Julia’s return to consciousness was neither immediate nor pleasant. She could hear the light pitter-patter of rain on water, the sounds of heavy breathing, the creaking of trees—all of it from far away, as though she were in a long tunnel. Her awareness was gradually easing out of the tunnel, but it was a slow process.

  As her senses returned, she became aware of a nudge against the side of her chest. It came again, over and over. Not harsh, but urgent in its insistence. This must be Trixy-paws (or claws now?), she realized. The urgency with which Trixy was attempting to wake her hastened the return of her senses.

  She opened her eyes, thankful it was (apparently) night. She was staring up at a star-filled sky. It was beautiful, she thought. It seemed like so long ago since she’d just lied down and looked up—probably before she even went to Striton.

  An urgent mewling had her turning her head over to see Trixy staring at her from so close she must be feeling Julia’s breath. She lifted her hand—which was harder than she remembered—and petted Trixy’s head. Trixy rubbed into the pet before shaking Julia’s hand off and bounding out of her view—mewling urgently all the while.

  Julia forced herself upright, then sat with her eyes closed for a while until the spinning-world slowed to a stop. Her head hurt, but it was bearable—a remnant of what was likely a much worse migraine. When she opened her eyes again, she saw two elves perched atop the branches of a tree in dire straits.

  Sahira was straddling a branch with her limbs held in place by vines. It looked like Taln?r had set up some kind of support harness with his vines/brambles to ensure she didn’t fall. She was breathing heavily, had her eyes closed, and was barely moving. She didn’t seem to be in bad shape visually, but Julia knew the corruption that the undead carried could be tearing her apart inside.

  Opposite her was Taln?r, who had fashioned some kind of tourniquet for his arm out of his robe (which was now torn away up to his knees) and brambles. Julia winced a little as she realized the thorns from the brambles were jabbed into his flesh to secure it in place. His arm was gone from just below the elbow, but it didn’t seem to be actively bleeding.

  She took a good look at it and immediately knew what had happened. He wasn’t missing that much of his arm when last she saw him—it was just above his hand that was missing. He must have cut, or had someone else cut, the limb off higher.

  He knew he couldn’t purge the corruption and likely didn’t know when (or even if) Julia would wake, so he took whatever drastic measures he could, lest the corruption prevent his stump from sealing and cause him to bleed out. While horrible, she couldn’t help but feel respect for him. It could not have been easy to do something like that.

  Julia’s gut clenched tightly as she looked over their conditions. She had to remind herself that they were at least alive, which was her goal in intervening in the previous fight. She jumped a little as Nadhem ascended the branches next to Sahira, wincing a little as he shifted his weight off his bad leg.

  “You are awake. We were unsure you would. It is good to see you well,” he said, nodding to her. Julia was a little surprised at his candid, non-confrontational demeanor, but the situation probably called for it, as she looked around.

  “I am. Mana exhaustion seems to have knocked me out for quite a while. Is it the night of the same day, or has it been multiple days?” she asked, a little afraid to know the answer.

  “It has been several hours since our flight. The night is at its darkest now, the nashiin at their most active. I have watched through the evening and night, but I’ve yet to see signs of the great host moving. I suspect that the damage you’ve dealt them has inspired caution.

  “This is both to our benefit and detriment, as it will give us respite. However, when they come, they will come hard, fast, and in great numbers,” he concluded while staring out into the night—vigilant even now.

  Julia nodded. As bad as it was for the nashiin to assault them with preparation, they desperately needed the rest. She glanced up to find Nadhem watching her intently

  “My wal?n once said that people reveal themselves truly when their lives are on the line. You had every reason to flee, yet you stayed—and we live because of it. Ana akh’luk, Julia N?ralin. I recognize your root,” he said while making a gesture she’d not seen before.

  He made a fist and placed it against his chest, fingers pointing downward over his heart. Then, slowly, he extended the hand toward her and unfurled his fingers into an open spread—like a tree’s bough reaching outward.

  The gesture ended with his palm facing her, fingers splayed, reminiscent of a “stop” signal—but this felt gentler, more reverent.

  Perhaps it symbolized one’s roots growing from the heart and extending toward others? She didn’t know the specifics, but she felt the weight of it. So she simply nodded, solemn and silent.

  “Please, help my ghilim, if you can. They suffer from their wounds. I will continue my watch,” he said, making to jump down, but Julia held up her hand.

  “Let me look at your leg first—don’t complain. I will take care of your siblings, but you can’t keep watch and keep us safe if you can barely walk,” she said sternly. He opened his mouth to argue but shut it and shifted closer to her.

  Julia sent her mana to probe around the leg he was avoiding putting his weight on. It didn’t take long to see what the issue was. An arrow or bolt or something had struck his kneecap. Not only did it manage to fracture the actual bone, the projectile seemed to carry corruption, which was now seeping into all the…”stuff” behind the kneecap through the fractures.

  She didn’t know the names for any of it, nor did she know its full function, but she knew losing the kneecap would mean he’d likely have to lose the leg. “Grit your teeth,” she said quickly and flashed her mana into his knee. He groaned but didn’t struggle at all, which was good.

  Julia had no idea whether every piece of the body could heal itself, and she didn’t know enough to make parts of the body grow back if they couldn’t already regenerate on their own. She was doing her best to remove the corruption and as little of his actual flesh as possible, lest she accidentally remove something that wouldn’t grow back no matter how much mana she pumped it with.

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  In just a couple minutes, he was taken care of. “That’s the best I can do. You shouldn’t be in pain, and the corruption is gone, but we’ll need to get that checked out when we get to your home. There are healers there, yes?” she asked, and he nodded.

  “I’m not great at healing, so all I could do was remove the corruption and promote your body’s natural healing. It worked, but I noticed quite a bit of stuff that looked the same as what my scars are made of building up as it healed. It’ll probably limit that leg’s motion a bit until someone who knows what they’re doing can remove it,” she warned.

  He extended and retracted his leg a bit and shifted his weight back and forth between the legs. “It is stiff but far better than just minutes ago. Baraka na’alir, Dahm'Zahra. I thank you for your healing. I will return to my watch,” he said as he jumped far more nimbly to the ground.

  “Wait, wha—he’s gone,” she sighed. At the sound of a choking laugh, she looked up to see Taln?r somewhere between a cough and chuckle. “Hey, save your energy. You’re going to need it,” she chided lightly as she approached him.

  “I fear you’ve made an ally for life, Julia. Whether you wanted him or not, you’ll not find anyone more loyal than Nadhem. He’ll tell you exactly what he thinks, and he’ll call you a moron if he thinks you’re being one, but he’ll walk with you into the Utter Dark itself if he must. Ana akh’luk is a phrase we only use with each other—with our own kin. You’re one of us now, like it or not,” he chuckled.

  Julia gave a melancholy smile as she examined the man, lying on a bed of thornless brambles. He was unnaturally pale—so pale she could see the veins under his skin. He sweated despite the cool, night air. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and his breath sounded…wet.

  “I see you’ve removed the corruption from your arm manually. Is there any lingering within you that I need to purge?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “I was the first victim. That horrible creature—the floating one—tracked Nadhem back to our hideout after his scouting trip. It set the trees our shelter was constructed around aflame to burn us out.

  “As we exited, I was the first out. A fellblade caught me as soon as I stuck my arm out of the shelter, severing it. I didn’t take any wounds besides, as Sahira pushed past me and dispatched it rather mercilessly,” he chuckled.

  She finished looking him over and decided that, other than extreme blood loss and a fever, he seemed likely to survive—probably with a lot of rest. “Can I give you some of my mana to fight off whatever sickness has you feverish?”

  “No need,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve simply lost too much blood. You could flood me with mana and relieve the sickness temporarily, but it will come back. I lack the blood for fighting off infections. You could stimulate my body to create more blood, but you should focus on Sahira. My wounds are unpleasant to look at, but hers are more severe.

  “I will promote my own body’s healing with my mana as it recovers. Don’t worry about me. A little sickness isn’t going to kill me when the nashiin didn’t. And, no offense, but my healing is much better than yours,” he said with a wink.

  She could only shake her head as she made her way over to Sahira. “What is it that Nadhem’s calling me? Dahm…uh…Dahm'Zahra?” she asked him as she bent over Sahira.

  “She-who-blooms-in-blood, or ‘blood-blossom,’ perhaps—if you’re feeling poetic,” he chuckled again. “That guy really has quite a lyrical soul to contrast such abrasive skin.”

  Sahira was not in good shape. She seemed to have avoided taking too many wounds, but she had an arrow in her gut. Something seems to have punched a hole in the belly of her cuirass, allowing an arrow to get through. It was embedded deeply, but they’d left it inside her rather than ripping it out, which Julia was thankful for.

  “What exactly does ‘blooming in blood’ mean?” she asked, placing her hand over the shaft of the arrow and running her mana along its length.

  “I think it’s a decent description, honestly. How would you describe it? You spat blood and bone out of your mouth, had enough arrows sticking out of you to take down multiple warriors, and called up a storm of blood to decimate your enemies,” he said with humor.

  “It wasn’t blood—my mana was what was causing the crimson color,” she clarified. She pumped her mana into the arrow and focused on consuming the entire thing and any corruption that arrived with it. She didn’t want to risk whatever delicate maneuver would pull the arrow out, so she decided to incinerate the entire thing from within without actually removing it. The arrow began to sizzle and smoke as it was consumed from within by Julia’s flame.

  “Whatever it was, it evoked a sense of bloody beauty, the way a destructive force of nature contains beauty—which I believe is what Nadhem attempted to capture with the name,” he said, watching Julia work on his sister intently.

  Once the shaft burned into ash, she focused on the head—which was embedded deep in Sahira’s gut. Braden had given her basic lessons on anatomy, but neither he nor she were experts in medicine, so she could only guess at what was happening. Her mana flowed through Sahira’s abdomen, giving Julia a sort of “sight” of her internals.

  The head seemed to have impacted one of the turns in her small intestine. Which was very bad, if she was interpreting what her mana told her correctly. Bowel spilling into the abdominal cavity—or whatever that sac was called that held all the organs—was basically a death sentence. She desperately hoped that she was understanding the situation correctly.

  She’d never done something like this. Braden had described concepts like surgery to her, but she’d never even come close to attempting it. She thought through what needed to happen. First, she had to get the arrowhead out without doing further damage. That should be easy enough with Earth Magic.

  Then, she needed to grab any bowel that had escaped into her abdomen and shove it back into the intestines, sealing the puncture closed after to keep the contents in. Finally, she needed to seal the entry point closed and give her immune system a blast of energy to deal with any potential infection that had already set in. It had been hours since the battle, after all.

  Her plan in mind, she prepared to insert a finer strand of her mana, but she stopped as she felt a small tugging at the back of her mind. Realizing it was from Trixy, she opened the channel between their minds and felt a rush of mana. Trixy had somehow dumped some of her mana into Julia.

  “Thanks, Trixy,” she said before sticking a small needle of mana into Sahira’s wound. Surprisingly, Sahira’s mana didn’t interfere. Julia’s heart warmed a little to know that she trusted her so much, even unconsciously—or Sahira was so injured that she was almost out of mana, thus having none to cause interference. Julia chose to imagine it was the former.

  She grabbed the arrowhead with her mana, using Earth Magic to change its state to liquid and draw it out of the wound. It splashed to the branch at Julia’s feet before immediately solidifying once her mana left it.

  The projectile removed, she got to work guiding the bowel back into place and closing the wound. The work wasn’t particularly complicated, but it demanded exhausting precision. She knew even a tiny bit remaining could lead to a potentially-deadly infection. She focused for what must have been an hour or two before she felt comfortable enough to seal the bowel and close the major wound in her abdomen.

  After giving a large boost of mana to Sahira’s entire body, Julia sat back on a branch and exhaled heavily. She had only recovered about half of her mana, despite being unconscious for hours, so dropping her reserves back down to 30%—even with the extra from Trixy—was tough.

  Sahira was breathing steadily, though. Her complexion looked much better, and there was activity behind her eyelids—possibly suggesting a dream. Julia wasn’t sure, but she thought that was a good sign.

  Taln?r had fallen asleep at some point while she worked, and Nadhem was in the swamp below keeping watch, so she was left with Trixy and her own thoughts. Trixy curled up around Julia and made her soft, almost-purring sounds, likely close to sleep herself.

  Julia could do with some actual sleep rather than unconsciousness, but there was still one major task that needed her attention: the notifications blinking furiously in her periphery.