Chapter 152: When Magic Isn’t Enough
Given the ugly state of affairs with his hands, he didn’t hold out much hope for the rest of his body, but he still needed to know. Unfortunately, he couldn’t move around well enough to unwrap the bandages that covered his chest, and he was in too much pain to sit up. So, instead, he grabbed his drinking glass, broke it on the nightstand, and then used the biggest part to start cutting away at the bandages.
Simon didn’t try to be careful. He couldn’t hide any of this work from whoever came on to check on him in a minute or an hour. He just needed to get well enough that he wasn’t going to die or find out if that was the best solution, and then he could decide what to do. There was no sense in beheading himself unless he was permanently crippled, or maybe, not even then. He wasn’t sure what he’d do next exactly, but he didn’t really feel like throwing in the towel.
Why not just start with a clean slate? He told himself as he cut away at his bandages before shooting back, Have you seen my slate? It’s not that clean. Weight loss. Working out - I’d need to make new fireproof armor… it’s a whole thing.
The armor might be a valid reason to keep going. It would take him weeks or months to replace, depending on the circumstances, but what would he need it for? Duh, Dragon… The words came back immediately. He hadn’t been planning to fight the dragon, of course. He’d been planning to… Well, he hadn’t really thought about it past the whole volcano thing, and…
Thinking about any of that immediately made him think about his doppelgänger, and for a moment, that was enough to still Simon’s hand. Compared to that, none of the rest of these mysteries mattered. If he… If some version of him was out there causing some of these problems, then that needed to be his top priority.
“No,” he whispered to himself as he returned his focus to the matter at hand while he looked at the ugly bruise that colored the left half of his rib cage. “My top priority is making sure I don’t die. My evil twin can be handled after that.”
Simon used a word of healing on his chest after he’d probed all his bruises and felt for broken bones. There were enough broken ribs on his left side that he felt sure a lung or something worse must have been punctured, so he took his time, trying to hold all of that in his mind before he finally said the words.
The relief he felt was palpable, but so was the fatigue that washed over him as his body tried to fix everything on his wishlist. He’d left the bruises and the burns in place, no matter how ugly they looked, but he could breathe deeply again, so that was worth it.
Simon sat up, or at least he tried to… the pain in his back was so bad that he instantly knew where the problem was with his feet. He rolled onto his side and gingerly reached back to prod his spine. It was a painful mistake, but that didn’t stop him. He didn’t know if it was broken, fractured, or just plain crushed, but everything in his upper lumbar hurt, and everything below that didn’t feel like anything at all.