Healing in Darkness
Pavek wakes up in total darkness with no idea where he is or how long he has been out. His left arm, which was rotting and useless last time he was conscious, is now pain-free and working again. But it is sealed in some kind of stone cast, and the room is pitch black. For a solid minute, the guy genuinely wonders if he is dead.
He is not dead. He has a pulse. He is not hungry or thirsty, which is weird because he is pretty sure he has not eaten or drunk anything in days. And he is lying on the softest feather mattress he has ever touched in his life. None of this makes sense.
Then a voice speaks directly into his mind. Not out loud. Into his mind.
Drink now?
This is how Pavek meets his mysterious caretaker: a halfling woman with diamond-shaped tattoos framing her eyes and an ancient child’s face. She is a mind-bender, communicating telepathically, and she has been nursing him back to health in this underground chamber. He catches a brief glimpse of her when she lifts his head to drink, and the image sticks. He would recognize her anywhere.
I love this little detail. Pavek is a hardened ex-templar who has been through absolute hell, but the thing that stays with him is the face of the tiny woman who gave him water in the dark.
The healing takes a long time. His arm was so badly infected that the muscle had literally rotted. There are painful awakenings where his body screams through the regeneration process, and other times where gentle hands feed him broth and water. He never sees light. He never has clear memories of the actual healing. And he suspects the broth contains something that keeps him calm and accepting of his bizarre situation. Which, honestly, fair. If I woke up in a pitch-black underground room with a telepathic halfling, I would want some calming agents too.
Eventually Pavek wakes up for real. The drowsiness is gone, the stone cast is off, and there is a little oil lamp burning. He sits up too fast, nearly passes out, and meets the man who saved his arm: Oelus, a cheerful, round-faced earth cleric with clay beads and a dirt-colored robe.
Oelus is interesting. He is genuinely warm and friendly, but he is also sharp. He knows exactly who Pavek is. He read the wanted posters on the walls. He figured out Pavek was a templar from his body alone: too healthy for a slave, too muscular for a nobleman, wrong calluses for an artisan, and all his teeth still intact. That math only adds up to yellow robe.
The cleric drops some heavy truths. Pavek’s name is written in red on the gatehouse walls. The bounty is up to forty gold pieces. People have died trying to collect it. Pavek is not going back to his old life.
So Pavek, desperate and cornered, asks Oelus to initiate him into his religious order. Let him become a healer. Oelus shuts that down immediately. Templars have no talent for elemental magic, he says. The king’s magic corrupts everyone who uses it. There is no coming back from that.
This hits Pavek hard. You can feel the abyss opening under him. Everything he was, everything he knew how to do, it all belonged to the templarate. Without the yellow robe, he is nobody with nothing.
But Oelus has a different plan. Find that orphan boy, Zvain. Take care of him. Get a job with your strong back. Start over.
Pavek resists. He threatens. He flexes. Oelus does not flinch. And eventually Pavek gives in, because deep down he knows the cleric is right. “Damn your eyes, priest,” he says, which is basically Pavek-speak for “okay fine, you win.”
What really gets me is what happens next. Pavek demands his possessions back, including his templar medallion. Oelus warns him it will bring grief. Pavek does not care. The medallion connects him to twenty years of his life, and he will not let it go.
He also asks about his knife. A gray steel knife with human hair wound beneath the hilt leather. The hair belonged to Sian, his mother, cut from her body after she died. It is the only piece of his past that matters to him in a way that has nothing to do with power or status.
Oelus returns everything as promised. He feeds Pavek a final meal, blesses him, and sends him on his way. Pavek wakes up in Zvain’s underground bolt-hole near Gold Street, with sunlight filtering through an isinglass paving stone above.
The reunion with Zvain breaks my heart a little. Pavek tries to be tough, uses his harsh templar voice, and immediately regrets it when the boy crumbles into silent, shaking tears. So Pavek wraps an arm around this skinny kid and holds him while he cries, and says “we’ll manage” even though he does not believe it.
Then Zvain pulls out a gladiator weapon he stole. A bent bone thing with a dark stone lump on one end and an obsidian crescent on the other. He wants revenge. He wants to hunt Laq-sellers. He is trembling with grief and fury, swinging this weapon around their tiny underground room.
Pavek talks him down. Takes the weapon. Puts it on the highest shelf. Makes the boy promise to follow his lead. No more stealing from gladiators. No more talk of hunting men.
“Templars break his laws all the time. They don’t die,” Zvain shoots back. And the kid has a point.
Pavek has a plan forming. He knows the druid woman from the customhouse, Akashia, will be coming back through the gates with more zarneeka powder. If he can reach her, tell her what is happening to her product, maybe the druids will help. Maybe they will take him and Zvain in.
But first, they need to survive. And Zvain, it turns out, is not the half-grown child Pavek assumed. He is on the edge of adulthood, all snarls and sudden mood swings, clinging one moment and lashing out the next. Too clever and too suspicious for anyone’s comfort.
This chapter is really about two broken people trying to figure out how to need each other. Pavek has never taken care of anyone. Zvain has never trusted anyone who stayed. And neither of them has any idea what they are doing.
Book: The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey Series: Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas, Book One ISBN: 1-56076-872-X