The Best Medicine

“Beck…”

            Coils of light hefted me painfully by the meat of my arms, until I stood, marionette-like, held just so that my toes dragged the wide, cool floor. I blinked repeatedly, trying to clear my head, more rattled by the combination of my encounter with bendy man, and then Beck’s not gentle spellwork, than I’d realized. Figures loomed nearby, defying all efforts at identification.

            I glanced towards my left arm, knowing the Glyph to sharpen my senses was there for me, but the writhing aurora holding me up shifted like a bag of cats and immobilized my head, pulling my arms behind me forcefully, like a cop who wasn’t finding the drugs he expected to find. I was forced to lock eyes with Beck.

            She’d always been beautiful, in a girlish, accidental way. Baggy cargo pants, rainbow toe socks, a single lock of hair dyed an unnatural color. She had charmed with a glance and disarmed with the costume of a carefree spirit.

            Earning power had changed her in a beautiful, terrible fashion. She stood a few feet in front of me with a nearly regal bearing, splendid in close-fitting ebony robes over some kind of bodysuit. Golden jewelry and devices, shining with prismatic stored energy, gave her the appearance of a queen, a merciless goddess worshipped by ancient men who knew that women, like fire and death, were a force beyond understanding.

            “You never cease to steal my thunder,” I grunted, so far gone into discomfort that the pain of being held by my elbows was just another checkmark on the list. Beck’s eyes flashed dangerously.

            “I knew if I let you speak, you’d start with something ridiculous.” She gestured silently, directing the light to work it’s way over the lower half of my face, as well. I was forced to breathe through my nose, gagged by the somehow-solid gleam. “So we’re going to pretend that I’m going first. You get one last mulligan from me, after all.”

            I looked past her, eyes beginning to function a bit more normally. Nobody stood in the Nexus, at least nobody I could see from this angle. The many floors of shops and offices appeared deserted.

            How much planning had gone into whatever this was? How important was Beck and my personal conflict, to the entire magical community?

            “So. Tyler.” She rolled her eyes. “Trick. My man. My other half. How do you suppose we got to this point? It’s been a long couple of weeks, hasn’t it?”

            The Batman-villain things she was saying were creepy enough, but the way she was saying them chilled me to the bone. There was no woman scorned, no sarcastic, bitter ex in her voice.

            Just rage. Disgust. She spat words at me through her teeth as though she couldn’t stomach them. The force of her resentment hit me like a punch in the stomach.

            I have really fucked up.

            “Don’t make faces at me,” she snarled, noticing the look of fear I must have been wearing. “Here’s how it is. I have something to do, and I want you to be there for it. My mother always said that telling men doesn’t do anything, you have to show them. So who knows? Maybe this’ll be that wake-up call for you, that I always fantasized about.”

            She moved to my side, twitching a finger to yank my left arm down to her height. I flopped awkwardly to one knee, grunting in pain as the light pulled my arms in different directions.

            “This,” she said quietly, “Simply will not do.”

            She released the first of the clasps on the Phylactery, breaking the connection. The cool, refreshing trickle of energy ceased, the sudden lack of any sustenance whatsoever seizing my body like a thunderbolt.

            I think I probably screamed.

            It was finally too much, and I’m not going to lie, a part of me had to laugh.

            When my limbs relaxed, I was on the ground again, listening to my ears ring, the shrill whine slowly giving way to muffled shouts. I felt footsteps in the floor. Nothing hurt. Nothing was frightening. I could feel my heart fluttering feebly, a moth whose wings have been touched too roughly.

            Faded.

           

*

 

            Sensation EXPLODED through my body, lances of fire, every inch of me alive with fire, inside and out. A sword in my chest as air filled damaged lungs. A bullet in the forehead when my eyes started working. Another when I made the grievous mistake of trying to open them, only glaring, impossible green light flooding my retinas and washing away the world.

            I lost myself in emerald, pain falling away, replaced by stiffness, pinpricks, and just as quickly replaced again by mere tenderness. What felt like hours passed as I let myself sink into verdant oblivion-

-and just as painfully as the severing minutes before, the light was withdrawn. The flourescence of the Nexus came into focus, and once again I found myself on the marble floor, this time near the edge of the huge common area, shaded from the alien sky by an overhang.

            Wylla knelt at my side, watching me closely, and she smiled when I focused on her. “Welcome home,” she murmured, warmth radiating from every syllable. She was draped in deep green, asymmetrical robes similar to the ones those monks wear, just not orange. Saffron. Whatever. And Buddhists probably don’t cinch their waist with a belt woven of vines, leather pouches, and bizarre-looking flowers.

            She still had dreadlocks. Somehow it worked.

            “What’s going on?” I croaked, my throat miserably dry. “Where is everyone? Where’s Beck? Why am I not dead? Why are you dressed like that?” I sat up with surprising ease. I still didn’t feel good at all, but I wasn’t actively in pain, and that was something. Wylla’s magics had replenished some of my body, but I still looked like hell.

            The Phylactery was gone.

            All of my weapons were gone.

            My Text was gone.

            Wylla caught my shoulders as I flinched in panic, looking around for my gear, the precious book most desperately. “Tyler! It’s all right! Be calm.”

            “Wylla, what’s going on? Please,” I begged, at the edge of full-blown hysteria. “This has been the worst goddamn day anyone has ever had. Help me out.”

            She smiled sadly. “I’ve helped you as much as I can. You nearly died when that Conclave girl disarmed you, for some reason. They summoned me right away, apparently you weren’t supposed to kick it just then.”

            “But later.”

            She said nothing.

            “Well I don’t know how many times you’ve been killed by those people, but I just tried it and it’s not something I really want to do twice. Should I leave a Do Not Resuscitate notice with you, or something?”

            “Tyler.”

            “No, really! I-” I nearly choked from raising my voice, and Wylla quickly handed me a little paper cup of water, which I accepted in sullen silence and drank. Delicious. I took a few breaths and continued, trying to calm myself.

            “Why did you let them take all my stuff?”

            She looked down at her knees. “I’m not a fighter, I’m a healer. I wouldn’t have stood a chance against them, and without me, neither would you.”

            “I don’t stand a chance anyway.”

            Silence.

            “So why heal me?”

            She answered instantly. “Healing is what I am. I couldn’t just let you die if it was within my power to restore you, even for a little while. Everything that lives is destined to die, Trick. My meaning has always been to prolong what can’t be truly saved.”

            “That’s pretty grim from a flower girl,” I muttered. I pulled myself to my feet, staggering over to a bench between columns. The Nexus mall was empty and quiet, save for Wylla and myself.

            “So what should we shoot for? Permanence?” She all but crossed herself, speaking the word as though it offended her.

            I shrugged. “Everyone wants to be immortal.”

            “We’re already immortal,” she replied, quiet. “What everyone wants is to be important. Individually, personally significant.”

            “You lost me,” I admitted, examining my arms. The Glyphs I’d copied in marker had been hastily washed away, leaving meaningless smudges of black across my pale skin. I used a corner of my tattered shirt to rub some marker off my brand, futilely.

            “It’s the second law of Thermodynamics,” Wylla said, as though that explained everything by itself. “Nothing is truly created or destroyed. Only changed. All that we are was fused into being in the heart of a star. Every single electron of us was present at the dawn of time.”

            She sat beside me, legs folded under her robes. As I watched, she opened a pouch on her living belt and withdrew a small, carved wooden box with a hinged lid.

            Nothing could have surprised me more than the expertly-rolled joint she removed from the box.

            “Get the f**k out of here.”

            She glanced my way, amused. “When you question my flower child reputation, what else can I do?” She twirled the little cigarette between her fingers, considering it. “Everything that makes up you? That was around for the dinosaurs, and it’ll be here for whatever comes next.”

            “That’s not very comforting to me personally,” I pointed out. “Still dead.”

            “You weren’t alive for billions of years before you were born. How awful was it?”

            I rolled my eyes. “All right, you’ve got me. So what’s the point?”

            “The point,” she said, holding up her joint with a thumb and finger and staring intently at it, “is that only our conscious ego is in jeopardy. Ever. And we only fear to die because we fear to be anything but what we are. We fear change. And that’s really all dying is.”

            For a moment we said nothing. She continued to stare at her joint, and I found myself staring at both of them.

            “What are you doing?”

            “Asking,” she murmured. “Politely.”

            “That’s really nice of you, but-“

            The end of the little roll flared up with emerald light, spontaneously combusting itself into a slow, even, light-emitting burn. And to my surprise, Wylla was saying a sort of grace, muttering with closed eyes for a moment before smiling and taking a long, luxurious drag.

            “Sorry, what?”

            “I guess I was going to say holy crap.” I accepted the cigarette from her, watching the lit end emit softly glowing motes of green light that tumbled slowly down before vanishing, like shining snow. “What is this?”

            “I grow her. She’s called Avendesora.”

            “What’s that mean?”

            “It’s a literary reference,” Wylla said, smirking. “Big reader?”

            I gestured at the leather holster where my Text was supposed to be. “Not much of one at all, I guess.” I took a long, needful pull on the magic joint, inhaling deeply of the pungent, intoxicating vapor. Only intoxication was the wrong word for this high, I realized.

            True to form, Wylla’s weed was distilled comfort. Reassurance. The wisdom of the cycle of life, whispered, soothing. It consumed itself willingly to tell me something important.

            “This is good s**t.”

            “Thank you,” Wylla said graciously. “It’s a pet project of mine. This is kind of a trade secret,” she explained, taking the joint when I offered it back. I couldn’t tell if it had burned down at all. “But people have a very negative attitude towards what they perceive as ‘drugs’. I keep it to myself that psychoactive plants have the best healing properties, and just pretend it’s sage or something when I’m working with a patient.”

            “Doesn’t that violate the hippopotamus oath?” Good s**t.

            “It might, if I was a doctor. This is magic. A little sleight-of-hand comes with the territory.” She smiled her sad smile. “Just a trick. Harmless.”

            “Take it from me, a Trick can hurt people.” I looked at the floor, thinking about Beck. About the disgust in her voice. The ice in her eyes. “And you know what’s extra fucked up about it? I should know what I did wrong, but I don’t. I’m not self-aware enough to figure out where I went wrong.”

            “Maybe that’s the problem right there,” she pointed out. “What exactly are you referring to?”

            “Beck. The one who kicked me around, before. She’s my ex. And before I… well, I just didn’t know she had that kind of anger towards me. It makes me think I don’t even know how terrible of a boyfriend I was, and now I’m probably going to be killed for something I don’t know to apologize for. I hate the thought that I threw my life away without realizing it at the time.” I inhaled again.

            Peace. Everything is going to be fine.

            Trust us.

            I looked over at Wylla, surprised. She met my gaze silently, simply nodded.

            I took another long drag, held it in. Serenity. Comfort.

            You will only have one chance. One. One chance.

            What do I do, I asked, inside my head. The magic answered haltingly, speaking in images, patterns, concepts that don’t translate directly to words. Memories of lives, searched like a rolodex for the concepts that I would grasp.

            You will know. You will be afraid. You will be weak.

            There is still hope. Be watchful.