Christopher Kellen - Elegy

He could hear Elisa, lying on the ground a few feet away and moaning softly. Each successive breath was getting weaker, and he could hear her heartbeat slowly draining away. Each beat took successively longer, and with the help of his manna-tuned hearing, he could hear every labored beat as the corruption began to take her over. He didn’t have long to deal with the spider if he had any hope of saving her.

What hope is there? He asked himself in despair. She’s been touched by manna, and corrupted manna at that. What hope is there for life after such a wound?

His mind provided him with the answer. The heartblade.

Could he do such a thing? Could he supply her with a tiny dose of purified manna, a boost against the corruption that now flowed in her veins, without completely killing her? Would the dose be too large and begin the manna transformation, or would it be too little to save her from the horrid fate that had befallen her?

Fighting with the idea in his head, he struck again at the spider, this time connecting solidly with its carapace. Where the steel blade had bounced, his blade sank in, and the spider let out a hideous shriek as ichor spouted forth, luminescent, like the kind that had come from the fel dog he’d fought outside Calessa’s gates. He yanked the sword free and spun away as the spider attempted to sink its fangs into his shoulder, narrowly avoiding a poisoning himself.

As the beast dripped its luminescent fluid on the ground, D’Arden could tell that it was beginning to slow. It fought with less certainty, less precision as it lashed out at him, and D’Arden knew that he’d struck a deadly point on the beast. Its attacks began to seem less and less like coordinated strikes and more like death throes.

He moved in for the kill. As he stepped closer to the spider, one of its flailing strikes caught him squarely in the chest.

D’Arden gasped. The world seemed to slow to a halt.

Slowly, he looked down. The beast’s clawed limb had hit him straight on and had punctured straight through his chest, his ribs, breaking bones and tearing through muscle and soft organs as it went. Blood and manna flowed out from him as he tried to catch a breath, but found that he was already feeling faint from a sudden lack of oxygen.

The spider yanked back its appendage and staggered backward, finally falling over the edge into the dry riverbed as it twitched frantically, trying to slow the loss of its vital fluid. It vanished into the darkness.

He fell to the ground slowly, in a motion that seemed very well to take an eternity. He hit the ground with such force that it would have driven the breath out of him, had he not already lost the ability to breathe.

D’Arden clawed at his belt, hoping that he had saved some sort of potion, some sort of alchemical substance that could save his life. His fingers closed only on the hilt of the heartblade.

The Arbiter weakly unlocked it from its specialized scabbard, and brought it up to his eyes. The thrumming of the light in the heartblade was weak. It would not be enough to inoculate Elisa against the poison running through her and also to give him the strength he needed to force the manna to repair the wound he had sustained.

There was no other choice.

He would have to let Elisa die.

With a desperate cry, he thrust the blade deep into his own chest, little caring if he sustained more damage. He was dead anyway if this didn’t work, and he had neither the time nor the strength to make a careful application.

The thin, round blade pierced his heart.

Time stood still for a long moment.

The manna in the heartblade flashed into his body. Immediately the manna took hold of his body, wrapping around him in a warming embrace and beginning to knit the flesh that had been horribly wounded by the spider’s attack. He only hoped that it would work quickly enough before his mind died of air starvation.

Black sparks began to flash in front of his eyes and he felt himself slipping away, the pull of the manna on his soul getting stronger with every second that ticked by. His heart beat weaker, and weaker. He struggled to draw a breath even as he felt the uncomfortable itch and burn of the flesh repairing itself thanks to the burst of manna. Fear gripped him; fear that it wouldn’t be enough, that it was already too late for him, that his failure would cost the world dearly.

His lungs inflated.

Desperately, he gasped for air, reveling in the taste of the sweet dawn. The pull of death faded from him, and he found the sudden strength to pull the heartblade free of his chest.

As he held it up in the light of the rising sun, it suddenly illuminated with a brilliant flash of azure manna energy. He stared at it as it pulsed in his hand to the rhythm of a heartbeat not his own, uncomprehending. He had just expended what little energy it had held contained within it, and yet here it was, glowing as though it had just been recharged.

A low, weak moan snapped him out of his daze. He scrambled to his feet, doing his best to ignore the sharp flashes of pain that he felt as new flesh that had not completely healed tore and blood flowed again. He rushed to the side of the fallen girl and knelt beside her.

Elisa’s skin already had a dusky grey tint to it, and her face was ashen. Her green eyes were a strange, almost surreal splash of color against her otherwise colorless form. They stared at him, not quite vacantly, but with so little recognition that he feared it was already too late. The blood had stopped flowing from the deep wound in her shoulder, but it mattered little. The venom had obviously spread like wildfire, and even though he had no idea how long he’d been semi-conscious, Elisa was nearing death.

He held up the glowing heartblade in front of her eyes. Her glassy gaze focused on it with a vaguely puzzled look. “This is the only thing that stands a chance of saving your life,” he told her, though he knew that she likely could not understand him. “The chance is very slim. I have never heard of such a thing working before. It is probable that you will die.”

She nodded, weakly, once.

“Do you want that chance?” he asked her.

Again, weakly, she nodded.

Needing little more of an answer than that, he unbuckled her breastplate and pulled down her shirt, just enough so that he could get access to the area above her heart and not enough to expose her to the chilled morning air. He took the pulsing heartblade and slid it carefully between her ribs.

She gasped, and the blade thrummed in his hand as it released its charge of power into her. He removed the heartblade quickly from her, leaving a trail of blood and tiny blue flames behind.

Her entire body buckled as she screamed, the sound echoing throughout the broken-down buildings that surrounded them. He gave a soft thanks to the land for the daylight that would keep the demons from pursuing them, even though it would now be clear to their entire population exactly where they were. The pure manna was coursing through her bloodstream, obliterating the corruption that had been forced into her by the spider’s bite.

Now was the moment of truth. If she survived the initial purification, she might still stand a chance. He waited, more nervously than he would have expected for a life he’d come in contact with so recently.

As her scream finally died away, her body went completely limp. Her eyes stared blankly out across the dry riverbed.

He bowed his head.

After a few long moments, he reached out and grasped her wrist. There was no pulse, no indication of life. He’d lost her to the purification.

D’Arden breathed a heavy sigh. He’d known the risks when he offered it to her, and even if she hadn’t understood them fully, she had some idea of what it might have done. It could have been much worse, he thought – she suffered none of the transformational effects that normally accompanied a direct exposure to manna energy. The regret that she hadn’t survived, though, weighed heavily on him. He’d hoped that no matter how slim the chances were, that this young girl might have survived where the young boy Mikel had fallen, that he might have had the chance to make amends for the boy’s senseless death.