Battle Medicine

You’re dying.

You know this is true. The world has narrowed to pain and a thick metallic taste in your throat. You’ve seen enough gut wounds on the battlefield to recognise your own. Regrets cloud your mind as your vision darkens at the edges.

Then: pressure on your chest. Someone’s checking your wounds.

“Stay with me.” A woman’s voice, calm and clinical.

You try to focus. Dark hair, pale face swimming in and out of your vision. One of the medics. The quiet one, you think. You’ve seen her around the medical tent, always keeping to herself. Good hands, the other soldiers said. Gentle.

Her hands aren’t gentle now. They’re freezing.

“This is bad,” she mutters, more to herself than you. You hear her rifling through her kit. Bandages won’t fix this. You both know it.

You try to apologise, mouthing “I’m sorry” with what little air remains in your lungs.

“Don’t,” she says, her voice strained. “Just breathe.”

Her hands frantically check your wounds again. She takes another look at her half-depleted medical kit and then another look around for… danger?

Her eyes meet yours for just a moment – pale, engulfed in fear like a fresh recruit facing their first charge. She brings one bloodless arm to her own face. Why? It comes away stained bright crimson, and you catch yourself. Hallucinations, maybe. Everything seems to blur together. Your final moments likely approach.

The medic’s hands – so very cold – still work on your abdomen as your vision narrows yet more. Pain shoots through your body.

“Shit,” her voice almost panicked, but you can hardly hear her.

“I’m going to do something to help you,” she says quietly, leaning in closer. Strange-her breath doesn’t fog in the winter air. “It’s going to feel wrong. I’m sorry. But you need to trust me.”

You don’t have the strength to wonder what that means. You just lie there. Agony, choices unmade, home, so much you could have done- then Gods, her hands are frigid. She’s pressing an icy palm against you, not on your wound, but over your heart.

“I’m sorry,” she pleads again.

And then the world inverts. Like falling in a dream only land back in a nightmare. Your breathing slows, almost feeling optional. Your heartbeat. Too slow. You can feel every heavy thud so heavily, so far apart. Colour drains from the world.

Is this it, the end? You can feel the sun raw against your skin. Prickling, almost stinging, like knives through the battle-smoke.

You gasp, trying hard to take in air, but your lungs don’t respond as they should. Everything is muffled, grey, wrong. The medic with her corpse-cold hands is still there.

“I know, I know,” she says, her voice tight with something you can’t name exactly. Guilt? “You’re still here, stay with me.”

Her other hand moves to your wound, dark energy gathering around her fingers like smoke made solid. Not the warming cantrips of the priests. Pain. Darkness. Suffering. Instinctually you want to flinch away; to drag yourself from this torture.

But you can’t move. It doesn’t burn. Not that oh-so-harsh sunlight. Black smoke enters your wound. Like a cool stream it flows into your veins, seeming to fill a void you didn’t know was there. You feel it coldly, roughly, tugging at your blood vessels, rebuilding them, knitting your flesh back together like the undertaker preparing a corpse.

When did it stop hurting? You lie there deathly still, caught between worlds. The battle still rages somewhere far away, the sun’s weight pressing down on you disapprovingly.

You’ve seen this medic – Mira – working by lamplight on night duty. You feel as if you understand now. Why her hands are so cold. Why she never attends morning prayers.

“What…” your voice rasps. “What are you?” She freezes for a moment; you almost think she’ll run

“Someone who couldn’t let you die,” she says quietly.

She starts to pack away her kit with practiced, clinical movements.

You reach out and take her arm.

“Thank you,” you say, meaning it. You manage to force a weak smile.

Something in her expression cracks, like she had expected fear and revulsion, not gratitude.

“Go,” she commands. “Get back to your squad and have a nurse look over you later. You’ll be weak for a while, but you’ll live.”

You sit up, feeling fresh skin where a spear once intruded. You should report back to your sergeant, pretend this was normal battlefield medicine.

Instead you ask: “Will it ever stop? The cold? The sun?”

She blinks, understanding what you’re asking. About what she did to you. What you became.

“For you? Soon.” She sighs, looking away, her reticence more telling than any answer.

You nod slowly, understanding.

You leave her there, kneeling in the mud, another casualty already being dragged towards her. The wrongness begins to fade as you make your way back to your unit. Your lungs pull in deep, life-giving breaths. Your heartbeat steadies. Colours flow into the sky once more and your skin appreciates the warmth. By the time you stumble back you almost feel normal again.

Almost.