Chapter Text
In retrospect, it is a warm blessing that they had not found themselves in such dire straits before now. She’ll decide later if she thinks kindly or not of the fact that it took hours for them to notice the air was any worse than on Barbarus, of the way the effects only fully registered for them not when she was coughing or Calas had to slow his pace, but when their Reaper said his lungs were burning and stumbled, barely able to right himself.
Toxic air on the planet, but toxic only when in direct contact with specific chemical compounds.
Compounds that were found on Barbarus, that all three of them had brought with them on their clothing and in their bodies.
Irmaya feels her throat burning and her skin breaking into hives as they dash into the cave, but she’s still standing. Calas, being carried by her yarn’s framework, cannot say the same for himself.
Their Reaper is the worst off, unable to even protest the way that same framework then moves him into the cave.
She can, at least, use her witchcraft to purify her bandana and wraps, enough to lay it over their faces and tie a scrap across her own to prevent further damage to the lungs. But she’s no trained healer, and the forced push of power costs her the ability to stand for a good five minutes.
Damage control comes in the form of taking their cloaks and stringing them up across the cave’s entrance with the sort of loose draft-weave that she’d used as a child to map the hatches and plaids she could make. Enough material hung and she can pour the witchcraft around it, a rudimentary filtration device that she knows won’t hold for nearly long enough. It will have to do.
Calas has managed to prop himself up by the time she has returned, although their Reaper can still do little more than stare up at them.
“Toxic air,” she says. She’s too tired to clarify, and they know more about this sort of thing than she does. Calas nods.
“You’re filtering it out?”
“For now.” She knows by now they don’t read what she feels unless she says it, but she’s sure her shame is radiating off of her. “Only a few hours, and I would need to replace it with something to clean the fabric out.”
“Understood.” Then, he pales and turns away, now looking pointedly at the ground. “Serra, why-”
Ah. Right.
“The toxins appear to be bonded in the places Barbaran air has infiltrated the most. Lungs and outer clothing. I still need to clean all of mine.” It’s not so much shame as the visceral discomfort that she feels now that takes over. Even Sendak has not seen her in just hose and undershirt outside of the glimpses of undressing for the night. But she’d rather feel this discomfort than be poisoned, and if she still cannot remove the burning in her lungs, she can at least keep the hives to a limited amount.
“Understood. Can you filter the toxin completely?”
“With time.” How much time, she really can’t say, but she can ignore the way breathing still hurts if she can get started.
Calas looks at her again, pointedly keeping his eyes at the top of her head, then starts to stand and take off his own outermost layers. “If I help you-”
“No,” she cuts him off. “Help him breathe.” She’d thought about it in those precious minutes spent on calculating their odds of survival, the roles each of them could play. Their Reaper’s greatest strength, his ability to withstand the atmosphere of Barbarus in such high concentrations, is now a weakness. Between her and Calas, she knows which of them he will trust more in this state.
“Aye.”
Now, they both turn to face their Reaper. Calas moves over to him. His eyes are wider than she’s ever seen them, strained with pain and-
Fear. That is not something she has seen in him before.
Calas does not seem to be as lost as her at this moment, softening his voice into the gentlest tone she’s heard from him.
“Trust in us, old friend.”
Their Reaper still stares up at him. Then, blinks. Looks away. She thinks that’s what shame looks like, but it is close enough to agreement for what they need.
Calas strips first, left in underclothes and the improvised shilon like she is, and then they maneuver the Reaper’s body to remove his armor and extraneous clothing. From anyone else, that trembling would be fright. Irmaya chooses to put it down to the toxin’s effects.
She begins with his clothing, of course, resisting the urge to mentally put aside his tunics as acceptable replacements for the cloaks for the filtration swap. The fabric, now that she works at it properly, feels bogged down by the poisonous combination, like the syrup-sap of the trees, or the honey from Tidebreaker’s feasts. She cleans it out yarn by yarn, imitating the motions she would make if she were scrubbing a non-magical substance out. A filthy, clinging, toxic substance. The one thing she can be grateful for is the leather gloves she’s kept, waterproof and remarkably good at keeping the corrosion away from her hands.
Her lifeline, the bracelet she’d used to communicate with Sendak, is swamped as well. The toxin dampens out the usual relay synapse. It leaves a ring of red on her arm, but she can’t bear to take it off, nor can she spend precious minutes cleaning it.
She’s made a point of not looking towards the other two, and she knows the favor has been returned, but the occasional glimpse she takes gives her little hope. Calas is focusing on drawing the toxin out of the Reaper’s lungs. Even if it had been her power, and not one their Reaper trusted more, there should have been more progress by now. A worsening effect by concentration? Another cruel trick played unknowingly by the Overlord?
The signal yarn she’d put onto the cave entrance system breaks and falls, turning the dull grey that indicated it was saturated beyond all capacity.
“Thirty minutes left,” she warns them. Calas makes a quiet noise.
“We’ll need more time.”
“We do not have more time. Not without replacing the filtration.” The Reaper’s tunic is large, large enough that it would add as much time as his cloak did. She could rescue her own and Calas’s outer clothes in the meanwhile, string them up as filters as well for a somewhat stabilized cycle.
But that is not her choice to make.
Calas doesn’t look at her when he says “Do what you have to,” and she doesn’t ask him to repeat himself.
The second warning fiber falls five minutes before the first barrier would have failed, and she swaps out the clothing in that moment. Their cloaks are taken down, their outer tunics and new yarns put up in place, and the timer is reset again, this one for two hours if she’s done her math right. Another burst of power to clean her shilon, trusting Calas to do it for himself and their Reaper.
Another hour passes with no forward progress for either of them, and there is a flash of red light before Magnus appears in the cave.
“What happened? You missed the return time by almost two hours.”
At least he is concerned, not angered. And he doesn’t seem to be as affected as any of them.
“The air here is poisonous.”
Magnus tilts his head, then shrinks down to her size. “I haven’t felt anything,” he says, even as his eye starts changing colors and he runs his own assessment.
“Our going theory is the toxin is activated by compounds from Barbarus,” Calas tells him. Magnus seems to take the theory in stride.
“And your clothing would be poisoning you.”
“Aye.” No matter how lightly Magnus dresses, they are not accustomed to being similarly exposed, and the discomfort from before returns. “I’ve been trying to filter the toxin out, and Calas is trying to heal the Reaper, but-”
Calas cuts her off. “There’s something else in his lungs. I can’t remove it.” That raises all of their alarms. Magnus’s eye turns coldly blue. “It feels familiar, but it was not common enough on Barbarus for me to recognize with ease.”
“We’ll fix it,” Magnus says without a hint of uncertainty, as if declaring this as a fact to the universe. “We’ll fix it, then worry about how to get you all out afterwards. Brother,” he adds, turning to face the Reaper properly, “I’m going to try and see what the problem is, alright?” There’s no response, of course, but Magnus looks concerned until, again, their Reaper blinks and looks to the side, at his now-corroding respirator. “I’ll take this as consent. Try to remain calm.”
Her own magic is weak enough that she has to put in effort to make the magic itself visible, not just the resulting yarns shifting colors or twining tougher. Magnus, apparently, has enough power to spare that not only his eye and hands glow when he works, but so does their Reaper’s chest, illumination forming the shape of lungs, a dulled white glow to represent the organs and a soft red sweeping through with Magnus’s motions. The picture becomes clearer, more refined as the red sweeps through to leave a light pink -like the meat she’s seen the few times the local butcher enlisted her apprentices- and then pulses alarmingly, spasming before stabilizing again, now with an odd green mass in the bottom of the lungs.
She and Calas both swear, Magnus muttering something in the language of his homeworld.
“By the unburied, what is that?” The curse is old, one that she hasn’t used since she was seven, but it feels appropriate for what they’re seeing. The picture is still magicks, still glowing and dramatized, but the green looks like a mold, a spore of some sort or another.
“This is-” Magnus breaks, and she’d swear by all that’s cold he looks nauseous for a brief moment, “-the most powerful work I’ve seen in my life. Something from deep in the Great Ocean.”
Calas, as always, focuses on their Reaper first and foremost. “Can you remove it?” His attempt at anger is somewhat undercut by how carefully he is holding the Reaper’s hand. “Can we fix this?”
Magnus nods, slower but no less determined than the first time. “Everything I can do, I will.” He motions to her now. “If you can stabilize the lung here,” he taps a spot on the diagram, then waits for her to kneel by the Reaper to point the spot on the flesh, “I can try to remove this. Calas, you’ll need to keep him as calm as possible for this. Power of this scale can reverberate through the body in unexpected ways.”
“Understood.”
When teaching her control as a child, Calas had focused on the idea of feeling the power, and then feeling it adjust within the body. Her own feels like something trying to grow, frayed pieces twisting together to form something new, stronger than before. Calas had felt like the lifeblood of a tree or a plant, something growing. The power that radiates off of Magnus, even when not aimed at anyone, reminds her of the mist of an ocean, if an ocean can also feel warm and spiced and almost safe.
This thing - this thing in the Reaper’s chest is disease, like the guts of an infected and wounded animal trailing onto her fingers. Even a brief touch of her power to it leaves her feeling feverish.
Magnus is chanting something, again his homeworld’s language, and she’s sure whatever Calas whispers to their Reaper is only doing half as good of a job as it ought to in any other case, but her focus quickly narrows down to just the sickly green. It is familiar, just as Calas had said, but not the way most diseases on Barbarus were. It’s alive in its own way, different than the colors she can make or the plants Calas had shown her all those years ago, alive independently of the one who created it.
It is also, she realizes, fully anchored into the Reaper’s lungs.
Magnus’s power seems to pick up on the same realization, adjusting to try and pluck one of the thing’s roots out of the Reaper’s lung, relying on her power to detangle it in full from the small, hair-like things inside (cilia, distractedly falls into her brain from him as Magnus wrestles with the green for control, mind the cilia).
The Reaper’s body spasms from the pain, further injury prevented only by Calas muttering something else calming to him. She can’t hear the words, but his power flows through the Reaper as well, whether or not he realizes it. It curls around that same spot, the way her hands had gone over her brother’s scrapes to reassure him the pain wouldn’t last long.
The progress is slow, and again they lapse into near-total silence save Calas’s quiet murmurs. Painstakingly careful, Magnus’s power pulls the oddity away, Irmaya’s detaches it as gently as possible, and Calas’s sweeps over it like a balm. Their Reaper’s coughs get worse and worse even as the breaths he draws go deeper, to the point that Calas takes the shilon off and filters the air manually. Irmaya doesn’t really see the action so much as feel the currents of magic extended further up.
On the last detachment the Reaper coughs up blood, then finds his breathing blocked as Magnus begins to draw the thing up.
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” useless words above her, words probably meant to calm the Reaper and failing, “As soon as it is out you will breathe again, I swear.” Her vision goes spotty, the diagram flickering out of existence as Magnus concentrates all of his power on the final excision. “Just a few more seconds, brother, please.”
The combined force of Magnus’s final pull and the Reaper’s latest fullbody spasm send her and Calas almost flying back an armspan away. Small mercies, she lands the discarded cloth rather than the rocks, and can hear the Reaper’s shuddering breath. The new position and rapid disconnect of power are disorienting, made worse by the sight of the green thing Magnus now holds in his physical hand.
It’s repulsive.
Irmaya is, at least, able to throw herself away from the clothing and the group before the nausea overtakes her, but vomiting isn’t exactly a quiet process. It burns, not aided in the slightest by air still threatening to close her airways now that the shilon is dislodged again.
“-Serra. Serra?” Distant voice. Calas?
Calas. No one else here would call her that.
She gives him the palm-up gesture that she would to Sendak to say ‘as well as can be’ once the nausea dies down to just dry heaves and starts to let her breathe again. She’d be more grateful for it if the air didn’t burn as badly as the stomach acid had.
Cold comfort that she is not the only one to have had such a reaction, although Calas had either eaten longer ago or been spared the actual rebellion of his stomach against him. Even Magnus looks actively discomforted by the abomination he is still holding, although, now, thankfully with his powers and not his bare hand. They are polite enough to ignore how she wipes her mouth off with her gloved hand and wipes the glove on the rocks. The Reaper is still struggling to breathe, but at least the coughing seems to be dying down.
“I’ll need to study this further in my laboratory,” Magnus says once the last of the coughing stops, “But whatever it is, it was poisoning you, Mortarion, and it’s been there for a very long time.”
Calas stands, and when she tries to follow, she sways. Her eye catches the way his hose are partly shredded from the impact. Fresh red there too-
Not just fresh. There are new red cuts there from now, pockmarks on his calves and ankle, but the longer, crusted cuts are too old to be from only a few minutes ago and too fresh to be from earlier than their exploration today.
“Your legs,” she says dumbly, feeling the air too harshly in her lungs to express the full thought.
“Later. Ma- Lord Magnus, do you hear the voice?”
It’s not addressed to her, but Irmaya thinks she can hear something whispering, barely-there sounds coming from the green mass. She feels her stomach roil again, but she can stand against it this time, focusing instead on replacing the filtration magic Calas had been giving to the Reaper, broken when they’d been thrown back.
“Can you truly not hear it?” Calas, in contrast, seems to lean in further to them. He looks not quite entranced, but more interested than any of them in the sound. Magnus frowns, and his eye dulls to a pale grey.
“I hear very little, although what I sense of its intentions suggests I am not an intended recipient of the message.” Another set of commands in Propsero’s tongue, and a glowing cage forms around the green. The bars are wicker thin, but Irmaya can see, as she’s squinting to keep her vision from blurring too far, near-invisible filaments weaving around the bars and making the cage nearly impossible to break through. “I’ll examine it later, after the three of you are treated aboard the ship.”
The Reaper’s eyes narrow and Calas stiffens.
“We need an answer now, Lord Magnus, not in hours. And we are still here, with what little barricade we have failing-” and he isn’t wrong, she realizes with a start, the second warning fiber is already frayed. Do they have a minute of somewhat less-toxic air left? Did a new wave already sweep in? “-and given how you don’t seem to have a direct contact to the outside eith-” her mentor suddenly falters, dropping to his knees with a harsh sound that makes her wince for his joints.
They’ve run out of time, and the filters she can string up now won’t be nearly as powerful, not after how much of her had gone into magic surgery.
“What happened to the bracelet point of contact? Sendak assured me it was still intact.” Magnus looks directly at her with the question. She holds up her arm, pulling up the sleeve so he can see the bracelet’s weave practically dripping with the poisonous combination of chemicals. The movement burns for some reason she can’t quite figure out.
Magnus reaches over. The work of a good ten minutes for her happens in mere seconds, the toxins gone and the lifeline to Sendak alive again. She feels relief hit her like a surge of wind.
Far easier now, the link held without words, without anything an outsider could listen into, but she can transmit the basic concepts to him.
He knows where they are, knows how to aim at them, and the touch of a third from his end says one of Prospero’s witches is navigating the ship towards them.
One minute, pulses in from the newcomer before Sendak breaks them out of the loop again.
“One minute,” she relays, almost giddy with relief. She’s not sure what she looks like under the shilon right now, besides a mess, but she can feel her mouth trying to fight into a smile.
Calas does not seem quite as happy as he pulls the bracelet further down her arm. It burns badly enough that she cannot hold back a pained noise. Had he walked over while she was speaking to the ship?
Ah. The burning is somewhat explained by the fact that the poison in the bracelet had apparently rubbed the skin off of her arm. She should probably feel more alarm than she does at the sight.
“You are so severely poisoned? And you said nothing?” It’s pointed, harsh, and her mouth runs ahead of her mind to respond.
“As if you did not hide your wounds! We could have covered them, at least limited exposure.” It hurts to talk, to raise her voice, but outrage is such a rare emotion that she never quite learned how to hold it back.
It falls away as she meets Calas’s eyes, replaced by a wave of shame.
“Enough,” Magnus cuts in, tone too-steady in that way he flattens it where most people would raise their voices, “You both tried to put the other above yourself. If you insist on the act, you will argue only once we are out and recovered.” He leaves no room for protest, gathering their Reaper in his arms and motioning for them to hold on to him. “The ship is directly above us now, I can ‘port all of us up and allow the medics to take over.”
She should say something about their clothes, should point out how their Reaper’s respirator is lying somewhere on the ground, maybe insist they at least give their Reaper a chance to be clothed if he has to appear in such a state before one of Prospero’s witch healers, but her vision is blurring already and blurs further as Magnus cheats space and transports them directly to the infirmary, right next to an amalgamation of several beds.
Magnus puts their Reaper down as though he is made of glass, and then lifts both her and Calas with magicks to put them by his sides.
Her arm burns with a new wave of pain and she’s too tired to care. Exhaustion takes her, the pulsing rhythm of her arm fading out alongside her sight.