The Wizard

Idle Hands

"Before we start, I want to mention one more time, that I usually work with inanimate mechanical structures." 

Grimble stood on the stump table next to the bed. Mevner was passed out as drunk as he could get with his hand strapped down to the wood. The gnome walked around the immobilized appendage. Oxide held Mevner's arm firmly in its mechanical clamp hands. An astral projection of Mevner looked down at the scene. He held a pair of pliers in one hand and a very new and extremely sharp blue bladed dagger in his other. 

"If we mess up, I'll still heal. Hopefully, it won't get any worse," said the projection. 

Grimble adjusted his goggles. "Let's start with the pinky and work our way to the thumb." 

Mevner looked down at his own hand, raised the blade, and began to cut lines down the back of his little finger. Once inside he detached the tendons and Grimble held them in place. He used the pliers to turn each bone completely around. With a needle and thread, they re-attached the tendons in the correct direction and sewed the finger back together. 

Had his projection had an actual stomach, the horrid bloody practice would have turned it for sure. 

They repeated the process, making it to the index finger of the right hand before the projection vanished and Mevner woke up. He took one look at the bloody mangled mess that was his hand and passed out again. A moment later his projection returned. 

"Sleep." The Mevner astral projection waved a glowing hand over his human body. 

Oxide saw no one and failed to comprehend the floating tools, let alone understand who Grimble was talking to. It just did as it was told and held the man's arm with all its might. 

"The thumb will surely be the worst," suggested Grimble and it was. 

A day later, Mevner awoke to agonizing pain. His hand throbbed and pulsed with each beat of his heart. It was a ball of bloody bandages that he could not move nor feel. When they removed the bandages, his fingers looked like they'd been flattened by a boulder. Long zigzag incision lines ran across each digit, caked with blood, and sewn together with black string. The site of his destroyed appendage drained him of any hope. He was dizzy from loss of blood.

Mevner ate, drank, and slept and two days later his hand was looking more human-like. The ring increased his recovery time a hundredfold. 

"We should go back in and remove the inner stitches. Then seal them up good," suggested Grimble. 

And so they did. The stitches were cut and the incisions reopened. They removed the inner bonds as the tendons had grown back against the bone. They folded back the loose flaps of skin and stitched the fingers back together again. 

Even with a completely passed out body, Mevner's projection was calm and collected, unaffected by the physical world. After he and Grimble had the right hand squared away, they started in on the left, repeating the first surgery and returning his finger mechanics to the proper orientation. The two were engrossed in the intricate and sensational physical manipulation. The stump stained red with the wizard's blood. 

When Mevner woke the next day with the terrible pain throbbing in his left hand, he had half the bandages off before it dawned on him, he was removing them with his right!

By the week's end, he was walking, leg and foot bones healed, and his posture took on a straightness he'd never had before. He would never slouch again. His right hand was becoming nimble and with the stitches removed looked relatively normal sans the large white zigzag scars that ran down and around the length of each finger. The second surgery on the left had also been successful in realigning the fingers and causing enough damage to give the ring something to heal. 

Mevner altered the forge and began to blow glass. He created a set of narrow but thick-walled vials and a smaller circular one with a glass loop that he tied a leather string through to make a necklace. He asked to fill it with some of Melock's ashes. 

Grimble agreed and the remainder was placed in three of the larger vials. A fourth was filled with goat's blood and the fifth was kept empty. 

The goats were slaughtered and eaten; their hides turned into a new jacket, a knife sheath, and a pouch for the vials. Mevner spent days working leather, sewing, and returning the utility of his hands. The inner scar tissue healed giving him incredible grip strength and hands, he felt, were better than they'd ever been. 

He took full advantage of being prehensile again.