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Arcanist - Chapter 66
🕑 Added 2025-04-07 15:00:11 +0000 UTC“Close your eyes, and take a deep breath. Don’t think. Don’t focus on a particular thought. Let your mind wander. You might feel some pain around your neck, but that’s normal.”
Valens placed his hand on Selin’s forehead as he focused on the Resonance. The woman tightened and shivered under his palm, but he expected that much. Dealing with mental illnesses had never been easy for any Resonant Healer since it wasn’t entirely possible to explain the details of the procedure to a patient in a way that would make them comfortable.
The matters of mind are elusive, and dangerous in nature. Delicate matters, indeed.
This was especially true since the carriage bumped into an occasional hole along the way, and the wheels groaned loudly, which didn’t make for a good place for operation.
They had left Brackley early in the morning with the first lights of the day after Captain Edric persuaded Father Harmon that the evil in the mines had been dealt with and wouldn’t be coming back. He didn’t go into the details and told Valens to keep their journey a little secret since discretion was essential in these cases.
Valens didn’t remember much of it as it was a night of cheap booze and dirty jokes, of roaring laughter and songs he didn’t know, yet was forced to sing along when cornered by a crowd of grateful miners. He would cherish the time he’d spent with them, but not the taste of that wine. It took him an ungodly amount of lifemana to deal with the resulting hangover.
Still, there’s one thing I’m now sure of. The Church doesn’t want people to learn the various horrors hiding in these lands, and I think I’m somewhat of the same mind with them.
He’d thought when he met with the Templars and learned their ways that the Church was keeping everything a secret to enhance its presence upon the public, to show them while horrors were a dime a dozen in the Broken Lands, here they could do nothing as long as the Divine Orders stood strong.
But now, Valens could see there was more to that practice. What could a Miner do even if he knew there was a Remnant Terror hiding inside the very mine he worked for months? What could a Nursemaid do even if she was informed that any moment a shadow could take her soul?
If everyone knew the entirety of the matter, then it would be an interesting sight for sure. Chaotic too, but interesting nonetheless. However, I still think they should’ve at least made an educated guess that their discretion sometimes would give birth to certain problems.
Valens guessed it was the crux of the problem here.
You tell too much to people, then you’d have thousands of them panicking. You tell too little, then they’d think the world is all bright and sunny. You have to find a balance between the two, but is there truly a balance to be found? All of this… even I’m not sure how to deal with it.
“M-Mr. Kosthal? Is there something wrong?” Selin muttered sheepishly, shivering under Valens’s palm. “I-I don’t feel anything.”
“Oh.” Valens blinked at her. “Don’t worry. Just try to calm your thoughts.”
I’m getting distracted. Focus.
Breathing in deep, Valens waited for Selin to close her eyes before he sent a Lifeward to her brain, feeling her muscles tighten. What she suffered from was a type of amnesia that prevented her from recalling some of her earliest memories. She could still get new memories, and remember certain things from her past, but to regain her true past she needed a difficult operation.
Her mind revealed itself the moment Lifeward seeped into her brain, painting the picture of frequencies for Valens to study.
I see. The hippocampus has clear signs of damage here. I could fix the damage, but repairing the exact axons and synapses will take time.
Memory storage of a brain wasn’t a simple, isolated function. The brain didn’t store memories like a register; memories were distributed across various networks. Even though Valens could repair the damaged parts of her brain, restoring the exact neural pathways that were altered by amnesia was no easy feat.
Even a small mistake could lead to false memories or, worse, memory gaps. I have to pluck the frequencies of each memory, and that is a problem. What if I see something I don’t like? What if Selin truly did that ritual on her own, without an outside influence?
Would that reveal her as an evil young woman trying to kill off innocent people, or was it the Selin who was lying before him the true person that she once was?
Better to not jump to conclusions. I’ll take it slow and steady.
He started with a Lifesurge to the rhythms scattered across her brain frequencies. Since there were multiple of them, he couldn’t just flush the brain with lifemana waves and expect her to regain her memories. He had to find the matching tips of each rhythm and stitch them back together.
I’ll start with this one.
The moment he used the Lifesurge scalpels to manage a minute stitch to patch the rhythm of a broken neural pathway, he heard the frequencies belonging to that particular memory in his mind. His sound vision picked them up and established a clear flow through which Valens could observe the substance of that memory.
What he saw was a blurry and distant scene, as expected from the memories of another person, but Valens could make out the outline of a house and the two people standing before it.
A woman and a man. Are these Selin’s parents?
Their faces were featureless, save for the mouths stretched into wide smiles. They were holding each other like a pair of lovers. Valens saw through the eyes of Selin, the woman, likely her mother, stretching an inviting hand to her. The houses lined to the sides of the street further blurred as Selin began running, her little legs pushing harder and harder, her heart thumping faster and faster, excitement taking hold of her body.
Just when she reached her parents, a face poked out from behind the woman’s skirt, belonging to a boy barely coming to her waist. Similar to the parents, his face was blank like a sheet of paper save for a mouth. But rather than a smile, that mouth was tightly sealed.
The brother?
Valens scowled as the boy tugged at his mother. She didn’t respond. He then tried his father, but the man remained indifferent to his insistent pats. Slowing down, the excitement in Selin’s heart gave way to a crushing sense of dread. She shivered. She looked at her parents. Their smiles… Something was wrong with them.
She flinched back from her mother’s hand and lowered her gaze to her brother. The little boy squeezed barely from between his parents as though passing through the bars of a prison cell. He pushed and pushed, mouth curling into a stubborn frown, and finally managed to escape from his mother’s back.
“It’s wrong,” he said when he stumbled close enough to touch Selin’s arm, and with a voice that was coming from everywhere.
Clenching her hands, Selin found her breath with difficulty and asked him, “What is wrong?”
The boy turned slowly to their parents and raised an accusing finger toward them. “They are,” he said, this time his voice clear over the memory. “They are wrong.”
“I…” Selin muttered shakily. She searched her parents’ faces. Nothing. There was nothing other than those eerie smiles on their faces, and the more Selin looked at them, the more her skin prickled with unease.
“Don’t worry,” the boy said, voice deepening. Slowly, a pair of beady eyes appeared on his face, lined with red strings squirming like veins. He smiled at Selin, and it was a smile that spoke of hatred. “I will fix it for you. I will make right what is wrong.”
Drops of liquid oozed from the tips of his fingers, and an oily black puddle pooled underneath his feet. It stretched not to the parents, but the house, like wriggling tendrils of a twisted creature until they reached the simple porch. They climbed up through the wooden beams, covered every inch of them like dark paint, and thickened into a balmy consistency.
Selin shivered against the sight. She couldn’t do anything but stare as the little boy smiled triumphantly at her. There was silence. Selin waited. The blurry faces of her parents waited. The memory stilled, everything frozen.
And then the little boy clicked his fingers.
Flames roared alive, hungry flames lashing at everything inside the memory. They scorched the wooden walls, splattered over the paved ground, and seeped insidiously toward Selin’s parents, who stood still as if they weren’t aware.
They burned, and Selin watched, horrified, breathless. She saw out of the corner of her eye the boy had reached for her and couldn’t bear the sight of him. She sucked in a chilling breath. She screamed. Her cry tore the memory apart.
...
Valens was forced out of the memory to find Selin frothing at the mouth, shaking uncontrollably, arms flailing, chest heaving, the back of her head hitting over and over again against the carriage. Before he could do anything, Celme jumped over the back seats and landed near them, held the young woman by the arms, and pinned her hard to the ground to stop her from harming herself.
“What’s happening?” she frowned at Selin, then back at Valens. “This wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?”
“No…” Valens muttered heavily. He looked at Selin’s face and saw in her pained expression the dread he felt in the memory. A fear so deep that the mere act of witnessing it once again triggered a seizure.
“Easy now,” Valens said, reaching for the woman’s neck, and he pinched slightly the nerves there. Selin went still, body growing limp in Celme’s hands. Valens then wiped her mouth, pulled the strands of her disheveled hair out of her face, and laid her gently back over the cushion.
I’ll check one final thing.
Celme searched his eyes for an explanation, but Valens didn’t have one right now. He didn’t know what he’d seen in that memory, and that was why he reached for Selin’s chest cavity to take a look at her soul.
He came across a door similar to the one he saw in Harlow’s chest, made from marble, but the similarities ended there since Selin’s door had been nearly broken through by what seemed like thousands of holes riddling its surface.
Seems like something sharp stabbed at it over and over again.
A Hexsurge seeped into the battered door, and it opened with a loud grinding sound.
[You have arrived at the Spiritum.]
He waved the notification off and focused on Selin’s reflection, which stood still in the Spiritum. It wavered as if it felt Valens’s presence, but other than that, Valens couldn’t see any dark streaks like the ones in Harlow’s reflection, nor did he see anything out of the ordinary.
It looks clean. Almost too clean for a reflection living behind that broken door. So, the matter is not tied to her core. It’s the memories that affect her state of mind the moment she’s confronted with them.
“We’ll let her sleep,” Valens said as he removed his hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. “She needs a rest,” he assured when Celme gave him a look.
It was with heavy questions in his mind, under the curious eyes of the Templars, with Mas staring daggers at him as though deep in his heart he carried a terrible evil, that he returned to his seat. He was now fairly accustomed to being stared at by this bigoted Templar, so he shrugged it off and sat wearily down.
“Not looking good, is it?” Garran asked him. “You might’ve burned the shadow out of her, but that kind of thing stays with you. That kind of thing doesn’t go without leaving its mark.”
“Shadow’s piece,” Mas hissed. “Should’ve stabbed her when I had the chance than leaving the matters to the hands of a heretic.”
“You never change, do you?” Valens looked at him. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that life can be truly worth living when you’re not bound by the doctrines drilled into your mind by some people who think they know it better than anyone? Don’t you ever question that maybe, there can be other solutions to a problem than, I don’t know, stabbing anything with your sword and hoping that will do the trick?”
“Hopeless,” Garran chuckled when Mas’s face went red with fury. “You used too many words, and now he’s having it hard trying to understand each one of them. Should’ve taken it sentence by sentence.”
“Enough,” Captain Edric said, looking as serious as ever as he pointed a finger at Selin who rested in the back. “How is it looking? Are you still sure you can fix her mind before we get to the capital?”
“I’m afraid we might have to take a different path, Captain,” Valens said.
“Oh?” Garran arched an eyebrow at him. “That’s strange coming out of your mouth. Far as I’ve seen, you’re not the one to give up when things get difficult.”
Valens gave a ‘Hah’ at that and smiled. “I can restore her memories. No, I will restore her memories, it’s just that I’m not sure how long she could take it if I keep pushing her. You’ve said we have what, one week, one and a half to the capital? It’s too short. At this rate, her mind will collapse before I get a chance to stitch her memories back.”
“What about this other way, then?” Captain Edric said. “What are you thinking?”
“It’s simple. Just have her lie and tell everyone that she doesn’t remember a thing,” Valens said as his eyes strayed to Mas in mid-sentence. “But of course, that might not satisfy all of us here.”
“This matter is not about our satisfaction, Valens,” Captain Edric said. It was one of the rare times he addressed Valens with his name rather than the usual ‘Healer.’ “I took her in even though I knew it was risky. Do you know why I did that?”
“I take from your words that you didn’t do it because you’re a good man who saw Selin needed help and decided to do the right thing,” Valens said.
“Wish I’d been that good, but no, I took her in because I saw the way you dealt with that shadow. Do you know how a Hexmender handles a Wailborn?” Captain Edric leaned closer, his voice deepening. “They seek the corruption in the soul, find the plague that is the shadow, and strangle it with their skills. They use Sacred Artifacts from the Church if needed and, sometimes, prepare rituals to force the evil out of their core. But they never try to burn a shadow that has taken complete control of someone because they know it would be too late to do anything. But you didn’t think Selin was beyond saving. You nearly killed her but, in the end, managed to scorch the shadow out of her soul.”
“It was a nasty thing to do, though,” Garran said.
“And yet it worked,” Captain Edric said, one hand over the pommel of his sheathed sword. The jewel set in there was silent. There was a heaviness on his face as he continued, “So you see, I took her in because of you. You have the potential to become something more than a Healer feared and being excluded just because of a past event. You can help us in ways that might convince even the Church that keeping you close is better than getting rid of you. To do that, however, I have to be able to trust you, and that means everything about you, including that young woman.”
This… I can’t tell them the things I saw in her memories. That would be like handing her to the Church’s hands right away. But I don’t want to lie, either…
Valens racked his mind for an idea that would be the perfect solution to the problem at hand, but the more he thought about it, the more he understood that making everyone happy without lying wasn’t possible in this case.
Worst case, I can deal with what’s wrong in Selin’s memories. It’s not as if the shadow is still there. I’m not sure if this is about her at all. That brother of hers, though, now he’s a real piece, and the only way for me to know more is to search her memories.
“I will take care of her.” Valens raised his chin and gave the captain an assuring nod. “You won’t get any headaches by keeping her safe, Captain, you have my word.”
Captain Edric narrowed his eyes at him, his scowl sharpening as if he was trying to drill a hole through Valens and see whether he was stating the truth or not.
I have chills… I’ve faced a Remnant Terror, but for some reason, this man’s gaze is a lot worse than being stared at by a giant eye.
“Good,” the captain said just then, smiling widely around the carriage.
“Good?” Valens couldn’t believe his ears. “What?”
“That was all I needed to hear,” Captain Edric nodded at him. “I don’t work with men who’re afraid of taking responsibility. So, it’s good that you’re up for the task.”
That was… a test? He wasn’t planning on ditching Selin in the first place, was he? He was just trying to see whether I’ll buckle down under pressure or not.
Garran leaned in and smacked him across the knees. “Welcome to the Golden Ward, Val. A part-time Ward, but a Ward still, eh? We’re going to get some mean bastards together, alright!”
Wha— What’s just happened here?
Valens blinked against the pair of Templars smiling ear to ear while Marcus and Celme stared at him as if he’d grown another eye on the back of his head. They looked mildly horrified at first, then their eyes widened, and at one point, Valens saw Marcus eating his nails as if he was possessed.
“We’ll see if the Bishop agrees to this,” Mas, on the other hand, hissed at them with fury burning in his eyes.
.......
Comments
s476
Should be 65? Or give the interlude a ch nr
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
