Chapter 220: The Divine Sage

Encrid opened his mouth.

Nothing came out except a dry, scraping sound that hurt all the way down his throat.

The Reaper rose without a word. He went to a small table by the window and came back with a cup of water. He slid one hand under Encrid’s head, lifted it just enough, and held the cup to his lips.

It was the same careful hand Encrid remembered from the bridge.

He drank. Half of it went down his throat, and the other half went down his chin. The Reaper did not seem to mind. He set the cup aside and lowered Encrid’s head back onto the pillow.

"Slowly," he said. "You have not spoken in eleven days."

Eleven days.

Encrid stared at the ceiling and let the number settle.

"Where...?" His voice came out as a whisper. He tried again. "Where am I?"

"Somewhere safe."

Encrid stared at him as if asking that wasn’t the answer to his question.

"That is the only answer I can give you." The Reaper sat back down in the chair. "Very few people know this place exists. Fewer know how to reach it. I would like to keep it that way, even with you."

Encrid thought about that for a moment.

He thought about a walled garden, and a girl laughing outside the window, and a man who had spent eleven years watching his daughter slowly die.

He understood.

"Your daughter’s garden," he said.

The Reaper’s face did not change. But he inclined his head very slightly, the same small, precise gesture he had made the first time they met on the frozen training ground behind the granary.

"Her name is Sera," he said. "You will meet her when you can sit up. She has been asking every morning."

Encrid closed his eyes.

There were a hundred questions crowding at the back of his throat. He made himself pick the ones that mattered most.

"The span, what happened?"

"The span fell. The old man’s spell brought it down a few breaths after I lifted you from it."

"And the horde?"

"It turned away. I saw that much before I left." The Reaper paused. "It did not cross, and the roamers seemed like they suddenly lost interest in pursuing further."

"And the people?"

"They are alive." The Reaper’s voice stayed calm and even. "I did not stay to count them. I am sorry. You were dying, and I judged that more urgent."

Encrid opened his eyes again.

Alive.

Eight thousand people, standing in a long dark line along the edge of the Riven. Gus at the front of them, holding the lamp and the letters against his chest. Zuri. Gareth. Ysolde. Rael.

It was not a certain answer, nor was it anything that would help Encrid understand the situation better, but it was more than he had let himself hope for in the last moment on the stone.

He let out a breath, and his ribs reminded him that breathing was still a privilege he had not fully earned back.

"Thank you," he said.

"You do not need to thank me." The Reaper looked at him steadily. "I owed you a third promise. I have kept it. Anything else I do from here is my own choice."

? ? ?

The door opened without a knock.

An old man came in carrying a tray.

He was small and thin, with a white beard trimmed short and white hair that stuck up at the back as if he had slept on it and forgotten. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows. His forearms were spotted with age and stained green at the fingertips. He smelled strongly of crushed herbs and something bitter underneath them.

He put the tray down on the table with a clatter, looked at Encrid, and then looked at the Reaper.

"I told you to call me the moment he woke."

"He woke a few minutes ago."

"And you let him talk." The old man came to the bed and leaned over Encrid without asking permission. He pulled back one of Encrid’s eyelids with his thumb and looked into it. "How much did he talk?"

"A little."

"A little is too much." The old man let go of the eyelid. "Out."

The Reaper of the Blue Moon, the man whose name made nobles across the Empire lock their doors at night, stood up from his chair without a word of protest.

At the door, he stopped.

"I will come back this evening," he said to Encrid.

Then he was gone, and the door closed behind him so quietly that Encrid did not hear the latch.

The old man pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat down in it with a small grunt.

"Don’t look so surprised," he said. "Even he does what his healer tells him. It’s the only sensible thing about him."

Encrid looked at the old man.

Out of habit, without thinking about it at all, he focused his eyes and reached for the skill that had been part of him for almost two years.

’Appraise.’

Nothing happened.

There was no window. No name. No question marks. Not even the black bars he had grown used to seeing over people who stood far above him.

There was only an old man in a chair, looking back at him with sharp, pale eyes.

Encrid frowned.

"Something wrong?" the old man asked.

"No." Encrid made himself stop frowning. "Who are you?"

The old man sighed as if the question bored him.

"People call me the Divine Sage," he said. "I would rather they didn’t. It makes me sound like I should be sitting on a mountain, being wise at people. I’m a healer. I heal things. That’s all."

Encrid stared at him.

The Divine Sage.

He knew the name. Every reader of The Last Age of Radiance knew the name. The old healer of the Eight Stars of Astralis, the man the novel had described as able to put a body back together from almost nothing, as long as there was still a little life left inside it to work with.

If the sword saint was considered the strongest of the eight stars, then the devine sage was the one who held most influence among them. Not because he was strong, he was pitifully weak compared to the other eight stars, but due to his incredible healing powers.

And such a man was sitting in a chair beside Encrid’s bed, picking a dried leaf out of his own beard.

"You were brought to me with your body in a state I have only seen twice before in sixty years," the Sage said. "Both of those men died. So you’ll forgive me if I’m a little interested in how you’re still breathing."

"I don’t know how I’m breathing."

"No. I don’t suppose you do." The Sage looked at him for a long moment. "Your channels look like a river valley after a flood. Everything is still there. But nothing is where it should be, and all of it is torn."

He stood up and went to the tray.

"We’ll talk about what you did to yourself later. Today, you drink this, and you sleep."

He came back with a small clay cup. Whatever was inside it was dark green and smelled like the bottom of a pond.

Encrid looked at it.

"Drink," the Sage said.

Encrid drank.

It tasted worse than it smelled. He forced it down and lay back, and the old man took the empty cup, nodded once, and went out.

The room was quiet again.

The birds were still arguing in the garden.

Encrid lay in the square of sunlight and waited for the bitter drink to pull him back into sleep.

It didn’t. Not yet.

Because now that he was alone, he could see it.

At the very edge of his vision, faint and patient, as if it had been waiting for him for eleven days, a single window was still hanging in the air.

The last one he had never read.

He looked at it.

[ ? QUEST FAILURE ? ]

Then he opened it.

? ? ?