For a moment Paul was dead, and then... he wasn’t.

Gasping, he scrambled to his feet, unsteady, pushing away the trauma of death for him to contemplate another time. A cavalcade of seemingly unending notifications blared into his brain, one after another, but Paul blinked them away as he sped through the familiar caverns. They were unimportant.

He didn’t slow as he emerged into the soft light of his home cavern, muscles and lungs burning as he ran, beelining for the tunnel where he had fought the Troll chief. In moments he was back at the battleground, the troll’s body still warm and the smell of blood still in the air. Several scavenging cave rats scurried away at Paul’s approach, greedily taking chunks of the Troll’s flesh with them.

“Seymore!” Paul shouted, heedless of the way his voice echoed through the tunnels. Frantically, he dove to his knees where he had cradled the lizard just minutes before, searching for his friend’s tiny form. Paul could see the trail of blood that he left pulling himself to Seymore, but there was no trace of the lizard.

“Seymore!!” Paul shouted again, hoping beyond hope for an answering chirp, but the only answer was the mocking echo of his own voice. Paul tried conjuring a light orb to illuminate the space, failing twice in impatience before mustering the concentration necessary to weave his intent together.

“No, no, no, no,” he mumbled, standing up and pacing up and down the cavern, searching, eyes scanning every nook and cranny.

Right before Paul had lost consciousness, holding Seymore in his hands, he had noticed something strange. As Paul softly pushed his intent into the lizard, illuminating Seymore with a gentle glow, he could have sworn that he saw Seymore’s wounds slowly begin to mend.

I can still save him. I have to.

“Seymore!”, he called out again. Where could he be?

Paul’s straightened with a shock. The cave rats! They could have taken him!

A pit growing in his stomach, Paul set off after the scavenging rats, his Tracking skill helping him follow them through the maze-like tunnels. The fact they had drug pieces of the troll with them both slowed them and helped Paul follow, leaving tell-tale smudges of blood and the pungent smell of mantis-troll along their path.

When he found them they turned for a moment as if to fight, but when they saw the look in Paul’s eyes they skittered away. Paul was on them in seconds. He didn’t bother with his spear or clubs, setting on each one with his knife. They kicked and bit and clawed, but their viciousness was outmatched by Paul’s desperation and anger.

He barely felt the bites and wounds, dispatching them in a matter of heartbeats. He turned each one on its back, slicing through its abdomen to open its stomach. He sluiced through the contents with his fingers, dreading he might find a trace of his friend. His hands burned and the smell and texture made him gag involuntarily, but his newly - Created? Re-created? - body had nothing to bring up.

He repeated the contents with each rat, but didn’t find any sign that Seymore had been eaten. He wiped his hands on the front of his thighs and rushed back to the site of the battle.

The home cavern isn’t far, maybe Seymore went back to the mushroom grove?

Paul scoured his cavern, the other lizards that made the grove scampering away in fear from Paul’s panicked search and desperate shouts.

Hours later, Paul collapsed to the ground near the spring in his home cavern. His throat was raw from screaming his friend’s name. He had searched everywhere he could think of, and then backtracked and searched again, and again. What little hope he had of finding Seymore was gone, replaced by gnawing loneliness and a feeling of sickening, aching despair.

Paul held his head in his hands and sobbed.

When his tears ran out he pulled himself up on his shelf-fungus bed and slept, hungry and alone.

-------

When he woke, moving seemed like an insurmountable chore so he lay, listless, replaying the battle in his head and the aftermath, second-guessing every action he took. Every time he went through the events of the previous day, he ended with the same conclusion.

I never should have brought Seymore along. I put him in danger and now he’s dead, because of me.

He wallowed in self-recrimination for a long while until his grumbling stomach forced him from his perch. He splashed frigid water from the stream in his face and retrieved some dried meat and berries from his makeshift cold-box, mechanically chewing and swallowing to sate his hunger, though the food tasted like ash in his mouth.

Eventually, he forced himself to start his chores, but he was distracted, ruining a pelt by scraping it so hard that he punctured a hole in it. He cast it aside with a curse and moved on to his weapon-crafting area which abutted a stalagmite that he could lean against as he sat and worked. He had broken several javelins and spears during the drawn-out battle with the trolls, and started work on replacing them.

Wood was one of Paul’s most precious resources, harvested from the skinny trees that only grew in the largest of caves with plentiful bioluminescent fungus to allow for photosynthesis. He carefully began to scrape the bark from a length of wood - this one about 7’, perfect for a spear, and tried to concentrate on his work instead of the stomach-churning loss that felt like a hard, heavy mass in his gut.

His newfound strength made pulling the flat, sharpened stone he used for a tool relatively easy, but it also made for more delicate work, as if he pulled too hard or angled the edge too steeply he could easily cut too deeply into the pole that was taking shape. He had stripped nearly all of the bark when his tool caught on a knot. Usually, Paul would slowly work at the knot, working the stone into the wood at different angles until he pared it off and continued with the work.

This time, Paul sneered and pulled hard, frustration and bitterness dwarfing his patience. The improvised blade bit too deep, cutting nearly half-way through the branch.

“Fuck!” Paul yelled, standing and throwing the ruined branch across the cavern.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Paul punched the nearby stalagmite hard. And then again. And again. He knew he should stop, but couldn’t, his loss and self-loathing and sadness propelling his fists without conscious thought.

After a while, a part of him noticed that his own blood stained the stalagmite, and he registered a sickening crunch whenever he hit the stone. Eventually, he stopped, strangely unable to make a fist. He blinked away hot tears, his rage and frustration fading. As his emotional pain faded it was replaced by a more physical sensation.

He looked down at his hands. Bloody, mangled, and clearly broken, the rising agony from his shattered fingers and knuckles threatened to bring him to his knees.

He let out a strangled, hysterical, half-laugh, half-cry.

“You fucking idiot Paul! So fucking stupid. Why would you do that?” The fact that Paul’s internal monologue was external didn’t even register to him.

Part of Paul’s brain tried to regain control of his emotions, but was drowned out by a litany of self pity and invective. Finally, it gained purchase as Paul ran out of breath, and Paul forced himself to take deep, long, heaving breaths.

“You have to learn better coping mechanisms,” Paul murmured out loud. “Christ, when all this is over I’m going to need some therapy.”

His turmoil of emotions finally contained, Paul took stock. He knew he would eventually heal - much more quickly than what was natural, even - but would his bones heal properly, or would his hands be left a mangled, crippled mess?

Sighing, he examined his hands once more.

I’m going to have to set my fingers, aren’t I?

He wasn’t looking forward to it.

He gingerly walked back to the stream, placing his hands under the frigid water to rinse off the ichor that covered them. The shock of the water on his mutilated extremities caused him to cry out and made his pulse race. The spring washed the gore into the pool, and the water roiled with the small vicious fish that lived there, brought to the surface by the scent of blood.

Blinking and breathing hard, Paul tried to figure out where to start. His left ring finger looked dislocated rather than broken. Inhaling deeply, he brought the finger to his mouth and bit down on it, using the grip to pull his hand back and slot his finger back in place. The burst of pain made him bite down harder, drawing blood on his own finger. He fell back, panting.

One finger down. Nine more to go.

Paul was able to get his left thumb working as well - though the pain made his eyes water. The rest of his fingers, however, were worse off, and in addition to the pain, he could feel a wrongness inside his hands themselves, a sign that the bones there were broken as well.

He stared at them a while longer. He knew that he had to try healing them - the same way that he thought he had begun to heal Seymore - but it felt somehow wrong to heal himself when he had failed his friend.

He eventually pushed past his misgivings and sat cross-legged on the cavern floor next to the pool, one hand resting palm up on each knee, and slowly tried to push intent into his hands. It didn’t work. Paul could feel his intent pushing against some sort of barrier, but it didn’t travel to his hands as intended.

Frowning, Paul summoned an orb of light, quelling a rising fear that his intent no longer worked for some reason.

Dismissing the orb, Paul pondered the problem. He came to realize that he had always poured his intent into something external - the fungus, an orb… Seymore - never into his own body. He tried again, visualizing his intent moving from his mind, down through his neck and shoulders to his hands. Again, the intent was stopped by some sort of obstacle, like a blockage in a pipe. He focused more intent on it, but to no avail.

He doubled down, mustering his intent. He felt a warm sensation in his head, like submerging in a hot bath. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the pool and was shocked to see his eyes glowing.

So I can manifest my intent, but it’s leaking. I need to contain it - put pressure on it.

Taking a breath, Paul began to weave a framework of intent, but instead of creating an object outside himself, he wove a pattern within. The concept took a while for Paul to grasp - the space within himself wasn’t 1:1 analogous with his physical body, and instead felt like an abstract synecdoche of his corporeal self. He could tell that his intent functioned differently in this space - existing much more as potentiality rather than material form. Without his countless hours and days of practice weaving his light orbs, the task would have been impossible, but Paul held a pattern in his mind and it began to take shape.

Several notifications clamored for his attention as he finished the construct, but Paul mentally brushed them away for another time.

He willed his intent into the reservoir he built, filling it and overfilling it, packing his intent densely within its confines as if it was one of his concussive orbs. He added more slowly - he had the feeling that if the weave burst in his own mind that the result would be catastrophic - until it seethed with essence.

Only then did Paul open a small gate he had built into the weave structure. Behind it was a narrow connection to the barrier that blocked his intent from reaching his arms and hands.

Paul’s intent crashed against the barrier, and Paul reeled as he felt the barrier bulge. The pressure of intent was immense, and it took every bit of mental resilience he had to keep the surging essence contained.

Finally, the barrier gave way like a ruptured dam and intent poured into Paul’s arms, which lit up so brightly that it felt like he was staring at the sun even through closed eyelids. The light was accompanied by a searing pain so intense that for a moment Paul thought that his arms had somehow spontaneously burst into flames. Paul let out a ragged scream, the intensity of the sensation tearing through Paul’s Pain Tolerance like it was tissue paper and eclipsing the pain in Paul’s hands tenfold.

Eventually, the pain subsided, leaving an odd pins-and-needles sensation in Paul’s hands and arms. He panted, taking gulping breaths. He opened his eyes and looked at his extremities - which he half-expected to see covered in burns. They appeared the same as they had before, and his hands were still a mangled, broken mess, but now Paul was aware of them in a way he hadn’t been before.

Timidly, he pushed a mote of intent into his hands. With the barrier gone, the process took concentration, but after a minute Paul saw his own hands glowing with a gentle light, and to his excitement, he could feel his injuries slowly begin to knit themselves back together - albeit infinitesimally slowly.

*[Weak Healing Light] has reached rank 2*

The notification encouraged Paul, and he focused more intent into his hands, only to stop a moment later. He could feel the light healing his flesh and bones, but it did so without regard to where the flesh was supposed to be.

Paul closed his eyes and tried again, this time taking the time to guide his intent, using ephemeral threads of intent to create a framework for his bones and flesh.

Paul had no medical experience other than first aid training, but he instinctively could tell what felt right and what felt wrong. The process was painstakingly slow, and any time that he had to re-align one of the many delicate bones in his fingers and hands, it was also excruciatingly painful - though he guessed that it was probably less painful than setting them manually. After what felt like an hour though, Paul managed to completely restore function to his right index finger.

*New Spell Gained: [Weak Mending Light]*

“Three down, seven to go,” Paul said, feeling exhausted but proud. “We’ll get these fixed in no time, right Seymore?”

He liked to think that he heard Seymore chirp back, but he knew he was only deluding himself.

Paul let the sadness come, accepted it, and began work on another finger.