Death After Death

Simon quickly found a clean cot and moved it into the shade of a building far from the corpses. Then he picked up the stranger and carried him over. After that, Simon evaluated him the best he could. He knew very little about medicine. To be honest, physiology and anatomy were the last things he would have expected to need to know about in a fantasy world, but he’d learned the hard way that just wasn’t so.

Magic needed to be wielded with precision and focus, though a sloppy spell could still work, as he’d demonstrated plenty of times with fire magic. Healing was a little more finicky.

He shuddered as an image of Freya’s trembling form came briefly as he remembered how badly healing could miss the mark, but he suppressed it. Instead, he forced himself to focus on the man in front of him. The parched, cracked lips spoke to thirst, and the raging fever implied that it was getting worse, but the fact that his blisters weren’t too bad and his skin had not yet gone gray implied his case was still earlier than the rest.

“Maybe that dumb bird mask did you some good after all,” Simon said as he pulled out his water flask and tried to get the man to drink.

The dying man tried and failed to choke down some water, spraying Simon enough that he was certain he’d officially caught whatever this guy had. He shrugged it off. He’d kill himself before he ever got this bad, but he was certain it wouldn’t come to that. Now would be a fine time to use himself as a guinea pig, and then afterward, he could cure the dying healer.

Centering himself, he imagined all the bacteria that were crawling all over him now, trying to make him sick. He was sure that if he tried to purge all the bacteria from his body, that would have some kind of terrible consequence because he was pretty sure there were supposed to be good ones, too. So, instead, he focused on the plague bacteria and imagined them as little black bugs desperately looking for a way inside his body.

Once he had that image fixed and he could feel a connection to it, he finally uttered the new word he had yet to use before. “D̶͓̐e̵͚͛l̸͔̑z̵̙͋á̵̜m̴̜͊.” Cure. Simon felt a slight tingle as the word rippled through him, but once it passed, he felt no worse, so he turned his attention back to the dying man.

“D̶͓̐e̵͚͛l̸͔̑z̵̙͋á̵̜m̴̜͊,” he repeated, focusing on the stranger’s body with the same care and attention he’d done on his own.

Nothing happened immediately, but then Simon hadn’t expected it to. He followed that up with healing, trying to heal the worst of the man’s physical symptoms, which seemed to be mostly successful. Between the two spells, he looked almost as good as new, though he passed out almost immediately as a result. Simon was more than a little bit familiar with how hard a recovery from death’s door could be, even with magic on your side.