Look, I’m Not Good at This.
I’m really not. You’re gonna think I’m a hero, then you’re gonna think I’m an asshole, then probably a hero again by the end of this, but the truth is I’m just really bad at everything.
In my area of town you have to decide really quickly what it is you want to be otherwise you’ll wind up being like... a baker or something. No offense to bakers. But I wanted to be a mage. Not like a good mage, even. Just somebody who could do something that other people couldn’t. I figured anybody could swing a sword or a mace or study books all day. I wanted to be special.
I think I was like sixteen or seventeen when I started fucking around with magic. Masturbation sigils, blood sacrifices, stuff like that. I was past the age of acquisition or whatever they call it, and I wanted to hone my skills before I applied to the school. You’re supposed to be ten or eleven when you apply, but I looked fairly young and I wanted to blow them away with my prowess, for lack of a better term. I almost summoned a lesser demon, but I think somewhere along the chant I read it wrong and it was supposed to say “lemon” so I wound up with a pile of lemons and it just became a whole thing. They say that as a sorcerer your heart - rather than your mind - is what conjures the thing, whereas the wizards who sit around studying books all day use their minds. And generally get their spells to perform more accurately. So I guess in my heart I didn’t really want to summon a demon. I just wanted to say I did so everybody would think I’m cool.
So my first year in school they wanted to see what kind of sorcerer we would become, and I failed at almost every test. The high wizard told us to summon fire. They had us in a line in front of these braziers. We were supposed to summon a flame in whatever interpretation we could muster. The first kid summoned flaming coal. It smoldered a blue flame that burned for a few minutes and then went out. The second kid thought he was clever, so he put a handful of wool into his brazier and said his weird, dead-language chant and after a few tries got it to light with a flame higher than it should’ve been. It was really impressive and hard to follow. So then it was my turn.
I sat down in front of my brazier, legs crossed, eyes closed, hands to my heart. I had nothing in the brazier to light, so my mind started to wander. It wandered to my first incantation and after that it just happened automatically. I began chanting and speaking in tongues and everyone was mystified. My eyes were closed and rolled back into my skull, but I could feel everyone else’s locked on my and my brazier. I began to feel weightless. I stopped feeling the cold marble on my feet and ankles. I lifted into the air and when I finally finished, I came back down hard on the marble and opened my eyes. There, in the brazier, was a pile of lemons.
I was and am still an abject failure. Even the three kids that came after me managed to summon some sort of fire. The kid after me even had a small elemental dance around in its own ashes. His name was Njal. Not the elemental. The kid. And he was reared and raised by his witch mother and scholar father. The instructor praised him on how well he did and scorned my incompetence. These other boys were cut out for this. I was cut out for being a shepherd or a farmer or something, they said. “You’ve got heart, boy, but your mind is somewhere else. I think, perhaps, on a lemon tree.” And they laughed at me again. Njal had the honor of putting out everyone else’s flames, as sort of a show of dominance, I imagine. I figure they wanted everyone to see that the strongest of us will always quench the weak.
He didn’t even bother to try to put out my pile of lemons.
A few weeks after, we began our trials of Restoration. Still reeling from the complete asshole I had made of myself at my conjuration test, I was determined to find something I could be good at. I studied the books like the wizards did. I really put my mind into the old texts of levitation, healing, helpful shit like that. But what really made me want to be a Restorative was that I was in this school for the money. My asshole father was dying, and even if I didn’t become a big-time Wizard or poor Cleric or notorious Sorcerer, no matter what, I would be able to afford to have him looked after. I could rub some poultice on a plagued child and take the fifteen pieces from his family before he died. God-willing I could become sorcerer to the King and help his sickly children to adulthood and make a fortune. That might save my asshole father and - lux-willing - maybe the farm.
So the day finally came to begin the Restoration trials. The same five of us stood on that hard marble floor in front of our instructor, this time a young female, apparently in her early 30′s, who was said to be able to heal the plague - for a fee. In the center of the circular room sat a brazier, burning a high and mighty flame. The instructor thanked Njal for the dancing elementals keeping it aloft. In front of each of us sat dying goats, each with myriad afflictions. Plague, rot, small wounds, each of them dying. We were meant to heal them.
Njal began his incantation. He spoke clearly and kindly to his gods to rid this animal of its afflictions. To gift him a dusting of their power. I kept watching him because of the competition, but all I could remember was feeling so sad for the goat. It had a giant gash on its forehead clean to the bone, what looked like a thousand cuts on its legs, and one of its horns had been haphazardly cut off. I could see the striations of the saw they used. Blunted. Cruel. Anyway, Njal prayed to his gods, and after a few minutes the goat’s wounds began to close. Its gash on the forehead healed and it regained consciousness after a few minutes. Everyone clapped. Njal was clearly the next Grandmaster and everyone knew it.
The second boy’s goat had been maimed. The front left leg had been severed, as had its tail, and both its rear legs were crushed nearly to a powder. These were all VERY recent wounds. They had mutilated these poor creatures just for this ceremony - just for some token test. I could call it nothing if not unwarranted and heartless cruelty. The boy laid down over the goat, hands and knees, heaving and saying nothing. They said he communed with forgotten spirits and was able to raise the dead. He was nine. But he laid there over the goat and all I could feel was the anger that someone had maimed this goat just to find out how apt some wayward children would be at speaking forsaken words. After a few minutes, it was done. The goat stood up and bleated and danced around on all fours. It was, again, intact. It was a beautiful sight to behold and everyone cheered for him. Not because the goat was intact, but because this nine year-old had been such a success. It wasn’t until after the trial that I began to suspect each of the students had broken their own goat to cater to their particular restoration style. But I hadn’t touched mine. Someone must have broken mine for me.
My goat was a baby. It had all four legs and its one jaw broken. It couldn’t even scream in pain. It just lay there, quivering. It looked at me with its wild, desperate eyes, silently begging me for death. I tried to hold myself together, but I remember starting to cry and weep over it uncontrollably - mourning like an animal. I knew I wasn’t good enough at any of this to heal this baby. I screamed and cried so hard I eventually passed out.
They poured my goat down the chute near my lemons.
The elders kicked me out immediately and I went back to live on the streets. Then two days later as I was trying to determine which of my family I could afford to feed, a young-ish envoy from the college, fresh-faced and full of piss and vinegar, came to me.
“Sir, they want you upstairs.”
“They said you’d know who.”
“They also said you’d know where I’m sorry I can’t be of more help. You know how they like to play vague games.”
I walked the three miles up to the college and was greeted by two more envoys. They were clad in those robes I’d always hoped to wear.
“I don’t understand. I got kicked out. What do you want?”
“Kjarl wants to see you.”
Kjarl was the headmaster and I was 90% sure I was going to be either mercifully exiled or summarily executed. So I headed up to his office. When I got there, I was underwhelmed by how Spartan his living quarters were. Just a small pile of straw pushed up against the wall with cloth laid over it, a desk with scrolls laid across it, and two candles lighting both areas. For someone of his station it was very meager. I was afraid, walking up the spiral stairs, because Kjarl was a mind-flayer. He had only become the headmaster because he had driven the previous headmaster insane during a duel over a perceived sleight. Those who witnessed it said the headmaster had squeezed his own head until a dull, sickening crack preceded a thud, leaving his corpse in a shuddering and pungent puddle of his own waste and blood. Kjarl was a terrifying man, if one could call him a man.
“What have you done?” he all but whispered without looking up. Through his commanding tone I could almost hear something akin to... sadness? Despair?
“I’m sorry, sir? I don’t know,” I said, head glued to the floor, prostrate, in awe of this all-too-disarming being.
“Stand up and sit down here,” he said, this time a little louder as he gathered himself, and he gestured to a chair next to his bed.
“Sir, I promise I have no idea what you mean.”
“Don’t waste your breath. Your goat. What did you do?”
My mind immediately went back to the broken baby goat and I began weeping again. A reminder of my failure. A reminder that I WAS a failure.
“Sir I’m sorry. My heart gave out.”
“Stop lying. I’m a Mind-Flayer. I can hear your lie in your thoughts. You know that.”
“Sir, I had never loved something before and I loved that baby goat. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Weakness is all I can call it.”
“We had a fire,” he offered in reply, ignoring my own, “in the orchards. It killed seventeen of our bravest villagers trying to put it out. They were buried on site. Eventually we had to just resign ourselves to it, as it hasn’t spread and has proven unquenchable. It’s burning from five distinct places and no matter how much water, sand, clay, chalk, we put on it... it refuses to smother. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, boy?”
“No sir. I failed my conjuration like I failed the restoration. I doubt I could start a fire with dry straw and a torch at this point.”
“They’re lemons. At the source, I mean. Five of them. And they’re burning with a clear flame that’s so hot it burned one of the Royal Guard’s hand to the bone when he tried to pick one up. You don’t know anything about this?”
“And I’d assume you don’t know anything about the goat that has been eating them.”
“That isn’t why I called you here, but your honesty and surprise is quite comforting.” He meant it, too. By then he was standing at his full height, eyes fixed in authority and the curl of a smile(?) forming at the corners of his mouth where his long, twisted mustache couldn’t grow. “What I’m really concerned with is the students. The ones you hurt.”
“Sir I promise I didn’t mean to hur-”
“I know, boy. Look at this rat,” he said softly, walking across the room and squatting down, eyes still fixed on mine as he held his hand open in front of the wretched, writhing mass on his bed.
He pulled the sheet back and there sat a rat with what, to us, would have been considered a small nick on its hind leg, but to the mouse, small as it was, was a grave injury. The kind you don’t heal from. It was so small - so innocent - and it squealed, its helpless eyes pleading for me to do... something.
“Am I supposed to restore it, sir? Like I said I fail-”
“Just try,” he interrupted.
Sat in front of the headmaster’s bed, cross-legged, I gazed over the rat. Its beady eyes stared at me in fear and it squealed now more desperately than before. Its leg was broken. A tiny little compound fracture you’d never even notice unless you were looking for it. The poor thing had never hurt anyone, and I knew this heartless thing we called headmaster had broken its leg just to test me. My blood boiled in impotent rage. So I scooped the tiny wretch into my arms, leg raised to stem the bleeding.
“You poor, sweet girl. I swear I’ll make this better. I have you. I love you. It’ll be okay.” I cradled him in my arms and tears streaked my dirty cheeks over the cruelty visited on this poor life that had never done anything or even asked to be born.
Somewhere between the beating in my ears and the tears, I heard a dull, quiet cracking. And the sound of a monster grunting in pain.
“Just as I thought,” gritted the headmaster, and stood up on one foot, with a crutch. “You can go now.”
“Go now!” the monster screamed in my mind. Confused, and still openly sobbing, I shambled out of the room in shame.
“I’ll have this pest sent to your room.”
I felt like her name was Kevin. She ate what roaches and whatnots she could find crawling around my new room at the college.
As time wore on, I would be sporadically called every now and then to settle strange, often petty disputes. They’d called me in for injuries, for the most part - emotional sometimes, but mostly physical. Sometimes against an animal or an innocent and I’d cry helplessly about it and then they send me away again. Every call was torture, and I grew to cower at every knock on my door.
“You broke the headmaster’s leg. Broke it OPEN,” the man I’d come to know as my escort and handler said to me. “Do you even begin to grasp what that’s going to mean for you?
“No, sire,” I said, with a powerless finality, “but I am prepared to accept whatever punishment the council deems-”
“What do you remember of your restoration trial?”
“I believe I remember everything, sire”
“Do you? Do you really? Do you remember being the only one who survived the night?”
“Sire? No sir I hadn’t heard anything about it.” I hadn’t seen any of the other students since, assuming them promoted out to begin their careers as they had succeeded where I had failed.
“Njal died from blood loss. He had a gash on his forehead - nearly clear to the bone. A thousand cuts on his legs, and one of his ears was missing the next morning, a messy, dull, nearly-ripped saw mark where the ear once was. The second boy, Sian, who we suspect died of pure agony, was missing an arm and both his femurs were found shattered to dust. But the truly peculiar case was Narla - . You were too weak and soft-hearted to break your own goat. Too unsure in your restoration. Narla had to break your goat for you. And she was found with four broken limbs and a broken jaw. Her throat had been shredded inside. She couldn’t even yell for help. Such specific injuries, and still you claim ignorance?”
“I have nothing else I can offer, sire. I truly didn’t know any of this.”
They locked me in a cell, too small to sit or lie down in, after that. Calling me “The Healer.” I assumed as a joke.
A few weeks later and the joke had lost its humor. My knees and ankles pulsed with agony. The diet of bread and water wreaked havoc on my bowels, and I longed for death - but not my own.
“Get the boy up,” a guard called from down the dripping stone corridor.
My “escort” unshackled me from the wall and brought me, hobbled, to the king. Our lord, the kindly and merciful, the god-King, in bed with what looked to be rolls upon rolls of gauze wrapping his stomach.
“They’ve been here,” he hollowly wheezed, wincing with every breath. “My boy, they’ve been here.” I don’t know why, but I didn’t need him to explain who “they” were. I somehow knew.
“And what would you have of me, sire?”
“Restore me, Oh restorer,” he said with an empty, breathy laugh, all but misting blood from between his lips.
“Sire. I can’t. I have never fixed anything.”
“I’m dying, you young fool. Have I not been good to you?” He meant it. I could tell in his voice that he had meant for me to be well taken care of, but his guards had kept him in the dark as to my treatment.
He died in the night while I wept in my prison cell. I wasn’t there to see it, but the moment his soul left him, I felt something burst in my soul and I fell limp, finally losing consciousness.
The next morning I was awoken to bells and a prison pardon. I was free. Free to serve the new queen.
“I need you to heal our sick. You are known as a healer.”
“My lady, I don’t know why. I’ve never known myself to heal ANYONE or ANYTHING. I’m afraid I’m to be quite useless to my lady.”
She wordlessly gestured to follow, guiding me in a slow, deliberate walk to what served as hospice, as she went about explaining the tragic plight of every soul damned to lie in the awful, stench-filled waiting room of almost certain death.
She stopped at the feet of the first of them. “This man is widely known as a good man. He looked after his wife and then her family upon her death - and their hateful god wrought creeping death upon him. But not only a good man, this one is my nephew. Heal him however you may, and I will make you rich.”
And so, at a loss for anything but my own habit of weakness, I wept over what sad, bag-of-bones husk remained of him. I held his too-light frame in my arms as he gasped what I thought would be his last breath. After a moment of holding him, fearing the cold darkness he was soon to tread into, and silently feeling the tears of unfathomable despair well into my eyes, he suddenly began blinking, and seemingly becoming aware of his plight, fearfully pushed me away.
“Get the fuck off me! Who are you!? Where is my sister? Where is my father?”
“Fear not,” the new queen softly admonished him, “this wretch is meant to heal us all. Or am I mistaken, Restorer?”
“Uhm, yeah? Yes. Yes sir. I am that. Or rather, that is what I am here for. For that.”
He glared at me for too long, then, apparently making a strange peace with his thoughts, squinted and rolled his head back into his pillow, side-eyeing the queen in mock disbelief.
She then led me down a row of moaning near-corpses and pointed out who needed help.
“This one is a distant nephew. A brave warrior, he nearly died fighting a dragon.”
“But I thought dragons were-”
“Nearly. Died. Fighting. A. Dragon,” she chastised with an uncharacteristic insistence.
And, seeing the sword and knife wounds, bite marks and bruises, I wept over him, loving the hero of a man he so obviously and desperately wanted to be. Somewhere in the midst his breathing slowed, his blood dried, and he drifted off to sleep.
“This is another of my nephews,” she continued as we made our way down the line. He had superficial wounds to his chest, but nothing that I could see that could account for his being in the hall of the dying. Seemingly with a poultice he should be up and around in a matter of days, if not hours. “Tell the Restorer,” she implored, “how you came to be this way, my brave nephew.”
Glancing here and there, he spun a shaky story as to how he was assaulted. How despite his unwavering bravery, he’d been mercilessly stabbed by some cowardly whores, as he defended himself against their onslaught of a robbery.
“Where are the whores now?” I asked.
“They’ve been lashed and have had their beauty taken from them,” the queen assured me, smilingly self-satisfied.
“You took their noses and carved their faces, then?”
“Among other fitting punishments...” she haughtily trailed off.
I don’t know why, but I could only force the most superficial of tears. What true mourning I felt, I felt for the (whom I believe to be innocent) whores who were most likely just plying their trade. It wasn’t uncommon, much less unheard-of, for the royal family to take certain... liberties... with the women of “ill repute.” Young women just trying to care for their children and families.
As I held him, sobbing for who I somehow knew to be his victims, I felt him shake. Then he began to convulse, eyes wide in terror and locked to my own. He mouthed a silent, “You... you’re...” and his terror grew as he found himself unable to speak. His eyes went a cloudy, milky white, and his face, once inarguably handsome - if not outright beautiful - creased deep lines across its surfaces, and shriveled his nose.
Weeks later the whores were all brought to the square to be hanged by their necks. But one by one, each of their ropes, perfectly measured before the spectacle, stretched far too long, finding each of the whores inexplicably surviving their execution. And so by the common law, each were ruled as judged and successfully sentenced, and each were granted their pardons.
The nephew never recovered from his mysterious injuries, I learned years later. Gangrene, not unknown to the kingdom, had taken hold of the once-handsome youth, taking the whole of his manhood - along with his charm and good looks. Six of his ten fingers fell off in time, and he never fully regained his sight or ability to speak in anything but frustrated, indecipherable moans.
Seven years of this went by. Some fully healed, some claimed by death, others surviving their diseases and injuries, only to be delivered into the hands of agony of a different and more colorful form.
At no point did any of the results surprise or disappoint myself, despite the mass confusion as to what sick form of fate the gods saw fit to gift.
I'd become known by so many names throughout the kingdom it became hard to remember. “Sarcast - the enabler; Softheart - the healer; the Broken, the Mender; Lover, the Maker of Whole,” all kinds of names, some said with reverence and others with a silent snicker and a roll of the eye. But it wasn’t until I headed to the valley below the kingdom that I knew what it is I had wrought.
I’d heard that one of the queen’s cousins (or brothers or husbands it’s hard to tell which) was getting sick from some bad meat a vendor had sold him. I laid over him and told him everything was gonna be okay. A week later, the vendor got gut-rot and died.
I don’t know what this is, but the people in the town over, down in the valley, they have a name for me that I had heard but never understood until I saw the world outside the palace walls.
“The Gods’ Quiet Murder.”
The healing I bring is not of my own. But I am no penitent, I am no saint of a loving god, and the wicked have stopped begging for “The Restorer.”
