Chapter 16: The Pain-Bearer Monk
When Toren opened his eyes again, the hood was gone.
He lay on a mat, a blanket drawn over him. For a moment the room looked wrong, too wide, too bright, until his mind caught up with it. His limbs felt heavy and hollow at once. The ache remained, but dulled now, as though it had been pushed farther from the skin.
Aren sat beside him.
Not across the room. Not standing over him. Beside him, close enough that Toren could see the strain held carefully out of his face.
“You came back,” Aren said quietly. His hand rose and settled against Toren’s forehead.
Toren swallowed. His mouth was dry. “Did it work?”
Aren looked at him a moment, then gave a small nod. “Yes. I got two.”
The words should have sounded like victory. They did not.
Toren tried to move, but his body would not obey. Even lifting a hand felt uncertain, as though the effort had too far to go.
Aren saw it at once. His gaze dropped to Toren’s trembling fingers and stayed there only a moment before he understood.
“Toren,” he said softly, “you will not heal yourself properly now. Let me do it.”
Toren closed his eyes and gave the smallest nod.
Aren shifted down onto the mat to face him. Then he drew Toren in with careful strength, until Toren’s temple came to rest beneath his chin. He held him close, one arm firm across his back, the other bracing him at the shoulder. There was nothing hurried in it, nothing uncertain. Only warmth, steadiness, and the quiet fact of another body bearing what his could not.
At first Toren noticed only the heat of Aren’s skin through cloth and blanket, and the smell in his hair and beard, sharp as metal and burned herbs.
Then something deeper began.
It felt as though everything within him, blood, pain, exhaustion, had found another path to follow. A hot current moved through him, real enough to catch his breath. It seemed to pass from his own body into Aren’s by degrees, as though some hidden channel had opened between them.
Aren’s mouth brushed Toren hair. “Do not hold it,” he murmured.
Minute by minute the ache in Toren’s muscles began to loosen. The burning around his joints eased. The stiffness locked into his shoulders and thighs softened enough for breath to come easier. And at the same time, pressed close against him, Aren changed.
His body grew hotter. Not feverish. Not weak. Tight. Braced. The muscles beneath his robe hardened like drawn cord. Toren, dulled as he was, felt a faint, tired amusement at the exchange. His own limbs slackened while Aren’s took on what had been tormenting them.
They stayed that way a long while.
At last Aren let out a low sound, almost a moan, and his hold loosened by slow degrees. He did not let Toren go at once. Only eased him back enough to look at him.
“There,” he said, his voice rougher now. “Enough for now.”
Then he rolled onto his back and breathed slowly.
Toren looked at him with gratitude and something harder to name. He had never witnessed pain-bearing magic so closely. Aren took Toren’s pain into himself with the ease of long practice.
Aren lay with his eyes closed, breathing through what he had taken. He felt Toren’s gaze and smiled faintly without changing position. “You will get used to it, Toren. One day.”
Then, as if to head off the reply before it came, he added, “And no, I do not need your help. What we both need is rest. We made good progress, but we cannot go further today.”
He pointed to the cup of water on the floor. “Drink and try to sleep.”
Toren closed his eyes. His body was tired, but the pain had almost gone.
Toren woke late in the afternoon and found Aren still beside him, unmoving, only his eyes open.
Toren said his name once, then again when no answer came. Aren still did not respond.
Only then did Toren reach for him and place a hand on the monk’s chest. The heart beneath it beat slowly and steadily. Warmth met his palm at once, deep and living.
“Your healer’s instinct is very strong.” Aren covered Toren’s hand with his own. His palm was large, firm, and so warm that Toren felt the reassurance of it before he knew what to do with it. “Did you ever want to become a pain-bearer?”
Toren paused, but did not pull away. There was something unsettling in how easily Aren kept him there, not through force, but through calm alone. The nearness made Toren too aware of the chest beneath his palm and the quiet strength of the hand resting over his own.
“I never thought about it. Your magic is remarkable. But I do not think it is for me.” The words sounded less certain than he wanted. Heat rose in him at the memory of his own response, and he hated the suspicion that Aren had sensed that too.
Aren paused. “Do not dismiss what your body tells you. The mind can lie. The body does not.”
He let Toren’s hand remain where it was for one breath longer than necessary, then released it and sat up. Toren could not see even the slightest sign of strain in his posture.
Aren read the look on his face perfectly. “It was not much.”
Toren stared at him. From his side of it, it had been excruciating.
Aren held his gaze a moment, seemed to consider something, then said, “I was six when they first put another person’s pain into me.”
Toren went still.
“Not enough to do harm,” Aren said. “That was the reasoning.”
The calm of it made Toren’s skin tighten.
“They began with sick children then. Fevers that would not break. Falls. Burnt hands. Small hurts first. The sort this place called safe.” His mouth shifted slightly. “Safe meant survivable.”
Toren said nothing.
“When I bore those well, they gave me more. By ten, I was taking pain from grown bodies. By twelve, they had stopped sending me away before the screaming began.”
The words sat between them with a hard, ugly weight.
“Did no one object?” Toren asked.
Aren turned his head and looked at him properly. “Who should have objected? The monks who trained me? The families whose sick walked home because I remained standing?” He paused. “Pain buys forgiveness quickly.”
Toren did not like how true that sounded.
“We do not teach children now,” Aren said. “When I became High Brother, I ended it.”
Toren frowned. “Just like that?”
Aren’s expression barely altered. “No. Not just like that. But I ended it.”
For the first time, something colder entered his face. The silence after that felt different.
Then Aren rose. “If you feel rested, I need your help with something in my garden. If that is all right with you.”
Toren nodded and followed without comment.
What Aren called his ‘garden’ was a clearing cut deep into the forest. The trees around it stood close and old, their trunks linked with ropes darkened by weather and age. From those ropes hung pieces of bone, some white and clean, some still stained. Old sacred runes were cut into the bark itself. They were almost invisible until something disturbed the boundary. Then they caught the light with a faint, sick shimmer, as if the trees had opened one watchful eye.
The clearing had been divided into sections. Some were already marked out with lines of salt and burned herbs, each with a post and a small wooden plate beside it. In several of them, things lay half-sunk in the earth, already softening with maggots. One patch shimmered with unstable colours that sat wrong in the eye, so that Toren had to look away almost at once. Another held something unrecognisable beneath a cover of thick black smoke that clung low to the ground. It did not drift. It did not thin. It crouched there over the hidden thing as if feeding on it.
The whole place was unnaturally quiet. No birds called overhead. No insects hummed in the grass. The wind still moved through the trees, but nothing living answered it. He had spent the morning in a monastery built around pain. This frightened him more.
Aren gave him a small spade.
“Dig there,” he said, indicating one of the empty sections. “Do not cross the borders of the others.”
Toren did not ask what would happen if he did. He did not want the answer.
The soil was dark and damp, threaded with roots fine as veins. It yielded easily enough at first, then grew heavier below, thick with the deep wet smell of the forest floor. Toren worked in silence.
By the time Aren returned, Toren had finished.
The monk carried a tray. On it lay the rest of the Drommala’s trunk. Beside it was a wooden plate like the others.
Aren stepped into the section with perfect care, as though he had done so a thousand times and respected every inch of ground all the more for it. He knelt and lowered the flesh into the hole.
Then he spoke a few words in dialect, quiet and precise. Toren caught enough to understand them. A request to the Forest itself. A formal asking that truth be shown, that hidden damage declare itself, that whatever had worked in secret upon the flesh would now be made visible.
When the words were done, Aren covered the trunk with earth.
He did not fill the grave carelessly. Each movement remained exact, the soil returned evenly, the surface pressed flat with the back of the spade. Then he set a sheet of thick glass over the top so that what lay beneath could be watched without being touched. After that he fixed the post into the ground and attached the plate.
Toren stepped close enough to read it.
Specimen number 7932/13
Seeding date and time: 12th Day of Falling Mist, Sunfall
The wording tightened something in him.
Seeding.
As if what had been buried here was not simply dead flesh but something planted. Something expected to answer.
Aren took up a pouch and marked a border around the grave with salt and burned herbs, laying the line with the same calm attention a careful man might give to sowing a kitchen plot. The bitter smell of the herbs rose at once, dry and sharp enough to sting the nose. It mixed badly with the damp sweetness of turned earth and the faint, rotting taint drifting from the older sections.
“We must study the speed and shape of corruption,” Aren said. “It takes time.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that the chill of the place went deeper into Toren. There was no drama in it, no attempt to frighten. Only the flat certainty of a man who had spent long years watching bodies yield up truth in ugly ways.
Toren looked again at the divided ground, the marked plots, the silent evidence of other examinations still at work beneath glass, smoke, crystal, and rot.
Garden, Aren had called it.
Aren glanced at him then and perhaps saw more in his face than Toren had intended to show.
“We need to eat,” he said. “I have duties to fulfil. Tomorrow we will try again to recall your memory. You may have the rest of the day to yourself. But if you would like to help with the patients, the brothers and sisters would be glad of your hands.”
Toren glanced towards the section where the Drommala remains lay buried beneath glass, swallowed, and said, “I am meant to help.”
Aren smiled softly. “If it becomes too much, come and find me.”
Toren nodded. The answer should have comforted him. Instead it left him wondering whether he had crossed that point already.