Hasan arrived before Reshid had a chance to do more than look over Yannick and Idrin’s injuries. He took Reshid’s report without comment and then ordered him and a few other recruits to help bring the injured to the stables, where Agatha and a handful of soldiers were setting up a hospital for the wounded.

At first, the village had looked as if it were about to be overrun by ghouls, but as it turned out, Reshid and the others were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. A scar of destruction ran from the edge of the village to the spot where the short battle had taken place. Some of the ghouls had run off to attack individual homes, but most had taken part and died in the main assault. The remainder caused a lot of property damage, but the villagers weren’t as helpless or as fragile as humans on the surface, so no revenants died, though not for lack of injuries.

The hospital turned out to be the open space in front of the stables where they ate their meals. Human soldiers were setting up cots in neat rows, most of which were already occupied. Idrin was awake, but too addled to walk under her own power, so Reshid guided her to a cot to sit. She didn’t speak and he was starting to worry that her head injury was serious. He drew from his essence crystaland the grass beneath his feet, feeling the revitalizing power fill him.

“I’ll have you fixed up in a sec…” A heavy hand landed on his shoulder and startled him. Yannick stood next to him with a serious expression on his face and grunted, pointing meaningfully at his jaw, which was horrifically broken. Reshid took an involuntary step back before collecting himself. He hadn’t seen how bad the damage was when Yannick was still unconscious.

“Alright, that looks a little more urgent. Uh… Why don’t you sit down here?”

The jaw was a simple thing to fix, if more than a little disturbing. When he originally started repairing his body to a younger, less rickety version of itself, he had just drawn in essence and waited for it to do its thing. With a bit of practice, he’d learned that he could focus it on whatever problem area he wanted to address. A localized injury like Yannick’s would be relatively quick and simple.

Telling Yannick not to move, he just held it shut and in place, picturing the broken and torn tissues growing back together while infusing them with essence that he drew from his crystal. It took even less essence than he expected, knitting back together easily in seconds. As soon as he let go, a stream of creative curses began to emit from Yannick’s mouth.

Ignoring him, Reshid decided to experiment a little. He snatched up Yannick’s horn, which the man was holding in his arms like a baby, and held it up to the bleeding stump on his head. The fleshy bits on the inside knit back together easily, but the crack around the hard part didn’t close. Hopefully, Yannick’s own essence abilities would do the rest.

“That’s good enough,” the ram-revenant said, “See to Idrin. I need to talk to Hasan right away. He needs to know what just happened.”

Reshid frowned at him as he rose. “I already reported to Hasan. Charlie and Em went after it to try to figure out where it came from. I assume he’s waiting to hear from them.”

Yannick, who had started to walk away, stopped and turned around, staring at him incredulously.

“They did what!? Didn’t they see what that thing did to us? That was a full-blown vampire! Hasan needs to know, and we need to hunt it down, quickly.”

“What?”

Vampires weren’t real. They were stories to scare children. “What do you mean by vampire? You mean an actual monster that runs around eating apostates and fools who wander around alone at night?”

Yannick rolled his eyes, which looked disturbing with his weird goat-eyes.

“No, you idiot. Vampires are a type of ghoul. They consume blood essence, among other things and they can become extremely powerful very quickly if they’re left unchecked. It probably herded the ghouls into the village as a distraction. We need to kill it.”

With that, he turned and left, calling over his shoulder, “See to Idrin, Hasan is going to want her along for certain.”

Idrin watched the interaction between the two without comment, tracking them with her eyes, but she didn’t seem to be all there, either. He was unsure of how exactly he should do this. Reshid couldn’t apply the essence as precisely as he had with Yannick. Instead, he put a hand on her head and sent it down into her, hoping for the best. At first nothing happened, so Reshid poured in more, completely draining everything he’d been holding. His crystal was entirely dim, and he considered finding some vegetation to recharge himself when Idrin moved, shaking his hand off.

“Reshid? What happened? How are the others?” She looked around. “Where are they?”

Looking up, Reshid realized something. All of the injured were revenants. Reshid knew that at least two humans had died—Lonnie had killed one, and the man who left to get help, Dan, had probably been killed by the ghouls. Did they have their own area, maybe? Why would Agatha be here, then?

Reshid quickly caught Idrin up on what had happened, then went to talk to Agatha, who was wrapping a delicate blood-red crystal into a bandage around a particularly nasty-looking gash on her patient’s leg. She saw him approach and waved him over, smiling broadly.

“Ah, Reshid! Just the man I was looking for! I’ve got someone who lost an eye over there, do you mind taking a look?”

He hadn’t seen the overly experimental essence engineer in a while and, at her friendly greeting, it occurred to him that she was the only living person he’d met so far who would casually call him, or any revenant, a man. Odd, that. He still felt like one, in as much as he could remember, but the divide was clear in his interactions with the “real” living. As a life elementalist, he might look more alive than most, but the bark growths on his body made his identity as a revenant obvious.

He smiled and nodded to her, then made his way to the blinded patient. To his surprise, he could feel that she was like him—a cultivator revenant.

“You can’t heal yourself?” He asked, reaching up to her face.

She shrugged, shaking her head.

“Heal it, maybe, but not so I can see out of it again.”

Reshid hesitated.

“Oh… Are you sure you want me to try it?”

He hadn’t really considered that fixing an organ like an eye might be more complicated than a flesh wound.

“I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with this sort of thing. Do we have anyone here who can fix it?”

The woman smiled—a somewhat disturbing sight with the amber-colored blood that seeped down from her gaping eye socket like tears.

“Healing is a common essential expression for cultivators, but regrowth is something else. I can grow a field of barley in a day, but that doesn’t translate to growing back an eye for me. Blood elementalists can do it more often, but we don’t have one in the village.” She gestured toward Agatha.

“I haven’t healed the wound myself because that pudgy warmblood over there said you have a talent for healing. I figure that if you can’t do it, the worst thing that’ll happen is what I would have been able to do myself.”

“Alright, I’ll give it a try,” Reshid said, “I just need to go gather some essence. I’ve used everything I had already.”

She scoffed, and reached for his arm.

“Nonsense, take some of mine.”

Power surged into him, far too much of it, more than he could normally hold. He panicked as it seared through him, jerking his hand away and gasping. He felt something stretch inside him, as if his very soul were about to burst.

“Oh, you really can’t hold very much yet,” She said, “Don’t worry, just use that on me and you’ll feel better.”

The essence felt slightly different from his own, with purpose that didn’t come from the plants that it was originally sourced from. It wanted to grow and to live, but it also wanted to be a part of a community, to harvest, and to be left alone by bothersome strangers. With wonder, Reshid realized he was experiencing some aspects of the woman’s own essence, integrated as it was with her cultivation essence.

With some alarm, he also realized that overdrawing it like this risked permanently changing him as well. If he held the overdrawn essence, it would eventually affect his own attunement.

Quickly, he placed his left hand over the bleeding eye socket and gently guided some of the essence into it. If he let it just do what it did naturally, the wound would heal, leaving a scarred and empty socket. He thought about the problem.

Plants didn’t really regenerate missing bits. If you cut a branch from a tree, it wouldn’t grow back out of the wound. Instead, another one would grow out next to it. Taking a bit of inspiration from that thought, he focused not on repairing the damage, but on growing out a completely new eye. Considering that it was her own essence, it should know what she needed, right?

He could feel that something was happening as the power was used up, consumed by the growth, but when he lifted his hand he couldn’t really see any progress yet. Shrugging to himself, he poured in more power, until he drained himself entirely. As he did so, the woman shuddered.

“You have no idea how weird that feels.” She reached up and infused him again, with a much more measured amount this time. Wordlessly, he continued.

A few minutes later, he lifted his hand to see an almost-normal eye staring back at him. Instead of white, the eye had a light green tint, with an amber-colored iris.

“Well,” She exclaimed, “the colors are all wrong, but I can see again! I think we can call this a success.”

For a moment, Reshid was confused. How did she know what color the new eye was? Then he realized that she meant that her vision had changed.

“Really? What do you see?”

She took a breath to respond, but was interrupted by Agatha who was suddenly leaning down to look at her face, uncomfortably close. Reshid hadn’t seen her approach.

“Look at that! I guessed you might have a gift for healing after how well you patched up Charles during his attunement, but this is really exciting! You could put injured soldiers back into action in minutes!” She turned around and grabbed him by the shoulders excitedly, “Maybe you could do even better! Have you tried healing anyone at a distance? No, of course not. We need to experiment! I need to talk to Barty. Where is he anyway?”

She looked around, as if expecting to see him walk up right then and there. Instead, she saw a soldier running toward her and waving urgently.

“Ma’am, injury inside the palisade—he’s bleeding badly. I’ve been ordered to come and get you right away.”

Agatha frowned. “Why didn’t you just bring him here? I’m not a real surgeon, you know. Why isn’t your medic here anyway?”

Uncertainly, the man looked around the hospital area, filled with revenants.

“There’s been a misunderstanding with the revenant commander, and the medic says he won’t be able to stabilize the patient…” He trailed off, as if willing her to understand.

Agatha hesitated for a moment, “I’ll need to grab a few crystals. Give me a moment.”

Reshid grabbed her arm, stopping her. A misunderstanding with Hasan? What was that about?

“Let me come, I can take care of it.”

Between a patrol of religious zealots attacking him and his friends, a ghoul invasion, and now this, Reshid wanted answers. Too many things were happening, and if Hasan and the humans were getting into disagreements that required magical healing, who would look out for his team and see that they made it back?

Agatha’s eyes glittered, and she grinned at him excitedly.

“Right, good idea! We need to see what you can do with a regular person.”

–----

On the way, as Reshid collected essence from grass, a few small shrubs, and some unusually well-tended flower boxes, Agatha extracted the details about what had happened from the soldier. In response to a panicked report by a certain lieutenant, Frederik had ordered his guards to hole up within their walls, ready to repel an attack by ghouls, revenants, or whatever was causing all the chaos in the village, leaving Hasan’s revenants to deal with the attack on their own. While they had little trouble, the lack of support meant that quite a few ghouls had managed to evade the main fight, scattering to attack the villagers.

After the battle, Hasan had gone straight to the compound, demanding an explanation—after all, the Free Cities’ presence in the village was explicitly to help protect the villagers from exactly these kinds of threats.

One of the guards at the gate apparently thought Hasan was there to attack the compound, and fired a shot at him. While that didn’t do much to inconvenience Hasan, it did piss him off. The other gate guards had come away with bruises, but the shooter was unlikely to survive much longer.

The little military compound that housed the merchant prince and his soldiers was heavily guarded. Four armed men stood outside the wooden gate, and Reshid saw another six lounging on the other side after they waved him and Agatha through.

Inside the walls there was a small open area surrounding a single large house that had been modified into a keep of sorts. The windows along the bottom floor were mostly bricked up, leaving only small slits that were too narrow to squeeze through. The soldiers had tents set up outside, tightly packed against one another. It looked even less comfortable than the recruits’ accommodations in and around the stables. Why didn’t they have Leif and his team build them a barracks in the village?

The soldier led Agatha and Reshid into the house and up the stairs and down a hallway. There, he knocked twice on the door and waited only a moment before knocking again.

Hasan opened the door, raising an eyebrow at the man. Then he saw who he was with, and his shoulders untensed slightly.

“Oh, it’s you. That was quick. Come in.”

The room was relatively small, and full enough to feel cramped. Frederick, who Reshid hadn’t seen since the man bought him as a slave, was sitting in a chair, tapping his foot impatiently.

A human lay on a bed set against one wall, breathing shallowly with little gasps. He was sweating, and his shirt was off. Something was visibly wrong with his chest. Hasan must have punched him hard enough to break several ribs, at least one of which left him bleeding internally. Yannick stood at the head of the bed, holding the man down as another, probably the medic, held a crystal that was set at the end of a long wand to his chest.

It was an ice essence crystal, Reshid knew, used to numb pain faster and more effectively than actual ice. The wand allowed the medic to apply it without coming too close to it himself. They were common in the cities and affordable enough that it wasn’t surprising to see one here.

Hasan ignored them and turned back to his conversation with Frederick as Agatha and Reshid went over to the bed.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Frederik said, “they’re close to mutiny as it is. They don’t want to be down here, no matter what I pay them. If he dies, they’re going to start a fight. If I punish him, they’re going to kill me and then start a fight. “

Alright, so no pressure.

As they talked, Reshid began to work. Stopping the internal bleeding would be simple, but some of the ribs were so badly broken that they didn’t line up anymore. After thinking about it for a moment, he signaled to Yannick to hold the man down more firmly. He would have to cut him open, line the bones up by hand, and then heal each of them individually before closing up the cut. He didn’t know how a real surgeon would have handled the problem, but he didn’t need their skills or knowledge for this. He would easily be able to heal whatever damage he did through his own ignorance.

As he put the medic’s scalpel to the man’s skin, Frederick spoke.

“Fine. So just send him and all his friends back to the surface. I don’t know what you were thinking, bringing those delusional fanatics down here in the first place. You can replace them with people who haven’t completely lost their minds.”

Reshid’s patient gasped, eyes wide and staring at him, unblinking. He didn’t know if it was because of the cut itself or because the man realized that a revenant was cutting him open. Whimpering, he looked up only to find Yannick’s inhuman face staring down at him impassively.

Ignoring Reshid’s impromptu surgery Frederik sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair, meeting Hasan’s gaze and suddenly looking older.

“I didn’t have a choice. They proselytize heavily in the military. The priesthood is involved, funding events, printing pamphlets. By now, they’re in every company and they make a point of converting officers—people from influential families. I would have to hand pick every soldier individually, and there’s no way to do that without Duskhaven’s Conclave knowing exactly what I’m doing. They’re working against me quietly for now, but that will change if I give them an opportunity this good. Even changing the garrison will be an enormous risk. They’ll report their version of what I’m doing here and the rumors will fly.”

Hasan didn’t look mollified. He looked over as the patient gasped—Reshid was straightening out a rib—then frowned at Frederik again.

“Master Merchant, I’ve been very patient with your religious extremists, but not all revenants are bulletproof. I appreciate the opportunity you’ve offered us with your vision here, but it can’t work if I have to worry about your soldiers in my village on top of the ghoul attacks from outside. The politics up above are something for you to worry about, but if you want my advice, you should just come clean. Get ahead of any rumors and control the narrative.”

He gestured toward Yannick, “I have a vampire situation to deal with down here and that’s going to take me and practically all of my capable fighters. I can’t go running around the Paths for days if I have to worry about whether the village is safe from your soldiers.”

“Is it really that dangerous?” Frederick asked, surprised.

“It’s worse. The only reason it didn’t kill half the village today was because it was looking for sources—food if you want to call it that. Revenants grow in power very slowly after a certain point. Overdrawing too much can unbalance our attunement and diminish our humanity. Vampires consume human essences, like ghouls, along with something else, it’s not really clear. The point is, they don’t have our limits. They don’t really need their own humanity to help them function—the essence they consume has its own humanity already. The creature is faster, stronger and tougher than anyone here, and each one develops its own unique abilities beyond that. We don’t even really know what it’s capable of.”

Reshid gulped. His friends were following that thing around the forest. How were Charlie and Em? Were they prisoners as well? What would a creature like that do to them?