There she went again, he thought, as she faded away. As much as he believed that she would return, it was still hard to imagine some cosmic hand smoothing out the sands of the aether to erase her image.
The fire was dying. Even though the morning sun had warmed the mountain air, he got more wood and put it on the fire, building it up again just to have something to do. While he did it he thought about Axodorus. The tables are turned, he thought.
Axodorus was a grandson of Merops, though not from Aes and the king's daughter Coronis. One day when he was ten summers old the youth had gotten into his mother's herbalist supplies and consumed a handful of dangerous plants (the kind used by diviners and soothsayers to induce visions) and had gone out of his wits.
Axodorus had run through the streets of the capital screaming of giant bats and demons. At his mother's request, Aes had the boy brought to him. He had suspected drug poisoning, but without knowing exactly what the boy had consumed it would be foolhardy, not to say dangerous, for him to prescribe an antidote.
Aes knew the boy's father was a potter, so he sent for some clay and a wheel. Then he spoke to the boy calmly, asking him if he could help him make some jars for ointment. “I know your father is busy,” he had told the boy. (Busy at the local tavern, he thought.) “But I'm sure you can help me. Will you? I need more jars.”
And sure enough, a few hours later Aes had some of the sorriest-looking jars he had ever seen. That, and the eternal gratitude of the boy's mother for keeping him calm and out of harm's way long enough for the pharmakon to wear off. The moral of the story? When you are feeling crazy, it often helps to do something ordinary. Distraction therapy, he called it. Whatever the name, it worked.
And now he was the crazy one. So he built a fire he didn't need, to restore the calmness he so desperately needed. To distract himself from the terror he was feeling, the fear that any moment now some god's hand would wipe him from the face of existence with no more thought than a scribe would take erasing ink from a bit of papyrus in order to reuse the space.
He thought of the analogy Darla had employed: living inside the dreams of the gods. Dreams could seem fantastic, joyous, terrifying, or nonsensical. Could they also seem so ordinary that you could not tell them from the real thing? And what happened to dream-people, when the Dreamer awakened? He shivered, and put more wood on the fire.
“I'm back,” said Darla suddenly behind him. “Did you miss me?”
“Yes I did,” he told her. “After what you just told me, my mind is spinning out of control. I feel like a ship with no rudder, drifting in storm currents.” He explained to her about Axodorus and what he had been doing with the fire just now.
“Brilliant!” she exclaimed. “Distraction therapy is just what you need right now, until we know more. But we can do better. Aren't you a healer? Then you should be doing something even more familiar to you, like healing.”
“What are you suggesting? There are no sick or wounded here on Pelion that I can see. What will you do, find some and bring them here?”
“I can do better than that. I have a small group of friends who fight bad guys with me for the fun of it. I think if you joined us you could help us stay healthy and distract yourself at the same time. You'd be killing two birds with one stone. What do you think? Will you give it a try, for me?”
“I can try,” he agreed. “But how do I go to your friends? I have no idea how to proceed if they are not nearby.”
“Just relax and trust me,” she advised. “I've worked with newcomers before. Here, let me send you a team invite.”
He did not understand. A moment later, however, a group of characters formed in the air before his astonished gaze:
Έχετε προσκληθεί να συμμετάσχετε σε μια ομάδα από ήρωες. Δέχεστε? Ναι ή οχι
(You have been invited to join a team of heroes. Do you accept? Yes or no)
Darla saw his confusion. “Just reach out and touch Yes,” she told him. Gingerly, he lifted his right hand and put his index finger into the midst of the characters that said 'Ναι'.
The floating characters vanished. A further strangeness occurred. In the upper left of his visual field, two square portraits appeared, one below the other. At the top was a small image of Darla, below it was a handsome devil with curly black hair. With a start Aes saw it was himself, as he appeared around age 30. As he appeared now, apparently. Darla's image had a golden border, but his border was blue.
“You should now be able to see what's called the team roster.” she told him. “If this is working. Everyone on the team can see it. For now, that's just you and me. Next to each member image you'll see a green line and a blue line. The green line indicates how healthy they are and the blue line is their mana...”
As she explained what he was seeing she began to move forward. Before he could prevent it she had stepped directly into the campfire. He reached out to snatch her from the blaze, but she just smiled and waved him back. “Look at the team roster for a moment” she told him.
The green line beside her image began to grow shorter as he watched. As it shrank it turned yellow. Then orange. Darla stepped out of the fire at the point. “Didn't that hurt you?” he asked incredulously. But her skin and clothing seemed unburned. Sorcery!
“Of course not,” she told him. “No one from the real world would play in the Games if they really hurt people. Now, pay attention. You should have seen my health-line getting shorter and turning orange. Did you see that?”
When he confirmed it, she continued. “It means that my avatar – that's what you call the 'dream' version of me, my incarnation in this Realm – is injured. As its health declines the line will get shorter and change from green to yellow to orange to red. If it disappears completely, I'm dead. Not really,” she added quickly, seeing his look of alarm. “Just for the purposes of simulated combat. This is where you come in. When your teammates get injured, their health will grow back, but slowly. As the team Healer it's your job to keep healing us during battles so that we don't get wiped out.”
“But I can't heal you while you're fighting!” he protested. “It takes time, and herbs and rest and incantations and...”
“Listen to me, Aes,” she said, interrupting his objections. “Listen and trust me now. For a team to survive, they must trust each other like comrades-in-arms. So trust me when I tell you this. In these Realms, healing is much faster and easier than it is in the real world. Otherwise, heroes would spend a lot of time recuperating and it would get boring really fast. Now heal me.”
He stared at her. “How?” He felt like a child, ignorant and helpless, in these Games of the gods.
He saw her frown. “I'm not sure. I've never been a Healer.”
Aes tried to imagine her health returning, the orange line stretching to full length, becoming green. Nothing happened. “It is not working,” he confessed. “I am useless to you.”
“Aw, don't give up too easily, Aes. I have faith in you. As you level up you will get more powers, and your healing will become stronger, meaning it will repair more damage more quickly. For now, probably all you have is a targeted heal. That means you can heal one person at a time. All we have to do is figure out how you trigger it.”
Her words evoked the image of a catapult in his mind, all the tension of the ropes unleashed in a moment by pulling on the lanyard. But unless you knew what to pull to release the catch, all that energy was pent up, still awaiting release.
“Have you known other Healers? How do they...trigger their healing power?”
Darla shrugged. “The interface is customizable,” she said. “I've heard in the old days they used consoles with buttons or keys on them. Nowadays, with the neural link, gamers usually set their triggers to be gestures, a different gesture for each power, so they can avoid wasting power triggering them accidentally.”
Aes's face clouded. “Strange words again. I do not understand. Something to do with gestures?”
She groan-growled with
frustration. “Just watch me for a moment.” She showed him her empty hands, and flapped her robes to show him she carried no weapons, then made a gesture as if hugging herself or crossing her arms, except her hands were at the level of her waist. Then she uncrossed them as if drawing blades. There was a TZING! sound of sliding metal and she was holding two swords. “You see? That's how I draw 'em. My dual-wield attacks are wired into my arm gestures so I don't have to think about it.”
She flicked her fingers open. Instead of falling to the ground, the swords vanished. The unreality of it made his head pound suddenly. He forced himself to take a deep breath.
“Most of my fighting is up close and personal. I have only one ranged attack,” she said. She flung her right hand up and over her shoulder. A dagger appeared in her hand in the instant before she whipped it over and down in front of her.
There was a sound like a bird taking flight, and a THUNK as the dagger stuck blade first into Achilles's archery stump.
“You see? It's automatic. If a villain is too far away to stab, all I have to do is think about throwing a knife, and it's all automatic from there. You'll have to learn something similar for your powers.”
“I understand, I think” said Aes. “I do not, however, see how it could help me, since healers throw no knives and bear no swords. The healing of an individual is usually done by touch, perhaps with pharmakon carefully applied, or incantations to the gods.”
“Well, there's a starting point” she said. “Touch me.”
Warily, he stretched for his hand and placed it on her shoulder. “Να επουλωθεί,” he said. Be healed. He felt foolish. He was not, he reminded himself, in the actual original Hellas, but only a dream-copy of it. There was thus no logical reason to expect that anything worked the same way here as there.
There was a swelling rush of sound like a thousand birds lifting their voices to greet the chariot of Helios. There was a curling wave of verdant light and energy that flowed from his shoulder, down his arm and crashed like surf upon her form. He felt an after-tingling prickle as the line before her portrait in the team roster shot up higher and changed color from orange to yellow-green.
“And there you go,” she said smugly. “Almost completely healed. Now all we have to do is figure out a version that doesn't require you to be within reach of me during a fight. We need to keep you away from the melee action, and for that you need a ranged heal.”
Aes looked at his hand, unable to speak for a moment. “It was never that...dramatic or loud, when I was...alive,” he said. He swallowed. He touched her shoulder again, thinking: be healed, intended to restore her health completely. But nothing happened.
Darla saw his expression. “Relax, it's okay. You're in cooldown. To keep fighting from being too easy, most powers have to rest and recharge after use before you can use them again. Just wait a few seconds and try again.”
It made sense, he realized. Any use of strength depletes the body's energy temporarily. Muscles must rest even for a few seconds after lifting a heavy load, why wouldn't the same apply to the muscles and powers of the mind?
He took a deep breath, remembering what she had said before, and took a step back. Imagining he was doing it, he reached out toward her with his arm and pretended that it was long enough to reach her shoulder. Be healed! he willed.
And it happened again, with differences. This time the glowing wave of emerald fire flowed down his arm to his hand, flared and vanished...as bands of greenly glowing light swept up from her feet to her head. Her health returned to maximum. Now her health line was back to its usual darker grass-green hue.
“Way to go, Aes!” she applauded. “Whatever you did, that's the trigger of your distance heal. From here on it's just a matter of increasing the distance you can heal at and the amount of healing you can accomplish.”
“That was almost too easy,” he remarked, surprised by his own success.
“Oh, you'll find it challenging enough once a battle starts,” she assured him, “Just you wait. You'll have to decide who gets healed and who has to wait their turn. Sam tried to make a healer once, back before we found Sherman. He couldn't take it. He said he couldn't take the guilt when he couldn't heal all three of us and had to sacrifice one to save the other.”
Chapter 19: Am-heh: gods and their quarrels