands as tendrils and waves of Lumen surged at her command, swarming and coiling around the body of the Spear Spider Queen as they slowly burrowed into the first layer of the mold that was gradually killing its host.

The fight could finally commence.

She felt her palm against the soft and warm metal side in front of her and used two more cores to force her way through, enjoying the much-lowered resistance to her own magic that was most likely due to the thinner and softer carapace. She easily soaked into Maath’s flesh.

It was a strange sensation finding herself both within the Lumen burrowing into the Queen’s body and into the body itself as it was invaded by a glowing army of infinitesimally small particles.

She felt the glimmers as they slowly consumed the mold, dying in the process, killed by the alien substance that only wanted to thrive and corrupt, turning everything on its path into more of itself.

That wouldn’t do.

The biomancer focused on the remaining cores gently rolling on the bottom of the pond and started draining them of their energy, only just controlling the surge of a dozen different powers that flowed into her body, sighing in relief when they were changed by her own well and then redirecting them into the palm of her hand, a dam quickly filling with barely contained power.

When she felt that a tipping point had been reached, the energy in her body threatening to rip her apart from the inside, she finally cast it.

Terminus

The roiling cascade of magical energy gushed out of her hand and into the titanic spider’s body, ignoring her damaged system to instead jump straight into the corrupted parasite that was feeding on her, focusing on each blighted particle in her blood, touching any spore, growth, and abscess that had dared establish itself into her organism and stopping it.

The girl felt each core as it turned into dust, a small feeling of loss immediately ignored as the young woman pushed even harder on the Lumen, using them as a battering ram on the diseased flesh, scouring the huge gaping hole in the Queen’s side and getting rid of its gnawing filth.

As the Lumen continued their cleansing, however, Alice had to focus on the rest of the body, moving from the esophagus to the stomach, from the lungs to the heart and from the muscles to the liver to keep the entire system working, to patch those leaking wounds that were left open by the glimmers on their path to victory.

Time passed and she kept controlling the battlefield until, after what felt like hours, she felt a stir ripple through the cankerous particles, their energy suddenly flaring up as they shook away the magical effect and resumed their fight against the radiant liberators, the progress of the Lumens weakening significantly once their blitzkrieg turned into an entrenched battle.

I need more power.

In a rush, Alice harnessed her own magic, trusting in her increased recovery as she guided the entirety of her reservoir into the body of the Queen, a single word on her lips.

Terminus

The particles stopped anew.

More time passed, and she could feel her own body, detached from her consciousness, slowly sag against the Queen’s own. She kept going, ignoring the small twinge of pain coming from the sore muscles of her legs.

The first entry wound had been almost completely cleansed, now a round, cavernous hole of temporarily cauterized flesh, a few trickles of blood pooling on its bottom and forming blue puddles of ichor.

The progress was going really well. So well, actually, that she even considered taking a small break to recuperate her forces and coming back swinging, ready to tackle the rest.

At least, until she felt yet another ripple from the mold as it shook off its daze for a third time.

This time, however, she knew that a lot less had passed since her last casting.

Already? She thought, fear gripping her chest as the mold awakened once again, immediately spewing spores and venom on the advancing green specks, halting their progress once more.

She checked her reservoir, finding it still almost empty, the smaller cores were now powder in the water and the larger one she had wanted to keep for the worst of the infection.

She smiled thinly in her mind. She had always known she wouldn’t be able to keep her second and most prized treasure.

Alas.

Alice snaked around her body until she found the familiar pressure of the shadowy core against her ribs. She drained it too, harvesting its mist-like energy and turning it into her life-giving warmth until it was a barely contained mass in the palm of her right hand.

One more trickle of her own energy and she reached her limit, once again, she said it.

Terminus

The particles stopped.

She continued her work.

This time, the effect lasted a bit more thanks to the much larger amount of energy she had poured into her Word of Power. When the blight stirred awake, Alice was already fighting through the digestive tract.

As she guided the Lumen against a particularly large and purulent abscess, the young woman extended another glowing tendril towards the massive, football-sized core she had left on the ‘shore’, forming a connection to the huge accumulation of power contained within.

She immediately felt a tangible difference from the other cores she had been linked with, this new energy was thicker, richer and more complex, it moved fluidly with a cold sensation of ancient stone, turned into a sort of fluid by time itself as it changed and mutated, always still but ever in motion.

The young woman felt herself straining to direct it the way she wanted, forced to sometimes let it course in strange directions throughout her body, forming a long and twisting path all over her system and only then pouring into her own well, slowly turned into a pure and continuous stream of her own energy that she then fed into the Queen.

Alice felt elation as she watched the illness slowly turning into nothing, gradually destroyed by the Lumen, experiencing the continuous death of the glimmers, too numerous to actually falter in their advance, fed and strengthened by the relentless magic of the massive core.

Enormous masses of pus, spores and growths of virulent flesh disappeared in mere minutes under her cleansing power, removing years of agony from Maath’s body.

She could see the end, into the bowels of her intestine, into the real fortress of the curse of the Anathema, where the Illness ran deeper.

Before delving into the rotten bulwark of the infection, the biomancer proceeded by ruthlessly annihilating any other pocket of disease, quickly sealing any wound that had been opened by her action and then proceeding to the next area until, finally, she found herself pushing against the almost calcified heart of the blight.

It was in that moment, however, that she felt the Infection do something new.

It was so sudden, so completely unexpected that she could only watch as, from within the inner sanctum of the infection, something finally stirred.

It started moving.

Towards her.

Astonished as she was, the young woman only managed to escape her daze after Maath’s agonized screech painfully hammered on her eardrums, her gigantic body shivering and twitching as what had been hiding in stasis for years or even decades was finally awakened by the first true attempt to heal its dying host.

The mass of the still-living flesh of the Anathema pushed through the spider matriarch’s flesh, moving past organs and nerves alike as it squirmed in the direction of the disturbance like a shark swimming towards a drop of blood, following the trail of that magic so opposed to its own nature.

In a rush, Alice directed a large tendril of concentrated Lumen to follow the blight on its path, the glimmers eating away at its ‘tail’ as it progressed further. Too slow.

She realized she wouldn’t destroy it in time just as the fungal worm suddenly compressed itself, standing still for an instant before pushing through the titanic spider’s flesh like an arrow and slamming against the softened chitin, somehow burrowing through it.

Alice forced her consciousness back into her own mind, attempting to remove her hand before the piece of Anathema could reach it.

She had just started raising her palm from the smooth metal surface when she felt the stinging pain of something pushing through her skin and watched as the tendril snapped within her own flesh, feeling a tiny cankerous worm as it started burrowing deep into her hand, quickly moving through her forearm, ripping apart her recently restored insides as it tried to establish a foothold in the new and uncharted territory that was a human’s body.

Alice started screaming.

Every single one of the cells contained within her organism flared in unison as the continuous power from her well suddenly changed objective and washed over her entire body, her system going crazy as it tried to activate every safety mechanism at the same time.

Leucocytes attempted to engulf the particles left on the invader’s wake, antibodies bombarded it with poison and kamikaze proteins, her temperature rose rapidly and her flesh swelled, trying to enclose the stubborn bioweapon in her veins.

It kept moving, slowly dying but too stubborn or mindless to surrender to its fate, the feeling of something moving under her skin filling the young woman with disgust and terror as it moved past her elbow and into her biceps, leaving a visible burrow underneath her dermis.

As a last resort, Alice used her left hand to unsheathe the sharp metal knife hanging from the somewhat consumed remains of her dress and simply sunk it into her own arm, just a few centimeters away from the burrowing tendril.

Working savagely, completely unable to feel the pain, the girl simply ripped off an entire chunk of the main muscle of her arm, complete with the tiny blight still squirming within it, and dropped it into the Lumen waters, sending an entire swarm of the particles to completely consume the tissue, making sure nothing would remain while she closed off the torn open blood vessels.

Hatred burned in her eyes as she moved forward once more, her right arm hanging limply on her side and the rest of her body completely enveloped in a coat of Lumen that immediately slammed against the thorax of the suffering Queen, delving deep within the new hole and searching for the Anathema itself.

She wouldn’t rest until the entirety of that evil was purged. That she promised to whoever would hear her as she further increased the stream of energy she was harvesting from the core, her body flaring up further as a response.

She moved into Maath once again.

It was chaos.

Somehow, Alice had managed to really stir the hornet nest and was now witnessing the results.

While the massive body bled, oozed, twitched and creaked, the remaining part of the tendril of Anathema now burrowed away from her and in the most worrying direction she could think of.

It was moving towards the brain, pushing past any barrier, much slower now that the Lumen had severely reduced its mass but still relentlessly moving towards its goal.

The core.

She wouldn’t allow it.

Alice could feel the massive core’s surge of energy starting to falter, slowly reducing as it was drained of the last remnants of its power, she pushed harder to access even the smallest amount contained within, letting it fill her own well and then moving the leftovers throughout her own body, “This might be painful, Maath. I need you to keep fighting.” She commanded her own detached body to speak as she forced the entirety of that energy inside of a huge tendril of Lumen, pushing it deep into the layers of torn and now infected tissue the mold had been creating, destroying any trace of infection in a race against time.

With another part of her mind she could feel the glimmers slowly breach through the plagued bastion in the Queen’s guts, laying waste to the Anathema’s final stronghold but the real target of her rage was still moving forward, even faster now as it probably felt the wild surge of energy coming for it.

It won’t matter. She promised, You’ll die today.

With a final cry of triumph her biomantic magic finally washed over it, a hungering swarm of Lumen glimmers jumping on its prey like piranhas on a piece of meat, their natural light a green maelstrom of untapped potential, dissolving the Anathema into nothing.

She didn’t have the time to smile as her mind was wracked by a sudden sensation of loss, like an elastic band snapping and slashing against her face coupled with a feeling of complete and utter emptiness.

The huge mass of crystallized magic had turned into dust.

The titan’s core had been extinguished. Her own well was practically empty, barely enough for her to keep herself staring at the matriarch’s system.

Alice could now see the damage caused by the final race against the living Illness, the way the two foreign substances had burrowed into Maath’s body, breaking it apart without care.

Just as she started inspecting the damages, she suddenly felt the same alien sensation that had been emanated by the mold, following it to the source and finding the small pathetic remains of the Anathema as they tried to burrow and hide into the healthy flesh, to escape their death.

Oh.

Pathetic and yet so effective. She had no more magic.

You really are forcing me to do it.

She pulled herself away from the Spear Spider Queen and really looked around the glade for the first time, finding herself staring at every single remaining Thinker—even the reclusive Olush, covered in a coat of bacterial colonies—as they crowded the edge of the pool, softly chittering between themselves, their pedipalps twitching frenetically as they observed the human fighting for their Mother’s life.

The young woman stood there for an instant, letting the remaining Lumen drop into the water, her eyes already filled with tears.

“You really couldn’t let it go, huh?” she murmured to herself, her words reaching the ears of the Thinkers who suddenly turned as still as statues.

She took a couple of steps towards them.

“I’m sorry, but I need you to bring me Eisor.”

The request washed over the water and reached Maath, who, despite the agony still splitting her mind in countless incoherent pieces, produced a single, weak and interrogative sound with her pedipalps while Chillushrith rushed out of the glade in a cacophony of thudding legs and shattered crystals.

Alice turned towards the Queen.

“I’m so sorry Maath, I didn’t want to tell you this way, and I shouldn’t be the one doing it but it was for the best.” she sobbed in front of the uncomprehending titan.

“Eisor wasn’t injured in the fight. She died as she fought against the monster. She is the only reason we managed to slay it. I don’t have anymore energy left. I’ll use her own to finally rid you of the Anathema. You’ll live—” she was interrupted by the incoherent shrieking of the Queen, a keening sound filled with all the grief, anger and desperation that such an ancient being could feel and express.

For the first time, Alice really saw a spider cry.

Instants later, Chillushrith emerged from the destroyed crystal forest, held between her pedipalps was Eisor’s shrunken body, the few legs she had left curled up against her thorax.

The gleaming Thinker gently lowered her sister to the ground, shivers and ripples coursing through her silvery exoskeleton as she listened to Maath’s sorrow.

Alice moved forward, her silver knife held with her left hand, approaching the carcass.

The Queen’s hissing wails grew louder and more distorted, the metal under her feet turning into a twisting lake of fluid platinum, she started sinking in it, unable to get close enough to the Overseer. She frantically addressed the grieving mother.

“Maath I won’t be able to heal you. Do you wish to let the Anathema win?” she shouted as her knees were engulfed in the cold alloy, “You can hate me all you want later, take your revenge after I heal you. Eisor sacrificed herself so that you would live. Make it worth it.” she pleaded.

“Make it worth it.”

Slowly, the metal grew thicker and she finally reached the body, carefully sinking the blade within it and thrusting her hand in the wound, feeling around the carcass until she found the silvery, fist-sized core that had once been the source of Eisor’s magical ability.

Alice Desare turned away from the cold corpse and dived into the water once again, pushing into Maath and immediately finding the small, pathetic smudge that was left of the Anathema, wordlessly consuming it.

A true anticlimax.

She silently started healing the ravaged body as Maath wept softly in the green glow of the Lumen.

*****

This chapter is officially sponsored by ViolinBeak! Thank you for your support!