The Healer’s Touch — “Drowned in Fire”

Start reading with Chapter I.

Pain was all he had left. Never had he supposed that pain could be something so overarching. It felt like a demon that had taken possession of him. He had sustained great injuries before, but none were so permanent as his current state. In those days, the pain had been an enemy he felt capable to fight and eventually defeat.

Not so now.

Lying on the bed at the army sick base, staring up at the tent ceiling, he knew this time, the enemy had gotten the better of him. He would never be able to defeat it now. Pain had damaged him — for good.

Every breath was a strain as air rattled through his broken, burned face into his lungs. His ribs were shattered and the heaving of his chest was as if a thousand nails were driven through his torso whenever he took in air.

But it wasn’t the physical damage that was the most gruesome. Not his broken legs and twisted arms, that would never again let him walk or eat without help. Nor his completely burned body and missing eye. Nor his crumpled sword hand, that would never do what it had been best at. Not even his cracked spine and neck, never again allowing him to stand.

It was the finality of his efforts as warrior. It was the inescapability of a life confined to bed, unable to engage in the struggles of the world and being an agent in the affairs of his nation. He wouldn’t admit it to himself then and there, but what he most missed was the power to command, to make battle — to kill.

The medics botched together what they could, but the explosion and the fire had done their harm. If he’d had the strength, with his own hands he would have strangled the man who had broken the news to him about what had happened and how his body looked now.

Since he had first felt the power of holding a sword in his hand, he’d known that he wanted to be killed by an enemy who was his equal. Never had he wanted to die old and in bed. Never had he wanted injury to deprive him of the war.

But destiny hadn’t listened to his wishes.

They carried him off with all the other cripples who had been rendered useless on the battlegrounds. He returned home, but there was no home for him. The estate of his family lay barren. He had fathered no children, nor ever married in the first place. The art of war had been his supreme and only passion for as long as he could remember.

The pain of being carried through the rust ridden gate and the neglected gardens into the rooms of his youth was almost unbearable. As if everything he had ever accomplished was void, inexistent. If anything was darker than the approaching autumn with its rain and fog, it was the darkness on his soul.

He had hoped to die of his wounds. Then he had begged the medics to stop healing him. He even prayed, though his pleading was without faith. God would never hear a murderer like him, even less grant him the wish to die.

He couldn’t turn his head on his own, so he needed to ask the two nurses who cared for him all day every day to lay it sideways, so he could look out of the window. In the gardens of his late mother, all the flowers had long withered away and the trees overgrown the smaller plants. Somehow, he found solace in this chaos, as if he saw his broken body and mind resembled in it. Meant for beauty and glory, yet denied of it.

The rains beat against the windows, like tears trying to bring him to acknowledge his sorrow, but were deferred by the barrier of his hatred. Oh, how he hated. He hated the liquid food the nurses pumped down his throat, the stories they chatted about — local garbage. He hated the weather and the captains he had led. Men who never paid him a single visit. He hated this man who had blown up the store of explosive powder. He hated his father for the gift of his first wooden sword. He hated the pain his body caused him day in and day out. He hated his weakness and how he couldn’t even relieve himself without help. He hated that he hated everything.

The nurses would scold him for being such an unpleasant patient and complain about his moaning and ranting and cursing. He couldn’t care less.

He only realized when the lack of care had extinguished the fire of hatred, that the fire had kept him alive. Thereafter darkness came. A darkness of greater torture than the pain his body could ever cause him. One day it lay claim on him and these claws never let go again. The daggers of despair sunk deep into his soul, draining all hope like deep wounds suck all blood from a body.

The darkness was so intense it felt like dying, but slow, so very slow. He didn’t want to eat or drink or be carried out through the estate on clear winter days. Once, he remembered, the smell of the driven snow was all he could have asked for. But now he just mourned, grieving over the loss of his strong body, his position, fame, reputation, power, …

And then the darkness even took that away. He stopped caring about his losses and became indifferent. Spring came, but not for him. He would wait for death, for years if he must.

He commanded the nurses to close the curtains and let no light, nor birdsong in. And so he decayed.

Until the day the stranger came. The nurses hadn’t announced any visitors — not that he would receive any. But the man simply stood there by his bedside in the light of the fire and stared down at him.

“What do you want?” he snarled at the unknown man. His words were foreign, as if he had long forgotten how to speak and form meaning.

The dark-cloaked man sat down on a chair, crossed his legs and stared at him for a little while longer before answering, “I have come to learn whether you are ready to travel or not.”

He was in no condition to go anywhere. “Travel? Who the hell are you?”

The man shrugged his shoulders. “A guide of sorts.”

“Who leads people through mountains and plains?”

The man lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “Of a kind, yes. I guide people from here to there.”

Am I hallucinating? What in the world was happening? Where were the nurses? Why had they let this man in?

“Mylord,” he said, “I have no need for …”

“Everyone has,” the stranger interrupted. “Nobody leaves without me nor crosses without my aid. I pick up the souls of the dying.”

“You can’t pick up a soul!”

“I have been doing this for a very long time. Trust me when I tell you that I know my profession. I come and claim the dead. Sometimes I come too early and have to leave again, because miracles are granted to those who trust in the father of all. It is not important. But there is one thing I do hate, you know.”

The man leaned forward and he tried to escape those piercing eyes. “You must understand that I am a very organized person. I like to plan and despise to be late. But what I abhor most, is being called to claim a soul before its time. Souls like the ones you slaughtered on a battlefield.”

“That is what happens in war!” he said in defiance. “If anything, I am not the one waging the wars.”

“No, you are the one waging the killing,” countered the stranger. “And you enjoyed it. That is the difference. I hate it when people die because others will it.”

“I am sorry that there are parts of your job that are unpleasant,” he mocked the stranger.

“Welcome to the world of mortal man. Have you come to a conclusion regarding your assessment of my doom? Am I worthy of dying, or do I merit to vegetate some more years and decades?”

“This is not entirely up to me.” The stranger tapped his chin with his finger. “I am here to show you what awaits you when you pass with me at this moment of your life. You can decide after whether or not you come along.”

“Don’t you worry,” he said, “everything is better than this.”

The stranger smiled, but said nothing. He arose and walked over to the large window. With an ease of movement that sparked jealousy in the cripple’s heart, the stranger ripped the curtains apart and light flooded in.

He was launched forward and fell at the same time. Darkness was removed from beneath him, as he ascended upwards. The light hurt. It blinded his eyes and seemed to burn his skin.

Then, all of a sudden, he was kneeling in short grass. He grasped the culms with his fingers. They closed without effort and tore apart a few blades. His body … followed his commands. He lifted his head and saw a beautiful valley open to him. Never before had he been here.

Small ponds of fresh, clear water, connected through brooks meandered through fields of flowers. The meadows were spotted with shade spending holts. Mountains raised themselves in the light of the sun on the edges of the smooth valley, aspiring to heights of glistening snow.

Then he looked down at himself and the joy over his restored ability to move and walk vanished as if someone had slammed a door.

He was covered in filth and dirt. Maggots crawling out of cracks in his skin that weren’t bleeding but swollen and festering. There was no pain, only disgust. How could he spoil such a beautiful place with his presence?

Desperately, he looked around, trying to find an exit, a way to leave the valley and never come back, but the mountains seemed to surround it all.

A man approached him. The sudden pain that emerged from the inside of his core was greater than all the physical pain and the darkness of mind and emotions combined. The gardener walked towards him as he trembled.

The former commander raised his hand, trying to shield himself from the torture the man caused in him, but to no avail. He broke down onto his knees and covered his head with his arm, using the other arm to stabilize himself on the ground that now seemed to shake.

“My son,” said the gardener, “you have come early.”

No! No, I have not!

“I understand your pain,” said the man and came even closer, “but I cannot ease it, for you do not allow me to.”

He tried to crawl away. Futile! The pain grew in intensity as if the man was like a white glooming forge, carrying a heat that would burn his flesh to the bones. He knew how it felt to burn. But not like this!

It was the fire of guilt in the face of the refiner and it would devour him.

He stared up at the mountains, begging them to collapse on him, hide his sins, hide his murders from the gardener. Let me not be!

But there was no escape, for he must be. He burned as the man laid his hand onto his shoulder and he screamed.

He was back in the room with the stranger. Earlier he had imagined how it would feel to kill this man who had entered his home without permission. Nothing of that now. All that he could revel in now, was the relief of having been able to escape the purity of this being that had touched him in his filthiness.

He stared at the man who towered over him. “I am not ready to come with you.”

“Very well, then,” said the stranger. “In this case, I have been commanded to wait, so you may repent of your ill deeds. A time to redeem yourself is granted unto you if you’d like to take it. Instead of engaging in the work of death, the Divine have decreed that you may be bestowed with the power to preserve life. May you use it well, mortal, until I return.”

The stranger lifted his arm and placed his finger on the cripple’s forehead.

The pain was sucked out of his body like water with a sponge. His breathing became less of an agony, his muscles relaxed.

The man stretched forth his hand to help him rise. “If you take my hand, I’ll take it as an acceptance of our agreement.”

He commanded his hand. It obeyed, moved and reached.

Spring had finally come — now also for him.