Despite the lighthearted banter and joking as the Frau continued to remove fragments of Drake’s sword from my body, I could see the obvious concern on the faces of my companions. The news that Drake had acquired at least some of my mastery over Shadow was more than a little disconcerting to everyone present.
Using more of her unsurpassed seamstress skills than her Healing talents, the Frau quickly patched up my gut innards, using copious amounts of thick, sinew-like fishing line that Jim had had sitting in his garage. Finally, she closed up the leather like flesh of my stomach using big, looping stitches to close the jagged wound.
As she was finishing her work, my consciousness sunk inwards, as I set in motion my own internal mechanisms for patching things up. It was no longer a process that happened automatically, but one that now took a great deal of concentration and energy.
The Frau tut-tutted again as she pulled away from me, her hands a mess of sticky, presumably stinky goo. The others avoided her with wrinkled noses and mutters as she toddled off to go wash up.
I sat up slowly, rolling my left shoulder and stretching that arm out gingerly, making a fist and opening the hand back up carefully. I was glad to see that the paralysis was only temporary.
I stood up from the floor where I had been laying on an old, now ruined blanket and moved over to an empty stool. Herne quickly bent down and rolled it up in to a sodden, soiled taco and removed it, showing little reaction to what had to be a nasty job.
Frau came back in the room and moved to her own comfortable chair, signalling the others to take their own places around the circle.
Jim had grabbed a laptop and a pile of file folders, notes and loose papers from his den and brought the whole mess to his seat, next to an already cluttered table. In one practiced motion, he swept the stack of newspapersd and magazines from the table and sat down with a grunt.
Ravyn had taken the time to clean the smoke, dirt and blood from her face and arms. She had also found, much to my disappointment, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt to replace her rather distracting Faire costume. She was now sitting directly across from me in the semi-circle arrangement, too tired to be her normal bouncy self. Her eyes, however, burned with an intensity that indicated that she was fully prepared to say her piece when given the chance.
Cerrydwen hovered near the outer edge of the group, not sitting so much as she was leaning against a sturdy book case. She was her normal brooding self, intent on watching everything and everyone at the same time. She made no secret of the fact that with one bounding step she could be up the stairs and on her way to Alexa’s room, should the need arise.
Herne, in the meantime, had slipped back into the room without anyone really noticing him and was seated next to the Frau. He had one of his long hunting knives out and was calmly inspecting the blade for any sign of a blemish.
The dusty duffle bag and the two archaic cannisters sat in the middle of the gathering.
Once I noticed that everyone was in place, I began a dry, mechanical re-telling of my journeys since I had left for the Tree, starting with the meeting of Alexa’s mother there and ending up with battle with Drake.
Ravyn piped in here and there when I left out an embarassing detail or two.
Once I finished with that generic tale of just the events as they happened, it was time to get down to the nitty gritty details of some of the secrets I had learned when I finally unlocked the walls around Daniel’s memories...
To be continued...
Monday, March 20, 2006
Conclave...Part 3
The journey from the Faire to the Professor’s home was done in multiple stages, but it took place so quickly, it was almost a blur.
First, we landed at the stone circle outside of the community home near Chicago. I was barely standing at that point, finding it hard to maintain my own balance. I was still leaning on Ravyn, who was grunting under the combined strain of supporting my weight and managing the complexc task of making sure we arrived safely.
“Hey, I have rather fond memories of this place.”
“Keep it up, buster, and you’ll be crawling your way home!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We hurriedly stumbled into the house, gathered up the duffle bag full of cash, and made our way to the basement without much notice. We stepped into a dark room, where we hoped that my own powers over the Shadow were put to the test.
Luckily, Drake hadn’t been able to drain those abilities from me completely before Herlinda had stopped him, so I was able to muster enough strength to take us to the place where I had hidden the cannisters and then take us to Jim’s place before collapsing.
I regained cosnciousness to find the Frau tut-tutting over me as she was pulling the broken pieces of Drake’s blade from my gut, all the while listening to Ravyn’s tale of the events at the Faire.
Jim, Cerrydwen, and Herne were all there listening in as well, all of them were also watching Frau’s less than delicate surgery on my gut with keen interest.
When she noticed that I had come around again, Frau chuckled and added a little humor to the event, “Ah yes, it looks like our patient has rejoined us in the Land of the Living. You let me know if any of this hurts now, OK?”
“Very funny, Frau. How bad is the damage?”
“Oh, he cut into you pretty deep there, Rusty, but I really have no idea how much of this stuff in here is essential to your functioning. You are, however, the first patient I’ve worked on who didn’t need any anesthetic.”
Jim’s face hovered into view, looking more than a little green. His nose was also scrunched up. “Rusty, do you really think it was a good idea to go confront Drake without letting us know what was going on? You have other responsibilities now, you can’t just go galivanting off without a plan.”
“Hey, I had a plan...it just didn’t work as well I thought it would. Besides, I asked Ravyn to go along!”
Ravyn’s smoke smudged face quickly poked into my view. She was wagging her finger in that way of hers. “It was all your idea, bub. I went along to save your bacon, as usual. Don’t even try to say that I sanctioned this adventure of yours!”
To be continued...
First, we landed at the stone circle outside of the community home near Chicago. I was barely standing at that point, finding it hard to maintain my own balance. I was still leaning on Ravyn, who was grunting under the combined strain of supporting my weight and managing the complexc task of making sure we arrived safely.
“Hey, I have rather fond memories of this place.”
“Keep it up, buster, and you’ll be crawling your way home!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We hurriedly stumbled into the house, gathered up the duffle bag full of cash, and made our way to the basement without much notice. We stepped into a dark room, where we hoped that my own powers over the Shadow were put to the test.
Luckily, Drake hadn’t been able to drain those abilities from me completely before Herlinda had stopped him, so I was able to muster enough strength to take us to the place where I had hidden the cannisters and then take us to Jim’s place before collapsing.
I regained cosnciousness to find the Frau tut-tutting over me as she was pulling the broken pieces of Drake’s blade from my gut, all the while listening to Ravyn’s tale of the events at the Faire.
Jim, Cerrydwen, and Herne were all there listening in as well, all of them were also watching Frau’s less than delicate surgery on my gut with keen interest.
When she noticed that I had come around again, Frau chuckled and added a little humor to the event, “Ah yes, it looks like our patient has rejoined us in the Land of the Living. You let me know if any of this hurts now, OK?”
“Very funny, Frau. How bad is the damage?”
“Oh, he cut into you pretty deep there, Rusty, but I really have no idea how much of this stuff in here is essential to your functioning. You are, however, the first patient I’ve worked on who didn’t need any anesthetic.”
Jim’s face hovered into view, looking more than a little green. His nose was also scrunched up. “Rusty, do you really think it was a good idea to go confront Drake without letting us know what was going on? You have other responsibilities now, you can’t just go galivanting off without a plan.”
“Hey, I had a plan...it just didn’t work as well I thought it would. Besides, I asked Ravyn to go along!”
Ravyn’s smoke smudged face quickly poked into my view. She was wagging her finger in that way of hers. “It was all your idea, bub. I went along to save your bacon, as usual. Don’t even try to say that I sanctioned this adventure of yours!”
To be continued...
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