The more one used an apex relic, the worse it got.
“It’s you…” Seraphina held the torch away from their faces and reached up to touch the man’s cheek. “Idris.” His name caught in her throat, the sound between a choke and a whisper. “It really is you.”
He leaned into her touch. Under her dirty palm, she could feel his cheek gaunt, the skin pulled tight over the bone. Her thumb rubbed over the sharpness of it, then her fingers traced his jaw, which she found as clean-shaved as she remembered, before resting at the joint between his neck and shoulder. His pulse thudded against her fingertips.
“Seraphina.” The surprise in his voice was replaced with worry. “You’re hurt.”
“Yes,” she said without thinking, then shook her head. “No, no…”
“Is it…” She could feel his eyes studying her from head to toe. “Is this your blood?”
“It’s not. I’m fine, Idris, I promise.”
He let out a breath, though she could tell he didn’t fully believe her.
“I thought you were dead,” he said. “Everyone said so.”
She hung her head and took a step back, her touch falling from his shoulder. Before she could pull away, he caught her hand in his.
“How are you here?” he asked. “Why… What happened?”
He was staring at the scarf tied around her head, and for the first time in what could’ve been more than a year, she felt the flesh in her empty eye sockets tingle. An itch that, once noticed, turned insistent, until she could feel it in her brain, as if it knew the bits of her that had been missing were close, just in her pocket. Around the handle of the torch, her fingers twitched.
“What happened to you?”
“I’ll tell you, but not now. We must hurry. I need your help.”
“Anything.”
She let out a sharp laugh at that, short and high, more of a cackle. She pulled her hand free from his and shoved it in the pocket of her cloak, her fingers wrapping around the wet, squishy eyeballs that she needed him to reattach.
Anything.Her next cackle turned into a sob.Anything.Her brain itched harder.
Seraphina was terrified of showing him what she’d become. To untie her scarf and let him see the monster behind it was nearly inconceivable, but at the same time, she was glad it was him. She was relieved that when the soldier had told her there was a ghoul, that ghoul turned out to be Idris Gharbi.
Once upon a time, they had been colleagues, and maybe more. Neither of them had ever called the other “friend”, but Seraphina liked to think that was what they’d become after hours spent studying together in the library, after endless philosophical debates over lunch, shared laughs and eye rolls, inside jokes and polite teasing. She’d helped him with his German and taught him English, and Idris had opened her mind to new perspectives on science, religion, and how there was no contradiction when it came to the anatomy of the human body. His views were naturalist in their essence, as Idris belonged to House Cordoba, but even so, he was strange enough – “other” enough – to not be accepted by his peers.
He was the only dark-skinned student in their year. Muslim, coming from a modest Tunisian family, he prayed five times a day, didn’t drink a drop of alcohol, and only spoke Arabic, French, and Latin when he came to Krähenstein Academy at fifteen. He’d expected to be othered in Europe, but not between the walls of the greatest relic school, one of the few that encouraged the study of all four currents, not within HouseCordoba itself, whose foundations had been laid by an Arab-speaking woman working at the height of the Islamic Golden Age, Muslim herself, bearing a Muslim name – Zahra. However, no one knew what Zahra had looked like. The portraits in the Cordoban hall showed her fair-skinned and European-featured, dressed in something a German painter had imagined an Andalusi woman might wear. Krähenstein liked to call itself international and took pride in celebrating all four founders of the great currents. But its painters had only one face to give them, and that face was white.
Idris didn’t belong, and Seraphina saw that. She didn’t like it, so one day she sat next to him under the linden tree in the courtyard, where the boy isolated himself to have his lunch in peace. He was scared of her at first, eyeing her long blond hair and black and gray robes with suspicion, but she smiled at him and asked what his name was. Then proceeded to call him by it every time, and use it when she spoke of him to others too, even when they asked, perplexed, “Who do you mean? The Moor?”. She’d say, “Idris. He’s had this fascinating idea about…”
She’d never called him a ghoul either, a courtesy extended to all naturalists, which came as a surprise to most, seeing how she was a pragmatist, and by the definition of her house, she should’ve been dismissive and irreverent.
Seraphina knew what Idris thought of her, the pure light he saw her in, and she felt guilty about it later, when she drifted from him. It happened when she started working with Matteo da Siena and became absorbed by both the work and the man. Now, as the word “anything” echoed through her jumbled thoughts, she felt a squeezing ache in her chest. She wasn’t the girl Idris knew anymore, yet he regarded her as if nothing had changed.
She was glad it was him. She agonized over the fact that it was him.
She drew out the two bloody eyeballs and heard Idris gasp, but that was the extent of his reaction. He was a surgeon; he’d seen worse.
“I need you to…” She started, faltered, and swallowed heavily. “Do you think you can…”
“Ice. There is ice in the medical tent.”
He grabbed the torch from her and headed up the stairs. Seraphina let out a breath of relief and followed.
“How long…” he asked.
“Not long. Maybe an hour.”
