4. Soul-splicing
Soul-splicing
Islept for eight days. Two of them, I was told, had been spent in General Xilsatra’s bed with the general himself tending me.
Though I received a number of penetrating looks about those circumstances, I didn’t let anyone in on the details.
I wasn’t even certain how many of the details were real.
All of my memories from the time the foxen had bitten me for the first time until I’d woken up were jumbled together, splinters and shards mixed up with longer spans of time, and the unreality of it all left me uneasy.
Given the circumstances, I didn’t return to my squad. Command was passed to my second while I was on medical leave, and a squad of the First Army delivered me to a small town on the river so I could be shipped home on a riverboat.
The trip was easy enough. Aside from nightmares, which I staved off by shacking up with one of the more attractive of the crew for the duration of the journey, I didn’t feel out-of-sorts.
I knew very little about soul-scarring—I’d never anticipated needing to know about it, after all—but it seemed odd that I felt… normal.
Once I reached the city of Xaerys and reported to the city garrison, I was directed to a specialist with the Armies.
After an interminable interview, she spent a long time examining me, hovering her hands over the places I’d been injured and peering at the already-fading white marks on my skin where I’d been bitten and clawed by the foxen.
Without telling me anything, the healer retreated to her desk and started fussing with a bunch of diagrams, making marks and muttering to herself.
At last I couldn’t bear it anymore. I cleared my throat and gave her a winning smile when she shot me a glare. “So, how bad is it?” I asked, trying to act cheerful despite the sudden ball of fear knotting in my gut.
“It should be awful,” she said, frowning at me as if I was causing problems on purpose.
“You should be barely healed. Missing time, trouble remembering certain things, that sort of thing.” The healer clicked her teeth together.
“But you’re not. I can tell where the injuries were by the shift in the flow of your energy, but by your description, you should be a right mess.
Pardon the visual, but it’s as if you swore you were mauled by wolves, but instead of missing chunks of flesh, you came to me with a few deep scratches. ”
I blinked at her.
She flattened her lips and started tapping her foot.
“I have the healer records,” she said, picking up a scroll.
“Stop the energy hemorrhage, dump enough magic in you to top up your reserves, heal the physical damage. Basic field medic care. Quick and dirty. Keep you alive long enough to get you to me.” The healer chucked the scroll back onto her desk with casual disdain.
“You shouldn’t be perky enough for two orgasms in the morning, let alone smiling at me with that boyish charm. Is that really all they did?”
My cheeks heated and my ears dropped, both at the casual way the healer announced that she knew exactly what I’d been doing before coming to my appointment and the fact that I’d have to admit to that whole strange interaction with Alluin—with General Xilsatra.
“Ah,” she said, her eyes sharper than I preferred. “Well, go on. Tell me.”
“I… I was…injured,” I started carefully, trying not to let the horror of the memories rise. “Still…fighting, I think. My memories aren’t…great.”
The healer watched me in silence, not looking away.
I made a face. “General Xilsatra pulled me away from the…it,” I said, swallowing hard. “I didn’t…realize that it was…that I didn’t need to fight.” Acid burned the back of my throat. “I fought him. I, um. With my allure geas. He…kissed me. I made him. I—”
She flapped her hand at me. “Not important,” she said in a dismissive voice.
“Momentary interactions have minimal impact on soul injuries, and that’s after they’re receptive to external interventions.
You were, pardon the description, a gnawed open wound spurting metaphorical blood everywhere.
You could have made sweet love and it wouldn’t have done a thing to fix your injuries. ”
I blinked at her again, turning redder.
“Eh, no matter, no matter,” she said, busying herself with her diagrams. “What happened after you got hauled out of that cesspit and your…” She unrolled the scroll and squinted at it. “…class two squadron healer took a crack at you?”
She was insane, I decided. Normal people weren’t this cheerful talking about horrific injuries to the soul. Useful, I supposed, that someone could be this perky about it, but still unsettling.
“I remember being in bed with General Xilsatra. Not, ah… ‘in bed.’ Just…in his bed, with him there.” I looked away uncomfortably. “He was…holding me. Not anything else. Just holding me. Telling me that I was… That I did well. That I didn’t have to be afraid. I fell asleep like that.”
The memories of his voice murmured to me. “You’re extraordinary, Zhiolas. You did so well.” I closed my eyes for a moment and took a careful breath, the warmth of those words easing some of my anxiety, even this far removed from their context.
“Hm,” the healer said. I glanced sidelong at her to find her peering at me with beady eyes. “How long?”
“Oh, er, I, um… I wasn’t awake for very long, I don’t think,” I said. “After I fell asleep, I was down for eight days, they said.”
“Yes, yes, I know. Healer report, remember?” She tapped on the scroll in emphasis. “How long was he with you, Lieutenant?”
I wet my lips. “Two days, they said.”
“Ah.” She sat back looking triumphant. “Yes, that would do it.”
I frowned at her. “Do what, precisely?”
The healer shrugged one shoulder. “Soul-splicing. It’s not that common. Obviously, I suppose, given that most people who get a hunk of their soul torn out and eaten don’t make it out of the predator’s jaws, so to speak. You got fair torn up, but the foxen only ate one bite, correct?”
My vision grayed for a moment at its name, but I blinked away the haze, refusing to panic in front of this woman. “Yes,” I said, the word clipped.
“Well, there you have it,” she said, sounding pleased.
“There I have what?” I asked. The question came out more annoyed than I intended.
She gave me a chiding look. “Your answer,” she said, as if I was a particularly dim-witted child.
“The reason you’re not a devastated mess is that you developed a natural soul-splice with General Xilsatra.
Don’t worry, it’s not a disaster, you don’t have to have big emotions about it,” the healer said, reeling off the words like they’d been memorized.
“You weren’t actually missing that much soul, so the piece that you’re sharing with General Xilsatra is concomitantly small. It’s really quite fascina—”
“The piece that I’m what?!” I squawked, my voice cracking.
Her expression pinched. “Do follow along, Lieutenant,” she said.
“You were damaged. He wasn’t, and he was taking care of you for quite some time—holding you, comforting you, all of that sort of thing.
” The healer beamed at me. “People in close contact overlap their auras, for lack of a better description. It’s why I can read your energy by passing my hands close to your body.
When your energy is whole, you might affect each other, but it takes a long time to get entangled.
If you’ve got a big chunk missing, if the right pieces align for long enough, you sort of…
glue together. Now, don’t look like that. It’s quite alright.”
I was, indeed, looking ‘like that.’ Horrified, mostly, and sick to my stomach with guilt. Alluin had been being kind, going out of his way to make amends for the terrible danger he’d sent me into, all unaware, and—
“I know what I’m doing. You don’t have to feel guilty,” he murmured in my memory, bare skin against mine and breath warm against my neck. “Don’t be afraid.”
“Gods-fucking-dammit,” I muttered, dropping my face into my hands.
The healer scooted her chair over and patted me on the knee.
“There, there,” she said. “It’s quite alright.
It’s only a little piece, so the side effects aren’t that extreme.
Likely all that’s changed is that you’ll feel unusually comfortable around each other, as if you’ve known each other for millennia.
You might—though I doubt it—occasionally have dreams or sensations that reflect his emotional state.
Hm. Let’s see. If he dies, you’ll be soul-scarred, but not vice-versa.
Actually, I can’t think of any downsides for him—oh, no, that’s not true,” she said, going subdued.
I peered at her through my fingers. “Mm?”
“Well, it’s just… Well, his soul is whole, but because of the splicing, even if you’re next to each other, it’s not…
completely his, do you understand? Because it’s also yours.
And you…” The healer shrugged again, wearing a helpless expression.
“You’re whole, too, but only because part of you is him.
So neither of you are ever completely yourselves. ”
“And that means…?”
She gave me a regretful smile, her eyes sad. “It’s only… You can’t have a soulmate if you aren’t a complete soul, Lieutenant.”
The words hit me like a blow. I closed my eyes and let the information wash over me, refusing to cry.
I’d known what I was doing when I walked into a soul-eater’s lair.
I’d thought it was weaker, thought I’d only be facing empathy and manipulation instead of the allure geas they developed as they aged, but I would have gone even if I’d known.
Alluin would have asked me, and I would have agreed.
The life of one man was worth stopping a monster like that.
“It’s not so bad, is it?” she asked, sounding a little desperate. “It’s not as if most of us ever have soulmates. One in a thousand, maybe, and General Xilsatra has lived a very long time without meeting one, so the shape of his soul is clearly unusual enough that it’s unlikely—”
“I would like you to stop, now,” I said, forcing the words through the thickness in my throat.
“Right,” she said. “Of course.” She hovered for a moment, then retreated, moving back to her desk and starting to fuss with her scrolls and tools again.
My hand crept up to my neck, covering the place where the foxen had first bitten me.
I remembered with painful clarity the look on her face as she chewed and swallowed, the hunger and anger and dripping saliva.
Whatever she’d taken from me had been lost forever in that moment.
She’d ripped me open. Mangled me, torn at me, mauled me nearly to death.
And Alluin had put me back together. Given my ruined soul the pattern it needed to settle back into place, and filled in the gaping wound that had been my soul’s throat with himself.
How could I possibly repay something like that?
I should be feeling the weight of that debt, the whole landscape tilting towards needing to right the balance, and yet—
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Damn you,” I said under my breath. There was nothing I could do about it. Alluin—General Xilsatra—had made the decision for me. He’d been my commander and he’d had every right to make that call, but the circumstances were so strange that I didn’t know how to feel about it.
If it had been merely physical, if I’d been missing a critical part of my body and the healers hadn’t had the materials to regenerate the tissue—if he’d given a piece of his flesh to me—it still would have been intimate and uncomfortable, but at least I had a framework for understanding that decision.
This, though… The kindness, the gentleness, the loving care for someone he didn’t even know…
It went so far beyond duty, or even selflessness. Who did something like that?
Alluin, apparently.
I let out a careful breath and sat back up, schooling my expression before looking over at the healer. “Who will be privy to the knowledge that I’m…” I had to take another moment to compose myself. “…soul-spliced with the general?”
The healer examined me for a moment. “I suppose that’s up to you and General Xilsatra,” she said quietly.
“The exact circumstances of your recovery aren’t critical to my report, and I don’t plan to add them to the official file.
But,” she said before I could respond, loudly enough that I snapped my mouth shut, “anyone with the knowledge of your injury and General Xilsatra’s assistance could surely piece it together.
And you ought to know that it’s not a shameful thing, Lieutenant Ulahana,” the healer added.
“Intimate? Private? Yes, of course. But not something to be embarrassed about.”
I flashed her a smile I didn’t feel. “I’m not embarrassed,” I said, which was true enough. “I’m not sure what to do with the knowledge, though, or how to feel about him. He didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him. I was simply a soldier with the right set of skills for the job.”
“Well! That’s not so bad. That’s only personal stuff,” she said, turning back to her desk and marking up one of the diagrams. “You’re free to go, Lieutenant. Have a good life, and I hope never to see you again.”
“Likewise,” I said, and made my escape.