Measureless Magic #1: Ch. 20

Wanted to have two chapters for you this week, but at least this one's it a longer one. Took some extra time because I wanted to check the Dee sections with a sensitivity reader. I also threw my phone in a toilet by accident and that worked out very poorly for my ex-phone, so the whole replacement process has been a bit of a drain.

I've also had some positive excitement that mostly isn't at the point where I can say anything at the moment. One thing I can share: I was invited to be a panelist at JordanCon this spring, so I'm looking forward to that. Will any of you be going?

Chapter 20

If you are hurt in the field, return to base as soon as possible. Teams of trained healers will be on hand to give you the best treatment possible. Do not attempt treatment yourself.

• Handbook of the Guardians of Marynth

“-Up! Come on, please wake up. Please.”

Dee sounds sad. That was Ravel’s first thought.

His second thought was: Why does everything hurt so much?

He groaned.

“Ravel? Ravel! Are you awake? Please wake up! I need you to wake up! You need you to wake up.”

He moaned again and forced his eyes open. “Where… What’s going on? Why’s it hurt?”

“Oh, thank the castle. I was worried you’d be too numb to help?”

“Help with wh-” Ravel tried to sit up, and was abruptly aware of the strange sensation of the bumpy, plush floor covering against his elbows.

His bare elbows.

“Why am I naked?”

“That is not important right now,” Dee said. “And anyway, you’re not naked. You have your smallclothes on. I needed to see your injuries to treat them.”

“My injuries?” Ravel asked, still trying to clear the sleep from his mind. 

Dee was leaning over his left leg, her weight on both hands. She didn’t look at him as she spoke, her words clipped and mechanical: “Puncture wounds on your right arm and torso, with signs of envenomation around the torso wound. Now that you’ve woken up, that’s of lesser concern to me than the deep laceration to your thigh. I’m applying direct pressure, and that’s been effective, but the wound is too large to close with a bandage, and if I stop pressing down, you start losing too much blood. We’re going to need stitches. The good news is, I’m pretty sure it missed your femoral artery.”

“Good?” Ravel said, uncertainly.

“Yes, good!” Dee snapped. “If it had, you’d probably be dead by now! You’ve been out for close to an hour, and I had to stop applying direct pressure for a few minutes to triage the other patient. Well, it would have only been a few minutes, if she wasn’t fighting me!”

Triage? Ravel wondered. Other patient? He almost asked, but his slow mind was still stuck on something else Dee had said. “What’s envenomation?”

“Injuries from monsters often come with negative side effects on top of the physical trauma, especially bites.”

“So they need to be washed.”

“No,” Dee said. “Well, yes, but this isn’t the usual concern of infection. Envenomation is when other substances are pushed deep inside your body. Poison, hallucinogens, sedatives, and paralytics are most common. Since you were out and then woke up, and you don’t know what’s going on, I’m guessing you got hit with a sedative.” Dee glanced over. Seeing Ravel’s lost expression, she took pity on him. “A sedative puts you to sleep or makes you feel overly calm.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh. I only found one puncture on your torso, but there were three more holes in the outer fabric of that strange vest of yours, so my guess is that it tried to bite you twice, and half-succeeded once. Thank goodness! If half a bite put you under for an hour, getting the full thing might have stopped your heart completely.”

Stopped his heart? “I almost died?”

“Yes!” Dee said. “And you’re not safe yet! I need you to stitch your thigh closed. I can’t sit here holding it shut forever. I need you to hold it closed for a minute so I can wash off one of your needles and some of your thread. It won’t be as good as proper sterilization, but there’s no reason not to do our very best.”

“Right…” said Ravel slowly. “Wait. You want me to sew my own thigh closed?”

Dee held up her left hand, which was jerking around like a leaf in the wind.  “What, you want me to do it? You don’t want me anywhere near your injury while it’s stitched up.”

“But… you’re a doctor,” Ravel said.

“My mother is a doctor. I’m just an idiot who thought she could be one for far too long. Maybe rely on my right hand, since it’s so much better than my left.” She lowered her left hand to put pressure on Ravel’s injury and raised her right, which trembled once, slightly. She scowled at it. “Yeah. Want me sticking needles in your skin?”

Ravel flinched.

Dee barked out a laugh. “That’s what I thought. Medical knowlege, yes. Bandages, yes. Surgery? I can give you advice on what to do.”

Sewing his own thigh. 

It sounded horrific.

He’d stabbed himself with his own needles before, of course, but he’d never put a stitch in his own skin. And he already hurt worse than he thought possible… He shuddered. “Couldn’t you just, um, magic it closed?” 

Dee gave him a look Ravel couldn’t read. “What do you know about medical magic?”

“I know it’s real. It can’t be used in the nursery, but we’re not there anymore. There’s magic all around us,” Ravel said. 

“Medical magic is dangerous,” Dee said. “The patient has to trust the doctor enough to let their magic in and still have the control to keep other magic from running wild while they do that.”

“But… magic levels are low here,” Ravel said. “I’m already letting all the unfocused magic in. If I can let yours in, you can do it. Right?”

Dee leaned down on his injured thigh with a scowl, causing a spike of pain. “Wrong. That’s only the start of the problems with medical magic. There’s basically two kinds, and the first kind - where one of us actually tries to fix your wound  - is out of the question completely.”

“Why?”

“Because we have other choices! Even if I was an expert at that kind of thing, and not some trainee healer who just learned magic, you’d still die shortly after the procedure about half the time. It’s just so easy to accidentally cause mutations! Even the people who survive usually have changes they have to live with. Does that sound like a good option to you?”

“No,” Ravel said. “What… what about the other way?”

“The second way, yeah,” Dee said. Her voice was grim. “That’s more possible, but I don’t want to try it. It’s where a doctor uses magic instead of physical tools. Don’t heal a shattered bone, just use magic to move the pieces back into place and hold them still. Don’t fuse a severed artery, just use magic to line up the ends and hold them together. You put things in place and let the body heal on its own.”

“Great,” Ravel said, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “Can’t you do that? Just use magic to hold my skin together?”

Dee glared at him. “Can you? What have either of us even done with magic so far? We’ve moved it around. We’ve made pretty shapes. Powered a few runes that someone else drew the shape of. But I haven’t made so much as a single enchantment on my own. Plus, even if doing it that way is much safer, it’s still not safe. Are you sure you can even do that? You want your first attempt at an original magic working to take place under your own skin?”

“Uh…”

“Exactly,” Dee growled. “So sit up, hold your thigh closed, and let me do my best to wash your materials. Do you have any undyed antsilk thread?”

Ravel clenched his jaw as he sat up, trying to stay silent. A small groan escaped him anyway, but he didn’t whimper or scream. He took several uneven breaths before responding. “Third pocket on the left… maybe?”

Dee grabbed his wrist and forced his hand down to cover hers before she took it away. She didn’t reach for his backpack immediately, instead stumbling across the floor to rinse red-tinged water off her hands before coming back to rifle through the pockets. 

She found the small hank of antsilk and frowned. “This isn’t undyed: it’s yellow. Do you have any more?”

Ravel shook his head minutely. “No. It’s expensive, and I don’t use it for much.”

Dee made a noise of disgust, then moved back toward the faucet. “It’s still probably our best bet. I think. I hope?”

Her uncertainty was not reassuring. When he looked away from her, scanning the rest of the room in an effort to distract himself from his rising panic, what he saw didn’t make him any happier. He was in an octagonal chamber with four doors, all of which were shut. A large table dominated the center of the room, and he couldn’t see the top of it clearly. Every part of the walls that didn’t have a door was festooned with framed black-and-white drawings.

At least nothing here seems aggressive, but I have no idea what we’re supposed to be doing here, Ravel thought. And… didn’t Dee say there was another patient.

He peered around, eventually spotting a slumped form across the room from him, partially hidden by the chair and table legs.

“Is that… Raza?” Ravel asked.

Dee had arrived back with her dripping bundle. She nodded shortly, her expression dark.

That scared Ravel. “She’s not dead, is she?”

“Not right now,” Dee said brusquely. “Sleeping. But she is injured and I want to check in on her again as soon as you’re stable. Here, I can’t get you over to the faucet, but use this to scrub off your hands as best you can.”

She thrust a wet scrap of fabric at Ravel and took over applying pressure to the wound. He started to scrub at his hands, only to stop, aghast, when he realized the ragged square had previously been part of his shirt. “You cut my clothes off me?!”

“I did what I had to,” Dee said. “You can fix it later. Sew yourself up first.”

Her expression was utterly without sympathy and Ravel found himself picking up the needle and thread… or trying to.

He hadn’t noticed it when he’d taken the scrap of fabric or scrubbed at his hands, but his fingertips, usually so sensitive, felt thick and clumsy. He could barely guess at where the thread was, like he was trying to pick it up while wearing heavy gloves. 

Helpless, he looked up at Dee, only to find her staring at the needle with a horrified expression. “The… the sedative,” she said. “It’s still affecting you? Of course it is. Why didn’t I expect this? What are we going to do? How long will it take to clear out? It could be hours. That’s not healthy. I wasn’t applying the pressure steadily enough. You were still losing blood.”

Ravel tuned Dee out as she continued to talk.

His hands, ever his most trusted ally, were betraying him when he needed them most.

What could he do?

Magic, his brain suggested.

He recoiled from the thought, alarmed by Dee’s description of the pitfalls of medical magic.

But what other options did he have?

Maybe… maybe I can do it even more safely than what she said? If… if I don’t leave magic in my skin at all…

Uncertainly, Ravel gathered the magic around him, compressing some of it into a needle and twirling the rest until it formed a thread. He glared at the tools on the ground nearby, moving their magical counterparts until they occupied the same space.

That much was easy enough - exactly what he’d been doing for the last week or so - but when he moved the magical needle away, the physical version stayed behind.

Oh. That’s right. This has just been a way of moving magic around. I haven’t wanted it to affect anything.

Ravel glared at the thread, trying to force it to merge with the magic he controlled… and then blanched and hastily stopped as a handspan of thread crumbled away before his eyes. 

Good thing I didn’t start with the needle!

Even so, he needed to be careful here. He didn’t have that much antsilk, and the castle was clearly dangerous. If he was injured again… well, hopefully that wouldn’t happen, but he could see why Dee had chosen the smooth and strong silk over the delicate embroidery floss, for example.

He pushed the magic together with the thread again, this time more carefully, only trying to merge the first inch, trying to imagine the magic coating and adhering to it, like a glove. When he thought he had it, he pulled on the thread and let out a sigh of relief when it actually moved.

Actually… Ravel realized. This might be enough. I don’t need to control the whole thread. If I can get this through the needle and control the needle, I don’t need to control the thread at all. Now, I just need to not destroy the needle. 

He held his breath as he caught the needle in his magical grip and threaded it, not letting it go until he lifted the whole thing into the air.

He offered Dee a shaky grin. “There. That should do it, I think? This shouldn’t be too dangerous?”

“Can you tie a knot while you only hold the needle?” 

“Um… not quite, but…” Ravel lifted his hand, clumsily pinning one end of the thread to the ground, then darting the needle around. “Close enough.”

Dee almost seemed to collapse for a second, as if she was letting go of the tension in every muscle from her eyebrows to her toes. “That should work.”

Then she shook herself, guided his hands to put pressure on the wound, and pushed herself to her feet.

“Where are you going?” Ravel asked.

“I should check on Raza again,” Dee said. “You’ve got this now, right? It’s just sewing.”

“Yeah…” Ravel said uncertainly. “But what kind of stitch should I use?”

“I don’t know,” Dee said. She looked away, her voice almost a whisper. “Sorry. Anything should work, I think. I think the different kinds are mostly about avoiding scars?”

“How tightly should I space them?”

“I don’t know!” Dee repeated. “I’m sorry. This isn’t… I didn’t expect to be doing this. It isn’t what I paid attention to.”

“But you’ve seen it done,” Ravel said. “Lots, right? I haven’t!”

Dee hesitated, biting her lip, then nodded. “If I had to guess-”

“Yes. I need you to guess. Please guess.”

“If I had to guess, for this, I’d say maybe put the stitches about this far apart and this far from the edges of the wound,” she said, demonstrating the distances with her fingers.

Ravel sucked in a deep breath, gazing helplessly at the other girl’s hand, which twitched once.

She pulled it down against her side. “I’d help more if I could. Good luck.”

Then she was gone, leaving Ravel staring dubiously at the wound on his thigh and the needle in the air beside him.