pascas

me: if you lost your genitals would you still feel like a man?

“no”

would you feel like a woman?

“no?”

so you wouldn’t feel male or female

“yeah what’s your point?”

So, you wouldn’t fit into the gender binary of male or female? :)

him:

Yeah basically

“so why do they use “they” so much”?

if you were a woman would you want to be called a man?

“no…”

And the opposite?

“no…”

Why why would you want someone to call you male or female if you’re not male or female then?”

The death is essential. If the death does not happen, the recovery cannot happen. Recovered patients are curse-free. They are the same as they were before death because if *I* am there, if *I* administer the care, then *I* can make sure that they don’t take even ten steps to the Underworld before they’re back. Other necromancers don’t take nearly the amount of care that I do, arriving sometimes days or weeks after the death. I’m the emergency ‘mancer. I get myself there. *I take very good care of my patients*.

When I’m allowed to treat them!!

“If I don’t do the procedure as soon as possible, the chance of irreparable trauma to your son’s mental state will become immense,” I explain for the 50th time to the stolid, stoic lord and lady who summoned me. Their wizard, an old classmate of mine who did the actual summoning, fidgets uncomfortably with her staff. She only told them I could help their son, but not exactly how.

“The procedure being killing him,” says the lord through gritted teeth.

“Yes,” I say, trying not to sigh. ‘Temporary cessation of vital functions’ flew over their heads although at least now they actually understand what’s going on, unlike many people who agree to my terms and swear they understand and then lose their minds because they didn’t actually know what was happening.

“Are you certain there’s no other way?” Asks the lady, looking desperately at the wizard. Not me, the actual specialist: she keeps clutching her faith symbol and avoiding my gaze as much as possible. “This can’t be the only way to save him!”

The wizard opens her mouth to begin the 50th time she’s tried to reassure her lady of this course, but I’m sick to death of hearing it. I could be helping others. I could be taking a nap.

“It’s either this or an apology to the Neighbor you annoyed,” I say sharply, which makes both the lord and lady stiffen. “And recompense for the damages.”

“All we did was farm our lands,” the lord says stubbornly. “What’s sun is ours, what’s shade is theirs. Tilling the soil happens with farming, everyone knows that.”

“Convincing me that blowing up a barrow with a gunpowder is a legitimate farming method isn’t going to help your son, Lord.” As he glares at me, I say, “ I understand that this is an extremely difficult decision to make, but we’ve been here over an hour. If you’re not going to make this decision with the full understanding of everything it entails, I’m going to leave.”

“What?! No, don’t leave!” The wizard looks genuinely alarmed. She grabs my arm and pulls me aside, turning so the lord and lady can’t hear us. “Look, I’ll just get them out of the room, you do what needs to be done, and then–”

“And then that poor little boy will be recovered to a place where the people who claim to be his parents look at him like a monster and a demon because they refuse to accept that their little boy is actually alright.” I yank my arm out of her grasp, glaring. “Ask me how I know.”

“At least he’d still be alive and would have a chance, rather than being in such horrible pain! He’s only five!” The wizard’s voice breaks on the last word.

“I’m not unsympathetic, but if his parents are not on board, he’s going to wake up a prisoner of people who will be convinced that he came back wrong and will try to beat, boil, and bleed the devil out of him. It would absolutely be better for him to stay dead than to experience that at the hands of people who are convinced they’re doing it because they love him.”

“That wouldn’t happen,” says the wizard through gritted teeth. “I wouldn’t let it.”

“You couldn’t stop your lord and lady from using explosives on fairy land and that was just a stupid decision. You’ll understand if I have serious doubts about your efficacy.”

The wizard’s eyes flash with rage, but then I hear a throat being cleared behind me and we both turn. The lord is standing, the lady is clutching her emblem and praying fervently. Both of them look unhappy. None of this gives me any information about how they’re going to decide and so I don’t react, but the wizard is trembling with emotion.

“We’ve discussed,” he says, stonily meeting my eyes, “And while we appreciate you coming here, we must ask you to leave.”

“No!” The wizard shrieks, collapsing to her knees. That startles me more than anything, especially when she lunges at the lord and clutches his clothes. “My lord, he’s your heir! Your son! You can’t let him suffer like this! He’s being turned inside-out from the toes upwards, he’s–”

“If anyone finds out that he was killed and brought back, the peasants would riot,” says the lord, which makes me narrow my eyes. “It would be unfair for us to escape the fate that so many of our servants have already suffered. Furthermore, dabbling in witchcraft and sorcery would have us all excommunicated by the church and we would lose everything. We could even die.”

“He’s dying right now! He’s dying because YOU-”

The lord backhands the wizard across the mouth. He’s a big man, solid enough to pull the plows that till his land, and she’s a small woman who spends most of her time at a desk and over books. It’s a wonder that her neck muscles are strong enough to avoid internal decapitation as she makes a full rotation before she crashes to the floor with a moan.

Her frame is very similar to mine. And my spellcasting times are longer. I clench my hands and look impassively at the lord, glad that my high-necked robe hides the hammering of my pulse. Interestingly the lady reacts not at all; she’s still praying, and I wonder if that’s actually a little smile on her face or a trick of the light. I watch her out of the side of my eye as I continue looking at the lord.

“Just so we’re absolutely clear, Lord, you are stating that as his parent, you do not consent to the procedure?”

He nods curtly. I look at the lady, who still refuses to look at me.

“And you, Lady, as the patient’s parent, do not consent to the procedure on his behalf?”

She makes a bitter chuckle. “Someone must protect the poor boy’s soul as much as possible, as well as the safety of our own people.”

The emblem of her faith is one that strictly prohibits lying, which was the root of their objection to necromancy: they consider it as a huge lie to the God of Death (never mind that they don’t actually speak to this God at all and I do, but I digress). I cock my head and repeat my question, watching her closely when I say “as the patient’s parent”.

She flinches. The wizard sobs. Ah.

There are a lot of things I could do, but they all bring their own amount of trouble. But arguably my entire profession is nothing but trouble and I’ve entered a particularly contentious field, so I say, “I need a statement from the patient’s mother.”

“You’ve already had it,” says the lord, thinning his Iips.

“My profession requires extremely specific verbiage. I need medical consent from the mother if she’s alive and unless that has been explicitly signed over to another party, I cannot in good faith say that the patients needs are being served and that I can therefore leave.” I hold up my pendant, bright untarnished silver in a necromancer’s shadowball and ringed by a halo of artemesia leaves. It’s a symbol that makes it explicitly clear that the Gods of Healing and Death are sisters. “My gods won’t let me. One way or another I need a medical statement from the – ”

“I consent!” The wizard shrieks, making the lord and lady both yell and me let out a huge sigh of relief. “I consent! Do it!”

“How dare you?” The lady shouts, shaking with fury. “You gave up everything! You have no claim on him, none!”

“That was the only way you people would let me stay near him!” The wizard staggers to her feet and I reach out to steady her. She squeezes my arm but all her attention is for the lord and lady, who look more passionately murderous over her embarrassing them than they did about the incoming death of their son. “ I gave you my title and the right to name him, but I never gave you his life!”

“Where’s my patient?” I ask the wizard, who stumbles – but then a portal opens up on the floor in front of me. I forgot she spellcasted with footwork. “Great, then. Off I go.”

“Wait!” The lord shouts, lunging for me as I step forward. “I said no! I forbid you–”

“Malice negates the damaging parent’s rights,” I shoot back right before dropping through the floor and falling into the patient’s room. The portal vanishes above me comma closing so neatly I only get a half seconds of an enraged male scream.

The room is dark, quiet, and stiflingly humid with the rank scent of sweat and much worse. A gift from my Gods is that I can see in the dark and beyond, so I don’t have to torment my poor little patient by turning lights on to see him on the bed, drenched in sweat, unconscious, and with what looks like two amputated legs to the knees. But as I watch, the flesh slowly creeps backwards up over his thighs, peeling back in ropes of red muscle and powdery casts of bone.

I know this curse. It kills the victim only when their own flesh has encased their face after a solid month of slow inverting, muscles and nerves alive and intact the whole time. Adults have lost their minds just after losing their feet. I have seen so many fairy curses but I cannot recall the last time I broke down and cried at the sight of one. I’m definitely going to break down after I fix this one.

He’s asleep, so deeply asleep that he feels nothing. Only an accomplished wizard could manage this depth of unconsciousness for long and particularly when the culprit is fairy magic. I’m very grateful since the unawareness of pain means that his mind has a much better chance of being intact after he recovers.

I locate the special soft divot at the back of his head and neck and slip the slimmest of my long needles into my palm. Tears spring to my eyes as the baby-softness of his skin yanks at my old leathery heartstrings like a archer.

“You’re a brave little boy,” I whisper as I settle the needle and plunge the five inches of silken steel into his brain. The shudder of the point hitting the opposite side is almost lost in the whole-body shudder as his life flees his tortured body.

But not from me.

It takes a longer time than usual since in this case, the body has been so severely modified that it is incompatible with recovered life and therefore I have to rebuild the entire structure, but it’s still less than an hour until the little boy is totally himself, awake, and most importantly, no longer in pain. I also tweaked his memories while I was pulling the Heaven Needle out, so he remembers nothing of the curse or its effects.

He does, however, remember why he was the one who got punished by the fairies.

“Lord Father said I wasn’t allowed back in the castle until I could control my magic around the baby, and that I might as well make myself useful.” He says this into the crook of my neck as I carry him back to the one who actually loves him: I don’t know the layout of the castle but I can sense her energy, which was going absolutely wild while I was doing my work and made me very curious, but it wasn’t like I could drop my concentration to find out. The important thing is that it hasn’t snuffed out.

“So he sent you into that barrow to practice your power, then?”

“Yes. He said there was Good Earth in there that was being hidden by shadow and that our serfs could make better use of it.” The little boy hugs me tightly. “Was she alright?”

“What she?”

“The little fae girl.” As my heart stops in my chest, he says, “She came to see what I was doing.”

“What did she look like?” Please, please, please, let her be a changeling. I can’t do anything about fullblooded fae, they’re immortal and soulless, but -

“She looked like a girl, but with sparklies.”

“Pointed ears? Sharp cheeks?”

“No. Just soft face, like me.”

Please, please, please. I chant it in my head as we turn a corner, go up a flight of stairs, then go down a hall and come to a large door that would normally be flanked by guards, except those were dismissed as soon as I came into the castle. The Lord and Lady didn’t want anyone to know they were trucking with foul necromancers.

“We’re coming in,” I call ahead, shouldering one of the heavy doors open.

The wizard rushes to us as soon as we’re inside the room. Immediately my death sense lets me know that the Lord and Lady are dead but there’s no trace of violence as far as I can see. More interesting, the wizard is now wearing the Lady’s dress and I can tell there’s an enchantment over her that presumably makes her look like the Lady. I give her a questioning look as she grabs the little boy from my arms and hugs him so tight he squeaks a little, but I don’t get an answer until much later in the evening, after the little lord’s miraculous recovery has been announced and a message sent to the local fairies, offering apologies and my services. Once everything is done for the day, we sit in what is now the Lady Wizard’s receiving room and sip some excellent, much-appreciated wine.

“They wouldn’t let me stay with him without giving up my rights and binding myself to their service, which was why I needed their permission to have you do anything.”

“I understand that part, and I also assume that once the recovery process began on my end, all of the bindings holding you fell apart and that’s why they’re not here anymore. My question is, why are you wearing her face and not his?”

“It’s easier to maintain an illusion if it’s closer to my normal form and no one will think twice about a mother wanting to hold her son.” Her gaze darkens as she looks into her glass. “I have five years to make up for.”

“Does the boy know?”

“Oh, he’s always known. We’ve been together in dreams every night since he was conceived so he’s never exactly been without me, but the times we’ve been allowed to be together in the same room since he was taken from me can be counted on one hand. Perhaps if he looked more like his father and less like me, it would have been different, but…”

“I’m surprised the Lord’s wife put up with that.”

“It was steal my baby or have their marriage annulled for infertility, and the political landscape would have destroyed them over the annulment.”

“Is it going to destroy you?”

She scoffs. “Before I was a wizard, I was the third daughter of a duke. I’ll eat these backwater nobles for breakfast. I’m sure I can even manage a ‘remarriage’ without any trouble.”

“I’m starting to see why they bound you instead of just contracting with you.”

She laughs and then cocks her head at me. “Considering that the position of Castle Wizard is now open, I don’t suppose…?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Just thought I’d ask. By the way, you are correct in that the little girl was a high-ranked changeling and that she is very much in need of your help. Now that my boy is proof of concept, maybe they’ll accept it and we can put this whole incident behind us.”

That raises my brows. “You’d do that?”

She smiles thinly. “Behind isn’t the same as forgotten. But I can’t say that I also wouldn’t behave just as intensely when my child was hurt, particularly when our statuses make it impossible to proceed with justice through normal channels, so I’m willing to decide that neither of us were at our best.”

Fortunately, it’s a mindset that the King Under The Hill wholeheartedly agrees with once he lets me fix his changeling girl. In some ways she’s lucky because she actually died right when everything exploded so she doesn’t remember any pain at all, and one thing she’d made very clear upon recovering was that the explosion was an accident, which meant that the King had vastly overreacted and none of his brethren would have come to his aid if the human neighbors had declared war.

In any case, these particular neighbors have made peace. In the morning, I’m off to see another case. Very often I wish I was much more than conventional type of healer, whom everybody was glad to see, but death is a type of healing as well and I always treat my patients with care.

KISS KISS FALL IN LOVE~ 💖💖💖

I have feelings about how these two are mirror opposites in reaction to monstrous trauma.

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