Chapter 15: The Truth in the Body
Toren woke before the bell. For a moment he did not know where he was. Then the hard narrow bed and plain room reminded him. He washed, put on the guest robe left for him, and went to the hall certain he was already late. Everyone was seated.
Long tables filled the room. Green robes with rune stitching. Pendants at their chests. Women and men sat together without distinction, monks, helpers, and apprentices alike. In his guest robe, Toren felt separate at once.
He stopped in the doorway.
Aren looked up, smiled, and gestured him forward. He sat among the others with nothing to mark his rank.
No one spoke.
After a moment, Aren rose and bowed his head. In the old forest dialect he gave thanks for the food, the day, shelter, protection, and pain borne with meaning.
When he finished, the monks stood. Each took hold of the pendant at the chest and pressed its carved edges into flesh. Toren watched metal touch lips, cheek, throat, chest, belly, forearm. Marks rose in the skin. No one flinched.
Silence settled again.
They held it for several moments, then lowered the pendants, sat, and began to eat.
When the meal ended, Aren rose and looked at Toren. “Come with me.” Toren followed. The true work of the morning had only just begun.
The passages beyond the hall were quieter. The air turned bitter and metallic, with hot oil lingering beneath it. When Aren opened a door and stepped aside, Toren stopped short.
The chamber’s shelves climbed from floor to ceiling. Jars. Bottles. Powders. Preserved pieces of things Toren could not name. Some floated in cloudy liquid. Others had sunk into dark sediment. On one long table stood a glass-and-brass construction so intricate it barely looked real, flasks, tubes, and narrow valves joined like some mechanical root system. Small oil lamps burned beneath parts of it. In one flask the liquid had gone black and thick. A faint foul smell hung above the machine. Beside it stood a jar of Drommala blood, already half empty.
On another table, broad enough for a whole body, lay part of the Drommala’s trunk, opened with terrible neatness. Thin slices had been laid out on thick prepared glass. A larger section rested beside them. Nearby lay the preserved rune, copied in careful lines onto paper.
Nothing here had been left sacred by distance. Aren had handled it all as evidence. Something shifted coldly inside Toren.
Aren studied the blackened flask before he spoke.
“From what I have seen so far, I do not believe your Drommala died naturally.”
Toren said nothing.
Aren continued, precise and calm. “The evidence points to killing. Most likely by magic. But I do not yet know what craft it came from.”
He crossed to the other table and laid two fingers beside the copied rune. “The greater question is how. That matters as much as the death itself. If we do not understand the working, your people will not know how to guard against it when the new Drommala comes.”
Aren tapped the copied rune lightly. “This is not enough. I need more of the missing pattern. You saw the runes before they were lost. You may be the only one who still carries them in memory.”
Toren looked at the neat lines on the page. He remembered the feel of the scales under his hands, the shock of seeing the marks there. Not the marks themselves. Not clearly.
Aren saw enough. “We will try to recover what you saw. Carefully.”
He looked at Toren as though weighing not courage, but understanding. “We begin with magic.”
Toren nodded once.
“It may work. It may fail. If it fails, we try something else.”
False confidence would have been easier to resist.
This time Aren took him past the working rooms and into a part of the monastery Toren had not yet seen. The chamber he opened was bare even by the monastery’s standards. Cold stone. A few oil lamps burned in wall brackets, their low light glinting off iron rings fixed neatly into the wall. A mat in the corner. A low table held bowls of dried herbs and polished metal instruments Toren did not like the look of. Near the wall stood a rack of chains, ropes, and flagellant tools arranged with the care of surgical instruments.
Nothing in the room threatened him openly. That made it worse.
Aren led Toren to a heavy chair fixed to the floor at the room’s centre and told him to sit. He lit herbs in a shallow dish. Bitter smoke rose at once, thick and resinous, catching at the back of Toren’s throat. Then he opened the jar of Drommala blood, dipped a finger into the dark thickness, and pressed it to the centre of Toren’s forehead.
The touch was cold.
Aren spoke in the old forest dialect, low and steady, not quite a chant but close enough to work under the skin. As he moved around Toren, he fed more herbs to the flame and touched two fingers to temple, throat, neck. Each touch carried a measured pulse of magic, precise and searching. Smoke thickened. Burnt herbs and warm blood filled the chamber.
“Let the memory rise,” Aren said. “Let me receive it.”
For an hour they worked that way.
Toren slowed his breathing and let the chamber fall away. Again and again he reached back to the Drommala’s belly, the scales, the first shock of seeing the marks there. Sometimes he thought he had one, only for it to twist as soon as he reached for it. Sometimes only fragments came. The shape of a pattern without the pattern itself.
In the end he gave Aren only one rune, and even that with doubt.
Aren stood still a moment, then drew his blood-marked thumb lightly across Toren’s brow, as if sealing the working shut.
“Va theryn lo, saelen vey,” he said quietly. What was opened is now closed.
Only then did he copy the rune onto paper. Disappointment crossed his face, brief and controlled. “It is too broken beside the preserved one.”
Toren looked at him.
“You are a healer,” Aren said. “Your mind does not take magic cleanly. It has been trained to bend it, shape it, use it, not simply receive it. What should have risen plainly came back distorted. You did not resist me on purpose. Your nature did it for you.”
He paused. “In other circumstances, that would be an advantage. Here, it means the gentler method cannot reach deeply enough.”
Toren said nothing.
“There is another method,” Aren said. “Discomfort and pain strip distraction away. Used carefully with magic, it may force the mind into sharper contact with what it has buried.”
Toren watched Aren’s face in silence.
“It is often effective,” Aren said. “If we do this, you must open yourself to it fully. Half-measures will bring pain only, not memory.”
He did not soften it or dress it as bravery or duty. Only a choice.
“You may stop here,” Aren said. “Or we may try the harsher method and see whether memory opens. If you choose to continue, you may still stop at any point. Agreeing now does not bind you to every moment after.”
Toren went still. Then, to his own surprise, he gave a slow nod. Something inside him screamed that he was making a mistake, but he put that voice aside.
Aren studied Toren’s face for any sign of hesitation. Seeing none, he drew his chair closer and sat opposite him.
“Then hear it plainly,” he said. “I will cover your eyes and head and bind you to the chair. If that loosens the mind enough, I will use magic and try to draw the memory clear. If not, I will put the body under greater strain until something gives, or we stop.”
Aren’s gaze did not leave Toren. “I will stay with you throughout. If uncertainty comes over you, speak to me.” He paused. “If you would have me stop, what word will you give?”
Toren answered too quickly. “Boy.”
Aren nodded. He brought a cup of water to Toren’s lips and waited until Toren had drunk enough. Only when the cup was empty did he set it aside and rise.
After that, he did exactly as he had said.
First came the cloth over Toren’s eyes, firm and close. Then the hood settled over his head, close and heavy, leaving him only two small breathing holes.
At once the darkness pressed against Toren’s face. The cloth sat tight over his eyes, and the hood trapped the heat of his breath until the air around his mouth felt used already. He smelled leather at once, and the sweeter scent of old sweat held in the dark.
Aren’s hands stayed calm, never fumbling, never rough. A sleeveless binding garment followed, close and heavy, meant for control rather than comfort. Then came the straps.
At first they were light. Enough to keep Toren in the chair. Enough to take choice from his hands and body, but not yet enough to force strain. Aren left him like that for a while, hooded and blind, letting the darkness work first.
“Breathe slowly,” he said.
Toren obeyed.
The hood warmed further against his face. His own breath came back at him. With nothing to see and little to hear, his body began listening too hard to itself. His pulse. The pull of leather. The weight of his arms. The shape of the chair beneath him.
“Do not rush against it,” Aren said from somewhere near his shoulder.
So Toren sat and breathed. Time thinned. He had no measure for it.
Only then did Aren begin to tighten the bindings. One strap, then another. Not much. Just enough for Toren to feel it. His shoulders were drawn a little farther back. His spine kept straighter than comfort allowed. His thighs lost another inch of ease.
That was what he had not expected. He had thought restraint meant stillness. But Aren did not merely secure him. He arranged him.
The discomfort came quickly after that, not sharp, but spreading. A growing knowledge that nothing could settle where it wanted. Aren’s hand touched his shoulder briefly.
“Do not fight it,” he said. “Let the body spend less on struggle.”
Toren tried. He let one breath out slowly and settled as best he could within the straps. Aren waited, then tightened another buckle, then another. It built with patience. That was the worst of it.
At first it was not quite pain. Only wrongness. Muscles forced to work without relief. Joints held where they would rather not be. The slow protest of every limb.
Aren stayed close. Toren heard straps checked, buckles tested, the quiet sounds of someone watching carefully. Fingers brushed his neck once. A hand settled against his ribs, feeling the pull of his breathing.
“Better,” Aren said.
Toren was not sure that was true.
More time passed. More pressure followed. One strap tightened, then another. Discomfort deepened into pain, not sharp or sudden, but full and deliberate, settling deep in the muscles.
Then something in it turned wrong in a different way. The pain carried a flicker of pleasure through him, brief but undeniable. Terror hit first, then shame. He forced his mind back to the task and dragged a breath through his teeth.
Aren did not leave him alone with it. More pressure followed. At the edge of that deepening hurt, when the body had grown loud and the mind begun to loosen, Aren’s hand came to the side of his head.
“Now,” he said quietly.
Magic moved through the dark, cool and narrow. It touched the sore place in Toren’s mind where the memory had twisted away before.
He reached for the Drommala again. Scales. Blood. Belly beneath his hands.
For one sharp instant, a mark flared clear.
Then another, harder won. Aren’s hand stayed at his head, the magic cutting through the blur until the rune rose sharp enough for Toren to feel Aren catch on it at once.
Two runes.
After that, the pain changed. What had lived in shoulder, back, and thighs gathered into one deep, agonising ache. Toren could no longer tell where one hurt ended and another began. The hood pressed close. His breath sounded far away. The chair, the straps, the dark all seemed to tilt.
He thought he heard Aren say his name. Then again, nearer this time.
“Toren. Still with me?”
He tried to answer. A hand caught at his chin, steady and warm through the hood. The pain pulled him under before he could make a sound.