A Work-in-Progress by Elysian Alder | Editor-in-Chief
The author would like to provide a few content warnings for any potential readers. The following passage of text contains: death & mentions of death, blood, and violence.
What was perhaps most surprising to him was how long it was taking to die this time. It was nothing like before, when he was fourteen years old and his pitiable, ailment-riddled body finally gave out in the dark peace of slumber. The circumstances being what they’d been, his memories of it were shrouded in a hazy fog, fragments of awareness amid the frantic efforts to revive him. Galino, decisive even in adolescence, forced air back into his lungs while Raksha sent jolts of electricity surging into his chest. Beside the bed, his mother sat in shambles, her grip firm on another’s hand, her body shaken by repressed sobs. Later, he learned that his father had excused himself posthaste to fetch the physician—a pinch-faced, balding man who consistently delivered grim prognoses and stern counsel, all of which Briar managed to dismiss with alarming ease, a talent entirely at odds with his worsening condition. In his father’s absence then, the hand his mother crushed within her own belonged to the estate cook who chastised him the next morning, claiming that she’d never cast so many prayers into the aether before that day, when she’d begged the forces that be to return his body and soul to those who loved him, only for him to revive with even less gratitude than he had possessed before. Who would have known, he’d said then, that the forces that be were an adolescent curmudgeon with rudimentary emergency medicine skills and an elementally-charged familiar?