Chapter 151: - Back in Bed
Simon woke, groggily. When he felt the blankets beneath him, he assumed that he was back in bed. That was expected, though, and he accepted it as the price of accomplishing the impossible. He only hoped that it was enough to finally solve the damn volcano level. It was only when he tried to rise and felt the pain shoot through him that he realized that’s not what happened. Somehow, he’d survived the impact, but he’d definitely hurt himself in the fall.
“No… no, no, no, no…” someone said. A woman, he thought, it was hard to tell in the dark room. “No, Mister Simon, you can’t move… you can’t, you’re hurt too bad for that.”
It was a woman. Someone motherly, perhaps twice his age. He thought she looked familiar, but he wasn’t completely sure. He’d treated so many people in… whatever city he was in, and his mind wasn’t working so well just now.
“What…” he rasped through parched lips.
“No, you just… you lay there,” she said, pushing him gently but firmly back into the mattress. “And I will fetch the healer.”
But I am the healer, Simon thought to himself. He might have laughed then, but it would have hurt too bad, and he lacked the energy to try. Something was definitely hurt badly, though. He couldn’t feel his toes, and when the woman hurried off, he tried to reach for a glass of water he'd seen on the nearby table. That was when he found out his hands were swaddled in bandages so completely that he might as well have been tied up.
The attempt at motion made his body light up with pain in a dozen places again. He wasn’t going anywhere, and until he recuperated a bit more, he wasn’t even sure he could speak a minor word of healing. Even that insignificant effort would be too much. Instead, he lay there, trying to analyze his situation.
His body was in bad shape. He may or may not be paralyzed from the waist down, and from the taste of blood in his mouth and the uncomfortable sensations he felt when breathing, he was probably bleeding internally. All that was par for the course when falling from a great height, so none of that surprised him.
What surprised him was his surroundings. He wasn’t in his cabin as he’d first thought, but he wasn’t in his home in Ionar either. Thanks to the pungent smell of herbs, he would have been able to tell that, even in the dim light. He was somewhere nicer than either of those places. The soft bed beneath him and the faint smell of incense marked it as either the palace or else a very nice home somewhere in the upper city.