The Tent of High Healing

Chapter One: The Tent of Healing

She was born with a broken heart.

So her mother told her. That she was born blue. Born too early. Born with a hole inside it. Something broken to be fixed. The healers swept in and pieced her back together. They told her mother and her mother told her that her heart was healed. That her heart was now unbreakable. They put a little device inside it that kept it beating. Her mother told her they put a star in her heart. It was why her mother named her Astrea.

When she was eight years old she discovered they were wrong. Her heart could break again. Into a million pieces. No amount of healing, medicine, or aether would fix it. That was eighteen years ago when her parents died during a Drakkorian terrorist attack.

She remembered the look on her mothers face. Her mother shielded her body as flames erupted around them. As her body broke over and over and Astrea stayed whole.

"I love you.

Never forget that I am with you.

Never forget who you are.

Never forget."

Her heart shattered that day and every day since.

And now she was supposed to fix other broken people. Supposed to piece them back bit by bit. Supposed to heal them.

The cardiac monitor beeped, spurring her into action. She bolted out of her chair and placed her palm on her patrons chest, willing Mysinia's diseased heart to keep beating.

The monitor blared.

"Beat", she said out loud. Willing her words to force the chambers of Mysinias heart to contract. To force blood to eject from her ventricle out into circulation. She sent waves of aether from her own heart into Mysinia's and willed them to beat together. To beat as one.

"Selwyn save me." Astrea sighed in relief as she felt Mysinia's heart beat return. At first barely palpable, mere fibrillations, and then Mysinia's heart succumbed to her will and beat for her.

Mysinia groaned.

Death hung in the air. Not just from the woman lying before her. But the walls of The Tent of High Healing wreaked of it. Small black veins crept up the Ashrah stones that could not be cleaned or scraped off. No amount of potions, polstices, or antiseptic could remove the slight stench. It permeated the halls and clung to the healer's robes.

Astrea lifted her hands off Mysinia's chest and traced the tubing that connected her to Mysinia. She had a port just above her heart, as all high healers did. A product of the modern era, a way to direct and control aether. She gripped the metal sensors in her palms and felt her body buzz as she reconnected herself to the 297 year old female laying in the centre of the room.

The decaying body felt foreign to her and she willed herself down through every crack and crevice of Mysinia's 297 year old frame. Her aether felt clogged by fatty plaques awaiting rupture in ancient veins threatening to burst as she writhed through Mysinia's vasculature, meticulously lysing each clot. She repaired the weakened bulging arteries, peeled back layers of lipids and platelets congregating in the wrong places. Ensured all organs were perfused within the limits defined by the High Healers. She felt her own breath become ragged as she willed Mysinia's lungs to expand with full inspiratory pressure and purge fluid and mucus from within.

She made her way up into Mysinia's cerebrum, as she flitted across axons and ventricles, potentiating where there might be a rupture or blockage. Then she felt it, a massive clot in the chamber of Mysinia's memories and drew deep within her energy stores before plunged into them.

Suddenly the tent faded as a fog took over. Thunder clapped and she found herself in another world. Or another time. It was murky and distant.

No. No. No.