"How long has this been happening?" Eirian asked, poking at Chenzhou's ears until he batted her hands away.
"Nothing happened. I was distracted." He insisted.
None of them looked convinced.
"Please, just continue. I'm listening." He must have sounded desperate enough, because they turned back to Yuze, though Chenzhou could still feel their attention.
"I have a list of items from the Inventories, but I haven't pulled any of them yet." Yuze explained. "Three weapons. Five pieces of clothing. Four pieces of jewelry. And about a dozen other random items."
Eirian looked thoughtful, "I doubt it's a weapon."
"Wouldn't that be an obvious choice?" Finn looked up from his notes. "They're trying to hurt; they'd choose a weapon."
"Depends on the type of hurt they're trying to cause." Eirian shook her head. "A weapon would be too obvious and would have reacted to the other weapons." She gave Yuze and Chenzhou significant looks, but her eyes were careful not to fall to the blades at their waists.
Chenzhou coughed. "Right. A weapon would be harder to hide as well."
"That's still quite a few pieces to examine," Marian pointed out.
"It's going to take weeks to find them all," Yuze explained.
"You don't know where they are?" Eirian sputtered.
"We know where they are…the storage vault is huge. It hasn't been organized in a decade or so." Yuze explained. "And yes," he said, preempting her next question. "We know they're in there because anything that's taken out is logged and none of these items have left since they were put in."
Eirian frowned. "Provided the logs haven't been forged."
Yuze frowned at his pile of papers. "I guess that's possible. If that did happen, we're in more trouble than we already are."
***
Yuze and Marian had helped Chenzhou to bed after that. Eirian had rightfully sensed that he didn't want her around for it.
He seed embarrassed, which was stupid. Healer Huang had reluctantly handed over all the records of Chenzhou's treatnts and then gone out of his way to make sure he was too busy to speak to Eirian in person.
According to Finn, Healer Huang's petulance when he didn't get his way was well known so it wouldn't reflect badly on Eirian.
And Yuze got squirrely whenever Eirian tried to broach the subject of his healer ex-husband. None one would offer any details on what had happened with him and the silence was enough to tell Eirian it was a painful event.
All Healer Huang's notes had revealed was that he had incredibly neat handwriting and he'd run every test that was common practice and several that were not and still didn't have a clue what was wrong with Chenzhou.
His symptoms aligned with everything from Aviary Delirium (minus the hallucinations) to Hester's Heat (minus the libido) to Zelda's Zeal (minus the obsessive focus).
Well, maybe he had so form of Zelda's Zeal given his obsession to make sure the Calia was taken care of, but there was no ntion of weird purple nodes anywhere on his body and even Healer Huang should have noticed those.
Even among poisons there were too many options. It seed like everything caused headaches, loss of appetite, and exhaustion.
Eirian had even dug out her rare poison texts and found many possibilities, but nothing that offered a solid direction.
Now, the only hope they had where the items Yuze had discovered, and it would take weeks to find them all.
Would Chenzhou last that long?
Was there a way to buy ti?
Eirian's magic danced over her fingers. It had sent Chenzhou into a seizure before, but that was her magic applied directly to him. Maybe a different approach would be more effective?
She thought about the miasma as she lay in bed that night. About how it lay over everything like the blanket. The way in sank into everything.
Like liquids mixed together, once they'd joined, they were impossible to separate unless there was a very rare, very expensive Goblin's Sieve available. Not even Eirian had the money to get her hands on one of those.
But so liquids reacted to heat differently. So were unchanged. So evaporated.
Her magic surged under skin. Wave after wave as it tried to escape. It never settled, it was never quiet, it was always there, just waiting to burst out of her. She'd scoured every library she could find as a child to try and understand it, but none of the books had ever described a magic like hers.
Sothing that seed like a living thing in and of itself. Like a Blooding Blade but more. Sothing just contained in Eirian and waiting for a mont of weakness to burst free.
She let it out bit by bit over the years, when she needed it in battle.
Or she just really, really needed to destroy sothing. But she'd never seen it react to sothing before the way it reacted to the miasma.
Like it was reaching out.
Not in friendship.
Like it was trying to start a fight.
It was hard to tell if that was Eirian herself or the magic itself, but maybe she should let it and see what happened.
Slowly, she relaxed into the mattress, her body limp, her mind clear.
Little by little she let it slip out. Falling into that quiet place in her mind where everything else fell away and the core of her magic pulsed like a sun in its own little universe.
Her magic rushed out of her. She could practically taste its excitent at freedom as it started to sink into everything. She could see it in her mind as it sank into the floor, into the levels below, into the dirt beneath the floor of castle and the into the rock of the very cliff it was built on.
Like the roots of an old Whispering Tree, so deep in the ground nothing short of dragon fire could truly uproot them.
Down and down it went.
Out and out it spread.
And the miasma rose to et it.
~ tbc
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