Empathy for the Dead [Urs]

[Kala Leukos]

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Of course, she listened to what he had to say on the matter; she always listened to him. Kala was also quite independent enough to make her own decisions, all the while taking in more expert input. She nodded thoughtfully.

"I think," she said slowly, "for now, I will try my mundane senses first, and follow up with Semblance. So much of the magic has to do with context more than power anyway, this ought to help me learn to understand what I am sensing through the Rune."

Watching him deftly catch another sample, she considered how best to answer his next question. She was never dishonest, but she tried to answer in a way that spoke to the spirit of his question as much as its letter. "I would not call myself a proper seamstress," she admitted, "but I know how to sew a bit. I can also cauterize with Fire, but I suppose I should practice sewing skin to prepare me for working with sinew thread." Cauterizing with elemental fire would be more helpful when a living person was bleeding out, she decided. Closing up a cadaver so it could be given proper funerary rites was probably best achieved with a needle and thread.

As he was looking through a drawer, she waited for him to give her the proper gauges for the task at hand.

But she couldn't help but ask, "So you don't recognize what she was injecting through your Rune?"

Kala liked a good mystery, but not if it cost people their lives.

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[Urs Wardell]

D A T E

“Either or,” Urs shrugged, leaving the scissors aside. The needles of various sizes and widths, for handling various sorts of injuries. He picked a delicate one, which would be more suited to the thin skin on the wrists. “I supposed I favor the needle and thread. Did you know -,” he paused, opening drawers until he found a thick spindle of black thread. “That the thread is weaved from the pig intestine? Dissolves right into the skin. Incredible.”

He gave Kala the tools, “Where I learned we relied entirely on flame. Fire causes all sorts of scarring, but you rarely see anything too horrible with stitches. And, the hospital employs a few Necromancers who are expert in removing all sorts of disfigurements post-op.”

Urs sparked his magic forward, dowsing Kala in a haze of awareness. Her aura pricked with curiosity, a lovely golden color. “No, but that happens. An Alchemist might better identify the drug. Or, that’s why I captured this. It might be useful if we need to produce something to counter an overdose, if we catch one as it happens.”

He’d watch her and her aura as she worked. He sent his spell along her consciousness, a ripple that echoed back all sorts of information. Largely, he scanned for concern or worry, any anxieties relating to the task at hand.

“You don’t recognize the drug, by chance? You mentioned some skill in the arcane, last time. Tranquil Gardens would be thrilled, I imagine, to find a surgeon who was skilled in alchemy specifically for this sort of forensics.”

[Kala Leukos]

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"That is interesting," she allowed, taking what was given to her.

"I'm used to surgeons using silk thread. Fine, high tensile strength, but it does need to be removed manually when the healing has come along far enough. And, of course, necromantic healers can use various things to make sinew thread, which is purported to leave a minimum of scarring. I suppose that would prevent them from having to follow up with more effort."

She began to carefully sew the incision shut. Kala had been honest about her skills; she knew what she was doing, but she was hardly practiced enough to be a seamstress and this was her first time sewing human skin. There was a different feel about it, and she supposed it would feel different still if it were living tissue. The work banished anxiety, though she was quite alert; there were natural things coursing through her veins in response to her attention and care. The body manufactured its own drugs in many cases, though she had hardly begun to learn about such things.

"Elementalism, Semblance, Scrivening, Necromancy... a touch of Runeforging. I suppose I could scrive a circle to guide my Semblance, leave the sample there for a time and let the sense of it come into greater focus. I wouldn't know what it was by name, perhaps, but I would understand its properties better... I suppose one of us will have to take it to Master Jacun's in the Plaza of Jeweled Arches."

Then she fell silent, focusing on the task at hand. If she wasn't skilled, she was certainly painstaking about the work. There was a quiet respect for the dead about her, perhaps due to her forays into the necromantic arts.

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[Urs Wardell]

“In cases where they aren’t able to find a Necromancer, and the wound is grievous enough, they’ll use silk,” Urs said, his magic dousing both Kala and her work in a blaze of color. The tremble of nerves, anxiety, was banished farther to the edges of her with every stitch. It wasn’t perfect, her work, but she was more attentive than others might be. They’d say she, or worse, it, was dead already. They’d say the dead cared little for scars. They’d remind him the dead didn’t heal.

True enough, he supposed. The Necromancers would clean up whatever issues there may be. The family wouldn’t know.

It was good to see that Kala cared enough to try.

“All useful magics,” he said, checking her work once she finished. Tightly done. She might be suited to living patients, soon. “Scrivening would be helpful, here. I am no expert in runes or glyphs, but we might try it, if you’re willing.”

Practice, he supposed, for them both. The Necromancy ward played with scrivening, having a few in house glyphs to better guide their practices. He wasn’t sure the effect it had, but he wasn’t anyone to question it. It’d been long enough now that he wasn’t sure if Mother had used Scrivening when she’d played with the dead.

“I might do that. I know someone who works there.”

Sivan. His friend. The relationship was strange, there. He’d been such a fool when they’d first met, drunk with drink and dumb with lust. He’d been so embarrassed.

[Kala Leukos]

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"I am willing," she averred, having stepped back so he could examine her work. Now that she wasn't plying needle and thread, she opened herself up to her magical awareness. The cadaver was dead, but all matter was still made up of aether, so echoes of life remained. She sensed wisps of soul stuff, but not a ghost. If her overdose had been traumatic, that trauma didn't seem to have kept her tied to this mortal coil. She supposed that was a mercy.

Since they were going to try her idea, she began to scrive a circle of pictographs upon the notepad. Knowing, sensing, understanding, and wisdom—she tied things together with paths, enhanced those paths with mirrors, and formed a convergence that would allow them to work together. It took some time, and she would stop if he asked her to. The doctor was exacting, sometimes patient and sometimes impatient. She didn't know him well enough yet to be sure which he would be in this instance. But finally, she thought she had it.

Kala set the notepad down.

"All right," she said. "If you place the sample here, I will activate the pictographs. Then, I'll channel aether through my Rune of Semblance here, and if you do the same there, it ought to tie both our senses into it. It won't last very long. I didn't think to bring spellwright's ink or anything like that, but it ought to make our powers... well, it ought to make our semblance abilities more than the sum of their parts. We ought to get a more... kaleidoscopic view of it, I suppose. A more refined idea of what the drug is. It might not work, in which case the sample ought to still be good for whatever other tests you might run on it. Even if it doesn't work, I'll go home tonight and work on this design to see if I can't make it more helpful for future analyses."

She paused. "Are you ready?"

When he was, she awoke the pictographs to the aether, then channeled her aetheric sense through her Rune and then into the point she had indicated, then waited for him to meet her in the middle.

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[Urs Wardell]

Urs watched as Kala constructed the Scrivening circle.

Runes weren’t really a study he’d invested time into, outside of the few things he’d picked up that could apply to Summoning. He’d largely relied on his own natural ability when he used Semblance. He recognized little of what she wrote, but vaguely that the glyph was written to increase general comprehension.

Or that’s how he understood her writing.

“Can do,” Urs said, capping the vial and placing the sample where Kala had indicated. He listened as she explained, which was helpful in providing him a clearer picture of what they hoped to do. It was an interesting idea, her thought to combine their abilities.

Urs wasn’t entirely why it would work, but he had little reason to doubt Kala. He supposed she’d had training or tutors or perhaps had even sat in on a course at one of the Towers. If it was anything at all like she’d approached surgery, he imagined she’d be exacting - if a bit timid.

That she was as confident as she was here supposed that she was perhaps more skilled than Urs imagined.

Urs nodded, “I’m ready.”

And he threw himself, his spell, his everything at the rune. His spell tumbled through the point and - without little effort on his part - was guided and blended as she pushed hers. He frowned, the intensity of her magic combined with his was confusing. At first. Eventually, he noted the lazy way of his Seeing, the molasses thick understanding that coated and took from everything.

And hers too - sharp and needle-like, wielded like a weapon.

Urs cast his over the vial and let it drain out understanding to the both of them. “It’s - quick, isn’t it. A moment. Not long-lasting. Tastes of…summer. Ease. Comfort. Perhaps not a thrill drug, like I’d imagined.”

[Kala Leukos]

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Kala felt the doctor's aether catch in her pictographs, then felt their awarenesses blend. She couldn't read his thoughts or his emotions, nor he hers, but their senses were doubled. It reminded her of studying a thing with Kaus, how she could almost see what he could see as well as what she could, their core bond blending them. But this doubled their senses, then trebled them. His was a more powerful gift, or he had trained it harder. She was used to Kaus being stronger than her, too, which required her to be more clever with what she had.

As he began to give his impressions, she rattled off her own.

"Quicksilver," she agreed, both for its brief duration and its appearance. "Gentle feelings, but... potent. Binds to the blood, but it's destructive. Perhaps that's why there's discoloration at the injection site. By the time it reaches the brain, it's already damaging the veins." She wondered if it was a habit that was quick to kill; if one injection damaged the circulatory system, she couldn't guess how many injections in how long a time could do irreparable and fatal damage. Contentment did not come cheap.

She fell silent, meditating on what she was sensing and giving the doctor a chance to build upon what she had said or refine it.

For a moment, she wondered whether she could manage to raise the girl's spirit to ask her questions directly if the doctor's alchemist friend couldn't identify the drug. But she put the thought out of her mind for now. She still wasn't proficient enough to risk it, both for her own safety and the girl's immortal soul. Best to let it rest with Wraedan for now.

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[Urs Wardell]

She was clever with her magic. Her spell danced and flicked through the vial, all light touches. It felt a bit like a dance.

Kala would discern something, and he would. Their spells clashed against each other first, clumsy things, but things fell into a pattern. Into a routine. It felt strange. There was usually a feeling, of something, that magic was being used but this was something different.

Urs could see everything. Well, no. He wasn’t reading her mind or her magic - but he felt it, he saw it, and they moved together.

“It burns,” he says, the vial’s aura prickling, “Strange. I wouldn’t think a drug would do that, would it?”

He wasn’t sure, now. They’d told him it was a drug. Urs frowns. He pushes his magic forward, forcing it through and over the vial, ever-encompassing.

“A slight grating. Sickly gold. Sweet, but bitter, and then bitter again.” Colors splashed as he lanced his spell deeper into the liquid’s aura. A drug - it felt like it could be. It felt like it might be. Still, there was something off, something wrong. He felt like there was something he was missing.

Which annoyed him. “There’s a sort of violence to it. Some intent. But that might be her own.”

Sivan would be someone to ask about it.

[Kala Leukos]

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There came a point where Kala came to the edge of her understanding. She could still follow what Urs was saying, what he was describing; she understood what he meant with his metaphors, though she wasn't sure she could articulate them any better. She just didn't know enough about pharmacology to understand what her spell was showing her. This was why she needed more than just power; she needed knowledge. It was the same as needing medical and surgical skills before she could fully unlock the potential of whatever she learned from necromancy.

Whenever he added a new impression, she made small noises of agreement, but it seemed he was going to have to take it to an expert.

"It must be very new," she said quietly when even he stopped finding new elements to comment upon. "Or a new mixture of things that baffles the senses. I hope your friend is more help than I am."

There was only the faintest note of rue in her voice. It was highly unlikely she would be better equipped to identify the substance than the doctor was, but she was always hopeful that she could be a help.

In any case, she hoped she had performed well enough assisting with the autopsy that he wasn't rethinking his decision to teach her. She had come here to study medicine, but he was teaching her about surgery and she was deepening her understanding of scrivening and semblance as well. Everything seemed interconnected, and it was exciting when one thing she knew proved applicable to another thing. It gave her more of a sense for how the world fit together.

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[Urs Wardell]

He fumbled pushing through the vial. The colors were strange.

The more he looked the more unfamiliar the substance was. The more sure he was that he was missing something important. It felt like he could see so much but he wasn’t able to discern anything. The answer was here, in this vial, and he couldn’t make any sense of it.

“New, maybe,” he answered, “And you’ve helped. I wouldn’t have thought twice about investigating the sample of my own.”

The Tranquil Gardens were hardly suspect of anything malign. It was a hospital. A social good.

But they weren’t perfect. They couldn’t be. And, while he doubted there was intention behind this mistake, it was still a mistake all the same. It was, he suspected, clear that the woman hadn’t died of an overdose. There wasn’t anything that suggested the substance was addictive. No, there wouldn't be a chance to develop an addiction.


Whatever this was, it killed. And it killed well.


Urs felt comfortable noting his suspicions on his report. This was something important. If there were more cases, the attending physicians needed to be aware of it.

And, the girl’s family would need to be told.

“I’d like you to spend some time becoming more familiar with anatomies,” Urs began, wrapping the sample in some paper. “And, a surgeon’s tools. You may feel free to find me if you’d like to practice on the cadavers.” Sivan or Jacun. One of them might better understand what the issue was, much better than he could.

“You did well today.”