Still Choosing

Vale was waiting outside Fell’s parlor when they arrived. Inside, she set her journal on a shelf while Maeril arranged the diagrams. Rishi undressed, removed the cords from wrists and ankles, and folded his robes beside his staff. He sat while they finished preparing. Clean cloth covered the part of him that was not yet needed.

Fell indicated a small vessel. A sign above it showed a hand touching a flame without feeling the heat.

Rishi shook his head. “I want to feel what changes.”

“Tell us if pain becomes all you can feel,” Vale said.

She sat where she could see his face and both shoulders. Maeril knelt to check the temporary mark at his breastbone, then stood. Fell touched his own wrist and showed a line ending short of a circle.

“I can ask you to pause,” Rishi said. “Or stop.”

Fell nodded. Rishi settled his feet.

“Begin.”

The first touch was a point on his scalp. He had expected the puncture. He had not expected the sense that something very fine had caught on the inside of him.

His fingers tightened against his knee.

“Sharp,” he said. “Then a pull.”

“Where does it pull?” Maeril asked.

“Toward the neck.”

“That is the path.”

Fell lifted the needle. The pulling stopped. Rishi let his next breath come without counting.

The needle returned.

Time grew difficult to measure in anything larger than a line.

There were rests, water, changes of position that made Rishi aware of how much of the body could object to moving at once. Across his nape the pain spread into the soreness above and became hard to locate. He named what he could: heat beneath the right ear, the pull when he swallowed, the cool edge of a clean cloth.

“What can you feel in your hands?” Vale asked.

He looked down. He had begun pressing his palms into his thighs. He eased them.

“The cloth again.”

She nodded.

By the time Fell reached his back, Rishi needed his forearms supported. Maeril stood beside him with a diagram turned toward the work. At the shoulder junction, she asked for a little light.

Warmth approached the upper back and spread along a path that had not existed that morning. One part tightened.

“Let it go.”

He did. The warmth faded, but the tightness took longer. Fell held the instrument clear.

Maeril checked the adjoining paths, waited until Rishi’s breath had settled, then asked him to approach the darker force. He admitted less than he had during their last test. The same junction drew hard toward his neck.

“That is enough.”

The pressure withdrew. Maeril laid one finger beside the unfinished line.

“It is taking too much through the upper return.”

She reached for a different page.

“His shoulder is rising before he breathes,” Vale said. “It has for the last three breaths. The ribs on this side have stopped moving as far. The other side is making up the difference.”

Rishi became aware of the lifted shoulder only when he tried to lower it. The movement pulled at the raw skin behind him, and his body wanted to put it back where it had been.

“I would try supporting the arm differently and letting the next breath come more slowly.”

Maeril looked from his ribs to the unfinished junction.

“Yes. That bracing would feed the return,” she said softly.

“Pause here,” Rishi told Fell.

The instrument moved away.

He took his weight from the arm and asked Maeril to shift the support beneath it. He lowered his shoulder by degrees. Each movement seemed needlessly large to the skin, although he could see how small it was.

For a while he did nothing but breathe. The first attempt reached mostly one side. On the next he felt the unused ribs begin to move.

“The ribs hurt when they move,” he told them. “Sharper than the burning.”

Maeril laid her palm where she could feel the difference. “Again, if you can. A little warmth.”

He breathed beneath her hand and let the force approach. This time he felt it take a different path, although no ink had been changed.

“It was answering the brace,” she said. “I would have given it a way to keep doing that.”

Rishi released the warmth. Her pen made two short marks. She rubbed out a temporary stroke beside the unfinished line and placed the junction lower, leaving a different interval before the return.

Fell examined the page. A moving rib cage appeared above it, a line bending with the movement. Maeril adjusted the end of her stroke. The image held.

“We test it before you close it,” she said.

Fell inclined his head.

Rishi had time to feel the cup in his hand again. He could distinguish the pull in his shoulder from the deeper ache of remaining in the position.

“Ready?” Maeril asked.

“For the test.”

He let the warmth approach. The junction received it without dragging the shoulder upward. He released it, rested, and repeated the smaller opening toward darkness.

Maeril waited until he had let it go.

“What do you see now?” she asked Vale.

“His ribs are moving evenly again. He is no longer raising the shoulder before each breath.”

Rishi turned toward Fell.

“Continue.”

The needle closed the revised path.

By the time Fell reached his wrists, Rishi could no longer imagine choosing to begin again from the start. He did not have to. He had to choose the work still before him.

Narrow channels crossed the backs of his hands. At his ankles and feet, a smaller arrangement answered the pattern above. He shifted when asked, drank when he could, and requested a rest before the last fine work at his sternum.

Maeril sat beside him. He leaned his head toward hers, then remembered the raw line at his scalp and stopped. She placed her fingers against the unmarked side of his face.

“I’m ready,” he said at last.

The last line hurt as plainly as the first. Fell examined the small breath-knot at Rishi’s breastbone and set the tool down.

Maeril circled him slowly, then came back to his face.

“Once more. Very little.”

Rishi closed his eyes, then opened them again. He wanted the room.

Warmth approached the finished ward. Silver-white script glimmered between the black lines at his wrists; he felt the force spread, meet a boundary, and ease as he released it. After a rest, he let the darkness approach. His ribs moved evenly. Nothing caught beneath the corrected junction.

He let it go. Maeril’s breath shook when she finally released it.

“The Becoming.”

Rishi looked at her, then at Fell.

“Thank you.”

“Thank me after it keeps you alive,” Maeril said.

Her hand found his knee. He covered it carefully with his own, and the pain across his fingers reminded him how much there was still to heal.

Vale waited until he had water and a clean covering before retrieving her journal.

“May I make a written note of what happened at the shoulder?”

They agreed to a private account of his reports and the correction, without identifying details, scar history, ward grammar, or diagrams. No sensory stone or reconstruction; no copying, teaching, or publication. Any wider use would require a new request.

“Do not make my choice a reason someone else should bear this awake,” Rishi said.

“I will include that boundary.”

She wrote a short paragraph and turned it so they could read. Maeril leaned beside him. Rishi took his time, then nodded.

As Vale put away the journal, Maeril offered her hand.

“If you ever come to Baldur’s Gate, find us at Lantern Hall. I would like to feed you when neither of us has to watch him bleed.”

“I would like that too,” Rishi said.

Vale clasped Maeril’s hand. “I have no objection to an uneventful meal.”

After she left, Maeril set the diagrams aside and reached for Fell’s salve. Rishi watched her open it. The work on the table could be gathered up and carried away. The work in his skin stayed with him.