FFXIVWrite2023: Prompt #5 - Barbarous
Warnings for: Medical Experimentation
Tsimh forces her heavy eyelids open. Her arms ached with the wounds of battle, marked with bloodied lines and exerted muscles. Her grogginess is replaced by icy dread almost instantly, when she feels a strange softness cushioning her. The last thing she remembered was falling upon the hard forest floor of the North Shroud.
She tries to move her arms, but they barely get past her sides, bumping into what seemed like restraints. Raising her head, she sees thick straps tying her down to a bed. Before her, a small room comes into view. Near the tiny door is a Keeper woman dressed in city-looking clothes, a long black dress and a white apron, much unlike Tsimh’s leathers and rugged cloth. She screams hoarsely.
“Where am I? Who are you!” The woman raises her ear, and turns to Tsimh. “Good evening, I see you’re awake.” “What have you done to the rest?”
“Some of them couldn’t be saved, unfortunately. There’s a couple that we took in however, they’re being monitored at the moment.” The lady in black walks over to Tsimh’s bedside with composed steps. “What’s your name?”
Tsimh spits. The lady takes a tiny step back, but no shock or anger registers on her placid expression. She feels the droplets fall back on her face.
“Fuck you Zhyur witch. You killed my sisters.”
“You came to burn our homes and kill our families, like what happened in Snakemolt. We had to protect ourselves.”
“Protect yourselves? As if taking our lands is to protect yourselves!” Tsimh growls. Her restraints refuse to give way.
“Your clan’s excessive poaching has earned the ire of the Elementals. We did warn you, but you showered our emissary with arrows. I believe you called her a… ‘filthy Gridanian bootlicker’?”
“Ain’t that what you are, the whole lot of you!” She sees the lady in black bend down, channeling a beam of light from her hand. The pain in her arms dissipates, her wounds closing shut. “If you’re gonna kill me, do it now!” “That’s barbaric. Killing without a care isn’t anything good.” She sees Tsimh open her mouth to clamp down on her tongue, and promptly recites an incantation under her breath. Her captive feels her jaw freeze in place. The muscles in her face cranked her mouth open, in complete mutiny against her own will.
“My own sister was killed in a raid led by your kind, but she always wanted to save lives rather than take them.” The black-dressed Keeper fetches a glass bottle from a small wooden cart near the door. Tsimh could smell a metallic tang emanating as the cap was unscrewed. “She believes that violent temperaments are a sickness of the mind. We’ve been working on medicines to help with that.”
She returns to Tsimh’s bedside, unrolling a long, curled tube, her expression slackened into a half-smile. “I want to cure you. Cooperating with me will be better than dying in vain.”
There was no way to scream when the tube slid down her gullet, or when the serum was fed through the funnel attached on the other end. Somehow it reminded her of the moonshine her spear sisters used to brew back home, where a cup too much melted boozy joy and drunken rage and tears into a dulled, viscous hangover. All the old aches from worn muscle and torn bone vanished. The new pains from tubes and needles were numbed. One day when she forgot about the poached leathers and spear she once had.
“You look better than yesterday, I’m happy to see you’re not in pain,” the Keeper nurse in black said with a tender smile.
If only she could remember her name. There were so many of them. Which one was she again?
