Christofer awoke to the feeling of his soul being licked by static. No slow stretch. No coffee cravings. In fact he had never liked coffee, coffee was just sulfuric mud concoctions that people deluded themselves into liking because the stimulants within it made their heart race. What he felt was just weight. Thick, heavy weight. Blankets heavy with sweat and the sting of oils, the aching press of his own limbs too stiff to move, the residue of pain swimming under the skin like bruised fish. Blankets soaked with his own sweat. Skin slick with salves. Limbs stiff and hesitant.

  His shoulder pulsed with that heat — the stitched kind, the buried kind — under layers that smelled like mint, copper, and moss. The wound in his arm itched. Pain was no longer sharp. It lived now in the walls of his body. It had unpacked. Numbed. Voices swam through the walls, muddied, indistinct. Then one cut through, hard and familiar.

  “Move him again and I’ll test the ointment on your lungs, Frank!”

  It was the old man, Gerard. Spoken with surprising lucidity. A metal bowl clattered against stone.

  “He moved his head,” came Jack’s voice, distant.

  “Didn’t say anything.” another reply echoed, by someone undetermined, answering someone he hadn’t heard.

  “He shouldn’t be saying anything yet. He’s been bleeding from six stiched wounds thus far.”

  Amidst the murmuring, Christofer slowly opened his eyes. The ceiling above him was wooden, cracked in a spiderweb of old water stains. One of them resembled a screaming face. He stared at it until his vision settled. His mouth was dry, but his shoulder was worse — wrapped in soaked linen, stiff with herbal paste. It radiated heat like an open hearth. His right arm was immobile, bound to a board and crisscrossed with straps. He couldn’t feel his fingers. The ceiling dripped.

  It wasn’t rain. It was some kind of root-based sap compound Gerard had fed through the rafters for "humidity balance." All it did was occasionally drip into Christofer’s mouth while he was too weak to move. It tasted like celery with abandonment issues. He tried to shift his weight and immediately regretted it as a web of pulled muscle fibers flared in protest. His chest burned with aftershocks. Gerard’s experimental red concoction had dulled the sharp edges of agony, but left behind a general numb heat — like falling asleep in a too-warm bath and waking up half-drowned.

  The blanket itched. His ribs itched. His right arm — braced, splinted, and slathered in something that smelled like mint and burnt toast — throbbed with a dull, living pain that never quite let go. To the right: a patient sobbed quietly into their blanket over a lost limb. Gerard’s building wasn’t built for this many people. Mercenaries spilled into every hallway, wounded and agitated. Some were sleeping with their boots on, others shouting at Jack for not having enough linens. Jack, meanwhile, was dragging a rolled-up bear pelt twice his size toward a screaming soldier missing most of his eyebrow on the side of his face due to a violent sharp gash that had clawed across his face.

  The curtain was yanked open with the urgency of a tax collector with arthritis. Rain whispered against the windows like secrets too tired to shout. Across the room, the fireplace hissed softly. After a long time of staring into the ceiling, Christofer heard something, a whisper. It was not muffled, it was seemingly intentionally quiet.

  Christofer turned his head — slowly, painfully — toward the open window where a pair of boots hung off the edge. There was no one there. The whisper was strangely familiar. It stopped. His’s gaze shifted slowly to Gerard squatting by the bed. The whisper was not from him. He frowned in confusion. Gerard finished scrubbing the cracked skin around Christofer’s right arm, revealing a network of bruised veins glowing faintly. The flesh looked bruised, overcooked — and underneath, it pulsed with something that wasn't entirely blood.

  “We don’t know what it is yet,” Gerard muttered. “Some mix of hex bleed and troll ichor. If you start dreaming in reverse or vomiting numbers, let me know.”

  The old man once again wrapped up his arm with fresh bandage. Christofer exhaled and let his head fall back. He blinked slowly and looked out the rain-streaked window at the stable. A vague memory flickered — the feeling of mud, weightless adrenaline, a mug cracking against bone. His right hand twitched, and he glanced at the bandages. A faint glow, greenish-yellow, pulsed under the wrappings. Like a heartbeat. Or a warning light.

  “We stitched what we could. There’s something in your blood. Something borrowed. Might be troll marrow, might be whatever left the scar on your shoulder. Either way, I wouldn’t get too comfortable.”

  Christofer couldn’t reply, he blinked and made the subtlest nods of having heard him.

  “We packed your shoulder with crushed vine-leather and stitched through three layers of muscle with troll sinew — if the bleeding starts again, I’m not reopening you.”

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  The room flickered slightly. He blinked. Just once. But in that instant, the shadows in the corners bent — not away from the firelight, but toward him. The whisper returned, now more audible than before. His heart was pounding in his chest and his pulse was thumping in his neck.

  ‘Ghosts? No, wait, those don’t exist, I think? Or do they? Trolls do, apparently. So solid maybe on that one.’ he thought.

  There was a clear resonance with the voice, but it seemed to come from within. He couldn’t actually hear syllables being pronounced, but the echo managed nevertheless to convey its intention. He didn’t hear a voice, he felt a voice. Christofer felt like he was hearing an echo from a long tunnel. He felt his shoulders tense up, as if a practiced instinct was urging him to do as it said, for reasons he had seemingly forgotten. He felt it urged him to utter a phrase. Uneasy but curious to see what would happen, he closed his eyes and repeated the words as they came to him.

  “Utevo… Res… Stillo” he said, with a pause in between each word.

  As the last word left his lips he felt the markings along his body flashed with heat and glowed a yellowish green glow that drained the color in his skin around the markings. The blanket over his body lit up. Muscles twitched and the warm electrifying sensation branched out, he winced as it echoed pain into areas where he was still wounded. When he opened his eyes again, the gecko was sitting on his chest. The green creature stared unceasingly with its two large eyes. A tongue twisted up its face and licked its eyes.

  “Greetings...” rippled out in Christofer’s mind.

  “Huh. I-uh...” Christofer whispered in surprise and stared back at the gecko,

  “Vocalization is unnecessary. Use your inner voice, your thoughts.”

  “Thoughts? How would my thoughts reach you? Wait, do all of my thoughts reach you?”

  “Accounts vary wildly about how the human organism truly functions, but one aspect we know perfectly well. Regarding the human condition, we are one. Two halves inhabiting a greater whole. Despite rifts and inscrutable intrusions in the mindscape, our tether remains strong.”

  Christofer grimaced, the instructions were so abstract that they basically felt religious. His only experience of religion was as a kid, attending a park-your-child-here-while-adults-pray kind of establishment. The memory made him grimace; it didn’t help. He wasn’t insane enough to make sense of it.

  ‘Then again, I’m talking to a gecko, so maybe not?’

  “Second, How?” he asked the gecko.

  The gecko slapped its limbs, moving from Christofer’s chest up the left side of his face to his forehead. Its words rippled out from within.

  “You know more than you see and see more than you know. To repeat the unconscious path consciously, you only need to trust your instincts. Take a deep breath and imagine yourself following the beaten synaptic path, reaching for our tether by burrowing into the vast neuroelectrical nexus that is your core. Just – Think."

  “I don’t know how, but think I get it…” Christofer whispered, “So in summary…”

  ‘B-Big... Think.’ he thought with his eyes closed tightly.

  Christofer’s head throbbed.

  “You’re getting there. Now, without the constipation clench.” The gecko’s tongue licked its eyes again, “The pathways in your brain are like the muscles in your body. The more you use the pathways in your brain, the bigger and stronger they get. The easier it gets. That’s basic neuroscience, neurons that fire together, wire together. Do it again.”

  ‘Big think?’

  The gecko patted him on the forehead with its tiny limb.

  “Better. Again.”

  Christofer tried once more, slower this time. The pulse in his bandaged wrist synced with the gecko’s stare, a rhythm he didn’t understand but didn’t resist. He heard someone cough up blood across the room. Somewhere outside, a dog barked and then went silent.

  Through the fog of steam and sweat, he felt it — pressure shifting. Christofer closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath.

  A sound made him open his eyes again. Boots crunched outside. Muffled orders. Steel against wood. A mercenary passed by the open door, armor half-removed, left eye swollen shut. Another followed — limping, dragging a pike with a burned tip. Christofer looked to the window just in time to catch the silhouette — a man on horseback, cloak soaked in rain, face drawn and angular beneath a soldier’s helmet. The captain. Watching him. Arriving once more by the hanging sign that spelled out the words ‘Herbalist Gerard’, the captain adjusted his weight in the stirrups, lifted his leg and stepped down on the cobblestone path that led downward toward the building Christofer was in. He approached the handle and pulled the door open. His boots thuded along the hall.

  “Is he stable?” The Captain appeared in the corner of his vision, glancing down at Frank wiping a thick deep reddish brown black fluid from his hands with a rag that may have once been white.

  “He shouldn’t be moving yet,” Gerard muttered over his shoulder to the Captain.

  “He needs a few days of rest, at least. If you’re hurried beyond that, we need a stopgap measure to keep him healing properly. Any more questions?”

  The Captain didn’t answer right away. He stepped closer, boots thudding softly against the boards — then stopped, his gaze flicking down toward the base of the bed. His brow furrowed.