NOVEL WEB A Little Secret
Hopper was very dead. Rigor mortis had set in. A brief inspection spell weeks ago had shown that he was dying of cancer, as most of my friends did, given their peaceful existence on the island.
I could have healed them before they died, of course, but even given how slowly they reproduced, I was wary of interfering.
"Overpopulation would be worse," I ruefully explained to Hopper's corpse. "The island isn't very big, and your children deserve a chance at life, too." I liked to believe that they would all understand and agree.
Instead, I had always limited myself to reducing their pain and suffering. But tonight, I wanted to test my progress. I had given Hopper the same care as any of his ancestors while he was dying, but after his death, I had decided that he would be my first exception to the full healing rule. Partly because watching him decline from the impressively high, frequent, and jovial jumps that he'd been named for to...what he had been at the end, had been especially depressing. And partly because I needed a test subject.
A Hopper is only dead, if there isn't a white mage strong enough to heal him.
I took a deep breath, and drew in as much mana as I could hold. After five centuries of using the straining technique on my mana pool:
- I still looked like I was twenty-five,
- I wasn't sure how many perfect shields I could make, because there weren't enough birds on the island to reach the limit, and I hadn't figured out how to anchor shields to the quirky mana of plants yet (look, I know I'm over 500 years old, but it's not obvious and no white mage has ever wanted to shield a shrub before, alright?),
- And my glow at full charge caused the birds to greet the apparent arrival of dawn if I did it at night. Even the passive glow was a little out of hand...
"It's hard to see the stars nowadays," I lamented to Hopper. Er, his corpse.
If I ever went back to the mainland, it's not just mages who would immediately see through any attempt at anonymity. A woman who literally glowed would be noticed everywhere. It was unavoidable. Still, after so long--five centuries!--surely I was just an abstract historical figure now. No one would be too personally upset with me. It would be like an academic discussion.
I still cringed at the idea of explaining what had happened.
Izena turned, looking back at me in shock and terror--
Five centuries, and still I can radiate acid from my chest on command. Nothing ever changes. I remember everything as clearly as I ever did.
"Another time," I said to myself. "Right now, it's time to get Hopper back."
Ultimately, fixing death was just a sequence of undoing many very serious injuries and diseases.
First, I had to clear out any would-be infections that had crept in. I had to do this at some point anyway, and if I didn't do it first, they'd attack Hopper's tissues as I worked. That was straightforward, like purifying any disease in a living patient, although tedious because the problem was so severe. This patient was, after all, dead.
Next came restoring any damage to tissues caused by the loss of internal equilibrium after he died. This was the tricky part that I hadn't done before, that no one had done before. This part was what normally kept dead things dead. In a still-living patient with relatively minor injuries, a healer needed only to guide, accelerate, and power the body's built-in healing processes. Those weren't working in Hopper. Hopper was dead. Instead, this would be like repairing an inanimate object, or repairing an injury that the body can't naturally heal like a missing limb, but enormously more complicated. Hopper was dead. Much of the underlying patterns that the magic would need to identify, interpolate, and restore were lost. With no way to use the healing cheat, I had prepared an ingenious strategy for my first try at 'repairing' Hopper.
Namely, overwhelming brute force.
"Fixing a metal bucket takes little mana because it's so simple. Inject just a bit, and the magic fills in the parts of the pattern that are broken based on the pieces that are still there!" I said to Hopper, mostly to bolster my own confidence. "Repairing clothing takes more mana because it's a little more complicated, so it's more difficult for the spell to determine what pieces of the pattern are missing, what they looked like, based on what remains. Repairing a house all at once is draining, and it needs to be in decent enough condition to be recognizable as a house. It helps to do one part at a time, so the patterns that need to be restored are individually simpler. It must be possible to fill in Hopper's pattern in the same way! By simple extrapolation, it should work."
I liked to think that Hopper would appreciate the lesson I was giving him, as I moved from one set of tissues to the next, if he weren't dead. I promise that I'm not completely insane yet.
"You're definitely in decent enough condition to be recognizable as a Hopper. The spell should have enough to work with to identify the patterns," I added.
If I was honest with myself, I knew that it would never be possible to heal a smudge back into a person. Too much information, too much of the pattern to be restored, had been lost for the gaps to be filled in. I doubted I could heal even a skeleton back into the original person. It's not a 'person's body,' it's a person's skeleton. Repairing a skeleton would just fix, say, cracks in the bones. I suspected that the current state of Hopper's body was probably the limit for resurrection or close to it, hence the present test. Any further, and too much would be lost for the spell to figure out exactly how to fix things.
"I just hope I have enough mana. This will take a lot."
People may worship me, but I worship overwhelming brute force.
An indeterminate time later, my breathing was ragged. "A lot," I gasped. "It takes, a lot, of mana." I hadn't felt this drained in centuries. Hopper was much more complicated than a house, despite being so much smaller. But I had done it. Hopper had transformed from a corpse at the onset of rigor mortis, into a bird that appeared at first glance to be sleeping.
"I'm, pretty sure, not even you, could jump out, of the, bottomless pit, that swallowed, that, mana," I complain-teased, while recovering my breath. My glow had faded noticeably from its full-power brilliance. Wow, this was draining.
My pulse was pounding, partly from exertion, but also anticipation. The hard part was over. This last step should be the easiest of all, but the most magical nonetheless. With a deep breath, I prepared the final healing spell. Hopper's body was repaired, it just needed to be reminded how it worked. Guided, resynchronized, restarted, coaxed to remember what it had been. I shuffled into a different position to wait while maintaining the channel. I didn't dare to waste any mana removing my sweat.
I hadn't even settled in yet before Hopper's eyes blinked open, and he looked around in obvious confusion. Then, he saw me, and hopped like he was one year old again, straight onto my head in a single bound.
For the first time in five centuries, I smiled without reservation. Judging by the sounds coming from the top of my head, I might have to call him Chirper now.
"I'm glad you still recognize me! Welcome back. Don't tell the others, alright? This is our little secret."