"This will sting a little."
Kael said calmly, pressing the cotton ball against the wound.
A pained shriek followed by small tears came from the upper floor of Velarific Wellness.
A young girl had tripped just outside the clinic, and on seeing the sign had simply walked in. Perhaps it was ignorance that gave her the confidence to enter a Luminaire's clinic without hesitation. Kael hadn't needed to think twice about taking her in.
He summoned a tendril and guided it toward the wound, a deep cut carved into soft flesh by the rough cobblestone that covered every road in the western continent.
"Look!" Luke said with a grin, making a stuffed animal jump in his hands. "He likes you, little one."
He was a natural with children. Probably because he wasn't far from one himself.
Kael glanced at him silently as he began to stitch the wound closed.
He could feel it in Luke's aura too. Naive but genuinely warm. The kind of person that was difficult to dislike even if you made a real effort.
When the wound was sealed Kael smiled and spread a deck of cards in front of the girl.
"Pick one."
She looked baffled by the request but reached out and took one.
Kael turned his head away and shook the deck.
"Put it back." Luke said, crouching beside her, somehow just as excited as she was.
She did, and Kael shuffled for a full minute before turning back, then flicked the deck upward. The cards spread through the air in gentle waves, indifferent to everything around them, like a brief sea of stars made of paper. Then Kael's hand shot up and caught one.
The rest drifted to the floor in a soft, scattered symphony.
"Was this your card?"
The girl's face lit up entirely.
"Yes, Mister!"
She had forgotten about the pain completely.
Luke was grinning beside her, wider than she was, which wasn't really the point. Kael threw him a look and he cleared his throat and straightened his back.
"Watch carefully."
Kael made the same spreading motion with the deck, but this time instead of another card, a green lollipop appeared from behind the last one.
Kael helped her peel back the wrapper and pulled out a few leaves alongside it.
"These are from the bed of a nearby creek. Make tea from them every day for a week and you'll be back to your old self in no time."
Luke and Kael saw her off and returned inside.
"That was our first customer." Luke immediately began pacing. "I can hardly believe it. Do you think she found it satisfactory? I completely forgot to ask if there was anything we could improve on."
"She was twelve."
"She was a customer!" Luke moved behind the counter, sat down, and entered some kind of meditative state that would have put ancient philosophers to shame.
Kael was a little taken aback by the bluntness of it, but he didn't mind. Taking it seriously was a good thing.
"While you're fixing the world I'll see to my own business."
Kael said, draping his military cape over his shoulders.
—
Kael's finger moved along the sewer wall.
At this point it felt like he had spent more time beneath the city than in it, which couldn't be far from the truth.
"All this..." He moved his hand across his chest. "And I still haven't found the third layer."
With a low grunt he drove his arm in a sharp arc straight into the wall beside him.
A thunderclap echoed through the tunnel. Crack after crack as every bone in his hand gave way. The wall collapsed into a cloud of dust, fragments of brick raining down, bone visible through the skin of his hand.
Kael clenched his teeth and shook it off. The hand was fully healed before he stepped through the hole.
He had mapped close to a third of the second layer by now and still hadn't found a way down. What he had found in the library was a book of old drawings. According to those, the sewer system had been built across two distinct periods, and in the later construction the paths to the third layer had been bricked over and replaced by new ones, known only to higher ranking Luminaires and nobles. He had asked Sielle about it and been advised to leave it alone.
But since when had Kael abided the noble's will? If anything he was just as much a noble as either of them.
The path from here was unknown territory, even to Sielle.
Kael descended a long flight of stairs. The sound of running water became almost deafening. The air carried human waste and ammonia sharp enough to sting.
He instinctively wrinkled his nose and looked around. By now he had to be roughly sixty meters below the surface. He pulled out his notebook and held it against his side as he went deeper.
It was dreadfully uneventful. The same tunnels, the same narrow walkway, the same suffocating smell. Now and then a staircase leading upward would appear. He marked each one in his notebook and kept moving. There was life down here, but not in any human form. Sewer flies. The occasional cockroach. The intermittent squish beneath his boots where a slug met its demise.
His eyes moved across the notebook when his step found nothing beneath it.
"Huh?"
The book fell from his hand.
The tunnel ahead was gone, replaced by the emptiness of a massive tear in the earth, wide enough that it looked less like a hole and more like the world coming apart at a seam.
Nothing got past the primordial eye… So why? Why had this slipped through?
He reached for the edge. Small rocks crumbled loose where his fingers brushed, and then his entire body seized, as though invisible chains had wrapped around him all at once.
He tipped and fell like a cut tree, the world blurring around him. He reached again but his mind had gone blank. No. He was locked out of his own body.
His speed increased at an alarming rate, his body completely limp. He slammed into the first jutting rock like a ragdoll, his hip bone snapping on impact. Before it had finished healing he hit another. His arm shattered in four places. Just as his leg straightened itself back into position another rock came up and snapped it again.
His mind was in chaos. Nothing aligned. It was the primordial eye all over again.
He dropped another few hundred meters when a rock that might as well have been part of a continental plate jutted out from the wall. Kael's head met it with a sound like a thunderclap. His skull split open, blood blooming outward into the dark air. His mind went blank.
Then he fell. And kept falling. Until gravity had taken everything it could from him and his speed plateaued into something absolute. He became a streak of black in the dark, a bullet with no target.
His limp arm caught a rock and tore free at the shoulder without slowing him at all. Tendrils shot from the stump and dug into the severed limb, dragging it down with him.
A metallic ring sounded as the tip of his blade caught a rock and tore loose from its sheath.
Wall to wall he ricocheted, slamming from one side to the other like a stone dropped into a well, each impact accompanied by sounds that had no dignity in them.
Then he hit the ground.
The sound it made did no justice to how far he had fallen. A wet splat, followed by a plethora of small crunches that disappeared almost as fast as it arrived, swallowed by the dim lit space.
Screams erupted around him. Kael heard none of it.
People in rags, in dirt-covered clothes that barely covered them, threw themselves aside. Some fell. Some gasped. Some simply froze. Others scattered like startled birds, running without knowing where to.
Cling. Cling. Cling.
The blade followed with a whistle, end over end, until it drove perfectly vertical into his back and pinned him to the ground.
Tendrils erupted from the countless wounds in what looked like panic, burning through Thoughts at a desperate rate, trying to rebuild what the fall had taken apart.