On stepping through the door, Anna spied an elaborate mural and turned to examine the depiction of a battle winding down and priests kneeling among the wounded, helping, caring, and healing them. The looks of gratitude made her realize patients didn’t care how you made them better, just that you did. All of this healing stuff wasn’t about her, and she blushed at her selfishness. If appealing to a god was the only means to heal such terrible wounds, then wasn’t she obligated to try?
But then why her? Surely not just anyone could convince a god to heal someone through them. She wasn’t a logical choice and knew that pretending to be Eriana wouldn’t convince anyone of her merits. Rognir must have gone through some training or somehow been found worthy. Having not done either, Anna didn’t expect a god to answer her even if she tried. One never had before, since the god of Earth wasn’t real, at least to her.
She became so engrossed in her thoughts and the mural that she lost all sense of time and only slowly became aware of the clanging of metal behind her. She turned to see Ryan fighting a warrior in black and the others were gone. On trying the door she came through to get help, she discovered it wouldn’t open no matter how hard she pulled.
Helplessly, Anna turned to watch, wincing at every wound inflicted on Ryan, her medical training helping her assess each. His fierce expression convinced her this was a fight to the death, but the sight of Ryan beheading his opponent shocked her. For a moment she was too startled to move, but then she rushed to him.
“My God, Ryan, are you alright?”
Dazed, he looked right through her, woozy and disoriented. Then he crashed to the ground with a clatter.
“Ryan, stay with me,” she begged, kneeling beside him. She had to stop the bleeding but saw nothing to use as a tourniquet except her robe’s hem. Struggling to tear off a piece, she finally used his dagger to do so. She tried to bind the worst wound on his leg, but the thigh plate stood in the way until she got it off, remembering how from their night at the inn. She pulled tight but knew it wasn’t enough, the chain mail that was covering his leg making it too hard to stop the bleeding.
“Ryan.” She leaned over him, patting his face to wake him, getting blood all over his cheek. “Ryan, please stay with me. I need your strength.” Even as she said it, she knew he was too weak to pull the tourniquet any tighter than she had. She desperately tried again, pulling with all her might to no avail. He was going to die right here in front of her if she didn’t find another way.
Feeling like a fool, she remembered Eriana’s method, and only a moment passed before she brushed aside her disposition about it. She placed one hand on his forehead and another on his chest, trying to remember what Rognir had told her. She didn’t know the words he used but surely the Goddess Kiarin would answer to save Ryan.
“Lady Kiarin,” she began, struggling for words, “please spare this man’s life. He does not deserve to die here today. He shouldn’t even be here and – ” She stopped herself. That probably wasn’t a good line of thought to follow. Maybe if she admitted how important he was to her. Surely her personal connection mattered.
“Please Kiarin. I don’t want to lose him. He is a good man, the best I’ve known, and such men are rare and deserve long lives. Please spare him.” Shaking her head in uncertainty, she continued, “I don’t know what else to say to you. Please forgive my methods and look into my heart instead, to see my words are true. Please answer my call.”
Even as she said it, from somewhere deep within her the memory of unanswered pleas to God surfaced and along with them anger about never being answered. She tried to snuff the resentment and uttered another plea to Kiarin, but her heart also carried something akin to an insistence that she get a reply. She’d never have expressed the sentiment aloud but it lived on in her still, and that was enough. Nothing was happening.
Ryan’s head rolled to one side and she gasped, checking his pulse with a trembling hand, begging Kiarin for help. She found no heartbeat and the flow of blood from his wounds faded, his skin white.
“Oh my God, no. Please no.”
She begged Kiarin again but it was too late. Ryan lay dead. Several minutes of desperate CPR followed with nothing changing. Tears poured down her face as she clung to his body, a blur of emotions raging in her. Looking heavenward, she screamed, “Why won’t you answer me?”
But there was no response. Unable to look at Ryan’s pale face any longer, she staggered to her feet and stumbled into a corridor she hadn’t noticed before, not knowing or caring where it led.
Even as the wizard stepped across the door’s threshold, he knew something was up. The staff sent a pulse up his arm and he found himself standing somewhere other than the large hall he’d briefly seen. Either he’d been transported or he now saw an illusion. Since the staff no longer alerted him to magic, he suspected the former. It still looked like Darlonon, but he easily could’ve been teleported anywhere on Honyn – or even off world. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
Matt stood in a ten by ten room with a corridor to one side. It offered the only way out, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to go wherever it led. The teleportation had undoubtedly been Soliander’s doing like all the magic they’d
