Whumptober Prompts:
No. 7: The way you shake and shiver - Silent panic attack
No. 8: Everything hurts and I'm dying
No. 21: Coughing up blood
No. 30: Please don't touch me
Everything hurts. A roaring maelstrom of pain. A vortex of agony so blindingly black, there is only one explanation. He is dying. Or is he already dead? Is this hell? This all-consuming agony and darkness so dense it is impossible to breathe? Impossible to move, not even the tiniest fraction of an inch? Even thinking is too fucking hard. In the deafening silence of the gaping abyss shreds of grotesquely warped words are drifting by, resisting any attempt to form a meaningful sentence while flashes of senseless syllables, of shapeless colours, flickers of contorted images float about in a swirling soup of pain and panic. Pain and panic, panic and pain so all-encompassing, it fills an entire universe. His universe. With no space for anything else. Not even for his name.
Suddenly there is an explosion of light. He wants to blink, to close his eyes against the brightness, but his eyelids are carved of stone. His entire body feels like made of granite, rigid, paralysed. Petrified with fear and frozen with the eternal coldness of the empty universe. Shivering from frost and fright and, at the same time, burning up with agony. Dying. Dead.
The blinding light vanishes, blends into a greyish twilight, not blackness like before. Something moves in the leaden greyness. Or someone? A blurry form, nothing more than a vague shadow, shapeless, faceless. Too close. Is it her? Every instinct tells him to run, flee to the furthest corner of the continent, but he cannot move his legs, does not know how to. They are dead, dead weight dragging him under the surface of sanity in this infinite sea of lead.
A sudden, searing pain in his arm. NO! Don't touch me, please! But there are no words, no cry, not even a whimper. The words fall from his stone-carved lips, unspoken, unheard, flutter away like dust in the wind. Like ashes in a forest of flames. Ashes of burned trees, ashes of soldiers consumed by fire. He feels like retching, however, even his stomach has turned to stone. Grey granite in a grey world. A world that suddenly explodes with a new kind of agony. Then the darkness returns, envelops him, devours him, until there is nothing left, not even the pain and the fear. Nothing but darkness.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Shit! Marti almost jumps up from the comfortable chaise longue she has been lying on. She must have fallen so deeply asleep that she did not hear the ringing of her alarm clock. Gods, it is already near dark outside and she only intended to nap for half an hour! What if she slept so soundly after the long night of work that she also failed to hear the monitoring box go off? Half panicking, the enchantress checks the magical device. She sighs with relief. Thanks to Melitele, there was no medical emergency. The Nilfgaardian is still alive and his condition not much worse than when she saw him in the morning, at least according to the box. Which is usually quite reliable. Still, she better have a look in person. After another detour to the infirmary to collect the test results. Hopefully the two young witches she has left in charge of the sick mages there have everything under control and will be able to manage without her for another hour or two.
Quickly, Marti changes out of her crumpled dress and into a fresh one made of yellow silk with tulip blossoms of the same flaming colour as her hair. One could argue that a dress like this is not very practical for a healer who might easily get bloodstains on the delicate fabric, or various other kinds of stains. However, the nurses' uniforms used here at Aretuza look so plain and dull, she cannot bring herself to wearing one of them. Instead she simply dons a white apron if necessary. With the prisoner in the dungeons she will probably not need it, no amputations or other kinds of surgery to be executed here, nor does he have any open and bleeding wounds or contagious diseases. Well, she will have to get some fluid into the man to prevent dehydration. If he is still catatonic, this might pose a bit of a problem. But not a problem she cannot handle, she is an experienced healer, after all, one of the best.
Although the two young witches in the infirmary are still far from ranking among that category, thanks to Marti's hard nightly work and instructions all the patients there are stable and set well on the path to recovery. An encouraging outlook as the approaching night is likely to be less strenuous and stressful than the previous one. The results of the blood tests are good news, too. The readings strongly suggest that the Nilfgaardian is neither suffering from hyperthermia nor malignant catatonia, but from a regular fever caused by infection and a less life-threatening subtype of the neurological disorder. There is no cerebral haemorrhage or other obvious damage to the brain tissue either. Whether the prisoner will ever regain the normal functions of his mind, though, is a very different matter. Only time will tell.
The sight of her patient through the bars of the grille door is no less encouraging. He is shivering and shaking worse than before, but he is lying on his other side now and his eyes are closed. He has moved by himself. Perhaps the worst of his acute catatonic state is over? Of course, Marti knows that the symptoms during a catatonic episode can wax and vane, however, this looks a lot more promising than what she found here this morning.
The redheaded enchantress enters the cell and approaches her patient. Besides the easily visible shaking and clearly audible chattering of teeth from the fever chills, Marti immediately notices that something is wrong with the man's breathing. The respiration rate is conspicuously increased and he is wheezing and coughing in his sleep. An infection of the respiratory tract? The sorceress deposits her bag on the floor and squats down next to the cot. His clothes are drenched with sweat and he is clearly delirious. Quickly she casts a warming spell around both of them and magically dries his black shirt and pants. When she touches the prisoner's fever-hot brow, he flinches violently and gives a low moan, but does not wake up. This is good, a reaction to external stimuli, a clear improvement of his condition in spite of the high fever. Which will not be too hard to treat properly as Marti has a good idea of the underlying cause. There is a simple way to verify her hypothesis, too, she only needs to turn the patient onto his back for a moment.
Marti grabs the shivering Nilfgaardian by his shoulder and hip and pulls him toward her. Although she did so as gently as possible, the man's eyes fly wide open with fear and he gasps for air, then starts to cough convulsively. Darn, after what he has gone through, she should have anticipated that the prisoner might panic and given him a sedative before touching him. She has everything in her bag, of course, but now she first needs to help him with the cough attack. Which will not be possible without her touching him again. Well, cannot be helped. Quickly Marti grabs the coughing and gasping, delirious man and pulls him further toward her onto his other side so he would not choke on or inhale any coughed up phlegm by accident.
"Don't be afraid. I'm a healer. I'm here to help, not to hurt you," she repeats over and over in her most soothing bedside tone of voice while with one arm she cradles the sick man's head to her body and with her free hand strokes his sweat-matted hair and shaking back. It seems to work. After some more heavy coughing and trembling he calms down and finally falls asleep once more. Very slowly and gently, Marti lets go of her patient, produces a syringe and the phial containing the sedative from her bag and readies the shot. The man is so exhausted that he does not wake up again when she injects him with the potion, nor does he do so when she carefully places him on his back again and pushes up his shirt to let her hands glide up and down his sweaty chest while murmuring a diagnostic spell. It is as she suspected. His right middle lung lobe is badly infected. Judging from the rapid onset of the illness, no doubt a case of aspiration pneumonia. Unconscious after the interrogation session with Tissaia, he must have inhaled some of his vomit which then has caused inflammation and infection of the lung tissue. Which was further exacerbated by the prisoner's inability to cough while insensible with catatonia. Well, now that she has gotten to the root of the ailment, it will be no problem to treat it effectively. Marti swiftly finds the necessary potion in her well-equipped bag. Unfortunately, she will have to wake the Nilfgaardian up for it as it has to be ingested. Cannot be helped either. Anyway, after having lost a considerable amount of body fluid through profuse sweating, he dearly needs to drink something. This time, however, the effect of the sedative will hopefully prevent another panic attack.
It does. It takes quite a bit of coaxing until Cahir is awake and aware enough to swallow the potion the healer is holding to his lips and drink the cup of herbal tea she has conjured up for him, but, as Marti is a professional, she gets the job done without further incident. Very good. Just one more thing to do before she can leave for now and have a well-earned, extensive dinner. From thin air, the enchantress conjures up a warm, woolen blanket and drapes it over the prisoner's still slightly trembling form. The warming spell will not last for long after she has left. And, with no pane in the barred window and gusts of wind from the ocean blowing into the cell almost unhindered, it is lousily cold in here. How Tissaia expects the prisoner to survive in a freezing hole like this without anything to protect him from the cold is a frigging mystery to her ...
Only when Marti is back in her chambers sitting down in her favourite arm chair, a tray laden with several dishes of delicious foods placed on the little table next to her, she realises that she has made a mistake. She should have donned an apron. Where she held the Nilfgaardian's head close to her body, the delicate fabric of her beautiful dress is speckled with blood and mucus. Darn. It will be a devil of a job to get those stains out again. How very stupid of her ...