By the time I left the tannery, the sun had set behind the tree line, casting a shadow over the camp. Judging by the line’s length, plenty of people had already filed into the dining hall for dinner, but food would have to wait. Enough light persisted to keep the camp from falling into complete darkness, but it wouldn’t last long. I needed water, and dragging heavy buckets in the dark was a recipe for disaster.

  I grabbed buckets from my longhouse, purposely avoiding the mirror. My head’s throbbing had steadily increased since the afternoon. I had made the mistake of touching my temple after the battle. I didn’t do it again. Let’s just say that denial was a powerful thing and, apparently, stronger than morbid curiosity.

  After a short walk to the well, I arrived, finding no one in line. I put a bucket on a small platform that jutted out of the edge of the well, though “well” was a misnomer. While it was a circular structure containing water, the water level was less than a foot from the top of the stone wall. They had more encased a natural spring than dug a hole.

  I grabbed the draw pail and studied the well. In the fading light, I couldn’t make out the depth or the clarity of the dark pool of water.

  It was clean, right?

  I took a deep breath and pushed back my thoughts about what microbes living in untreated water could do.

  If the first batch didn’t make me sick why would this one?

  I dipped the draw pail into the pool of water and poured its contents into the bucket from my longhouse. I leaned into my denial, purposely not thinking about how I failed to sanitize either bucket. I kept transferring the water, pausing only once when the hairs on the back of my neck suddenly rose. I looked over my shoulders, seeing nothing but in the deepening darkness.

  I needed to relax. Most of the camp drank the water from here, and people drank from communal wells all the time in the past. They also got cholera with an unsurprising degree of reg—

  I took a long deep breath, letting it out.

  I will be fine!

  I repeated the words in my head as I continued to transfer water into my second bucket. I leaned down to fill up the last pail needed to top off the bucket when something spun me around with enough force to rip the draw pail from my hands.

  A blow to my stomach silenced any words of question. It—rather a fist, judging by the dark shape in front of me—hit like a truck. I folded over as the blow lifted me into the air. Then, gravity reasserted itself. No one tried to slow my descent, and I hit the ground with a hard thud.

  I tried to look up at my assailant, but a hand pressed my face into the mud around the well. “Oops. Did you spill your water, Human?” I couldn’t speak. I could only gasp for air. “You should be more careful. It is quite muddy. It is so easy to slip.”

  The crack of my ribs breaking from the kick was audible. My world spun again, and I landed on my back. The cold mud instantly leached the warmth from my body, but it did little to dampen the spikes of fire that even the slightest intake of air sent through my body. I blinked away the tears, trying to make sense of what was happening. Everything hurt.

  My assailant grabbed my mouth, forcing me to look into his eyes. His amber eyes and lupin features held only scorn. “You better make sure you have some healing potions available in case you get hurt especially since you will need to get your water outside the walls. After all, we can’t have you tainting our water supply with your Human filth.”

  His vise-like grip tightened on my cheeks. “Do you not have a potion?” He shook my head back and forth. “No? That is fine. You don’t have to ask me for one. I am happy to help you. Consider it part of teaching about our water supply.”

  He pulled a potion out of a belt pouch and poured it into my mouth. I couldn’t stop my shuddering wheezes, and I choked on the cool liquid as it slid down my throat. Somehow through hacking coughs that turned my vision white, I managed to get it down. It wasn’t much. Likely my attacker had given me just enough to make sure I didn’t die.

  I assessed the potion inside me. Some of it had already been absorbed in my mouth, though most passed through to my stomach. Though still new at this, the amount sitting in there had no chance of repairing enough damage for me to walk home without significant pain. He had broken bones and probably also caused internal bleeding. He probably wanted me to lie in the mud writhing in pain, except, he didn’t know about my skill. While not the manner I had imagined for practicing it, I no longer had a choice. I activated [Enhance Medicinal].

  Pain lanced through my left ribs. My breath caught, and I let out an involuntary moan. Though I had never ingested potion, my response to it didn’t seem right. If I didn’t do something, I would pass out from the pain.

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  The potion could—no, needed—to work better than a blunt instrument. I used the skill to clamp down on the potion’s healing energy to prevent its activation and spread. That alone was a challenge. The bioavailability was ridiculous. I could already sense most of the stuff flowing through my bloodstream. I managed to contain it, but drawing the Energy for that action caused the throbbing in my head to rival my chest for a second. Thankfully it diminished to a dull throb, allowing me to do what I should have done to start: an exam.

  It took a single touch and less than a second of looking inward to complete the physical, and the truth both horrified and fascinated me. Even with my skill active, the fractured ribs had continued to regenerate. Micro-fractures closed over milliseconds. I gave a small thanks that the larger breaks remained unfused because the bone’s alignment did not conform to the proper anatomical structure.

  I had to confirm my exam findings. I took a breath, clenching my teeth as the fiery pain lashed through me. As I did so, a section of my ribs sucked inward as my chest expanded.

  A flail chest from a single kick?

  He had shattered enough bones that part of my chest moved opposite to the rest of my chest wall with inhaling. If I hadn’t restrained the potion, it would have given me, at best, a permanent chest deformity or, at worst, a permanent decrease in lung capacity and life-long pain. Ironically, the speed of the potion regeneration was actually a downside because of the high risk of improper healing. For most people, rib fractures just require conservative management with pain control, though—an image of an algorithm popped into my head confirming my suspicions—for a flail chest, surgical fixation did shorten ventilator and ICU times.

  I did what shouldn’t have been possible at home. I exhaled completely and gritted my teeth as I pressed the floating piece down to match the rest of my ribs. My vision started to go black, but I managed to coax the potion toward my desired outcome. The pain melted away from my chest only to flow into my head. With each beat of my heart, a hammer rained down on my skull. However, it was over in seconds.

  I let my new sense seep inward once more. With the potion’s healing factor consumed, I had lost resolution, but I could still pick out the injuries with some focus. My ribs had healed as well as the lung contusion I had also. I blinked away tears and took in the two thin silhouettes walking away from my crumpled form. They didn’t even bother to look back, but then again, they didn’t need to. They made their message clear: I wasn’t wanted here.

  But where could I go?

  I lay in the cold morass for minutes after they turned the corner. It leeched the warmth from my bruised body, but I welcomed it. It took the edge off the lingering pain. The potion had worked miracles, but it had only healed the major injuries. I would feel this tomorrow.

  Should I give up?

  I sighed. It would be so easy to just close my eyes and fall asleep. I had no real allies, and it appeared that two of the three groups here hated me. Those feral eyes and features made it clear who attacked me. Even without the amber eyes, their voice had none of the depth that I had heard in every ?ttar I had met. Their builds were far too tall and lithe for an Oresian. Which left the Volki…

  Lovely. It appears that both ?ttir and Volki hate Humans.

  The throbbing in my head increased. I had not followed the Vísir’s instructions regarding my Energy usage, but I didn’t have it in me to resist my morbid curiosity. I brought a finger to my temple. They danced over a two-centimeter-wide mass with a dimple in the center. I didn’t need a mirror to know its shape, not when something similar had burned itself into my memory.

  Unbidden, it flashed before my eyes. I was there again in front of the hospital bed with a young girl lying in it. Despite the nurses’ best attempts, her gown had kept getting soiled by weeping, deep-red cylindrical lesions that covered her abdomen. I had watched her day by day as she cried in pain until she slipped into longer and longer stretches of restless, narcotic-induced sleep. She had been dying from metastatic melanoma, and her lesions matched the exact same shape as the mass on my face.

  Fresh tears fell from my eyes. Had the Vísir poisoned me? The earth’s cold seeped further into flesh and bones. There were worse ways to go. I had seen enough of them.

  The memory played on. I had leaned over her to do a perfunctory exam when she whispered, “Can you help me?”

  I almost missed it. It didn’t seem possible. Despite taking agonal breaths just minutes, she had managed to get out a full sentence, even if barely audible. As a fresh intern, I stood frozen, unable to find the words. I couldn’t heal her. I couldn’t stop what had ravaged her body. I couldn’t even provide relief. That was beyond my level. My resident’s too. In the end, she needed an attending trained in palliative sedation to make her final moments peaceful.

  When I didn’t answer, she closed her eyes and slipped back to sleep. Her breathing returned to its ragged state. It was as if I had imagined it all, except I knew that I hadn’t. Regardless, she—No, I could say her name—Elena had died not long after, with her parents, holding hands, standing in vigil. She had just turned eighteen.

  I clenched my fist. My throat burned. It always did when I thought of her, of my failures. Life had always been unfair, and this world had no veneer of civilization to hide it. However, it did have something Earth didn’t: magic. I had given up on medicine at home, but could I do so here? With a sip of liquid, I could go from needing weeks in the ICU to standing. Even if I couldn’t wield magic to heal, I could manipulate substances that did nearly the same thing.

  I would not let this place break me. I had a duty, and I would fulfill it with whatever tools I had available.

  I dragged my body to my knees and then to my feet. The mud squelched with each movement. I reached down and picked up my buckets, tipped over next to the imprint of my sprawled form, the only evidence of what happened here. I filled them up. I had to get this thing off my face, but I couldn’t see Kyria Rhaptis like this. I eyed the buckets. I would need every drop to clean myself off before meeting with the old woman, but I couldn’t risk coming back here. I picked up a bucket and poured it over my head, clenching my teeth as the cold water hit me. Two more buckets did the job. I filled the buckets once more before heading home to change.