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“And you’ve kindly volunteered it to the protector. We thank you for your service,” Marianne said, gracefully ambling into the room.
Laurence opened the wardrobe, gently picked up the bundle inside, and turned to set it on the bed. But the bundle was a man curled up in a strange position and covered in a blue bath towel.
“Oh, Lord.” I gasped as I pushed through the many people crowding the room. The man on the bed was brown and crusted with layers of dirt on his skin.
“Could you please get me a towel, a tub of warm water, and soap please?” I asked Laurence quietly.
He nodded and disappeared into the en suite bathroom.
Behind me, the witch whined. “Deborah …”
Charlie scoffed. “I wouldn’t look to her for help. She’s got her own problems.”
“Where do I go?” the witch asked.
“No one fucking cares,” Charlie snapped. “Haven’t you got a witch friend you can bunk with? Get the fuck out so we can see to the dying man.”
“I’ll be back for my stuff later,” came the huffed reply along with the sound of the door opening and slamming shut.
I said softly, "Hello, sir. My name is Clawdia, and I'm here to help. Can you tell me what hurts?" He was rigidly stiff, with bumps under the towel where his fists were balled, and his arms were raised at odd angles. His hair was long and straggly with the coat of mud matting it. Thin skin stretched over bone, not a spec of fat on him. He looked almost mummified.
He is an old man. Did an old man defeat the dragon in the myth? Will an old man stop the dragon again?
Laurence came back and handed me a damp towel and placed a jug of water on the bedside table. I muttered my thanks and immediately started wiping his face.
"Hello, sir, could you please open your eyes for me?" He moaned but didn't open his eyes. "If it's too much, you can close them again. I just need to check your pupils."
Deborah scoffed behind me, drawing my attention. "He can't understand you."
"He seems catatonic. And old. And recently revived. Try to engage that blackened smudge you call a heart and find some empathy," I snapped.
“That's my girl,”Charlie whispered through our connection, pride filling me from his side of the bond.
“Is he supposed to be so old?” Marianne asked Deborah.
“No. The myth says he defeated the dragon and died in his prime. I don’t know why he looks like this.”
Did something I do cause him to rise this way? Did I not give him enough energy?I hated being the potential cause of someone's suffering after they were already forced back into being.
I shook my head. "You should have had a medical professional with you who could have planned for all the possibilities and ensured his well-being. But instead, you listened to a murderer and threw him in a wardrobe."
“The document Mary gave you about when to raise the protector, it didn’t have a date,” Charlie began. I heard the leading question, and his tone was deceptively light.
“No, but it obviously meant now. We are under attack,” Deborah replied ignorantly.
He scoffed. “Not going to argue with you on your logic there, but who’s to say we haven’t been under attack before? That he hasn’t been revived before?”
My hand stilled from bathing the protector, and I turned around, shocked at the suggestion.
Deborah shook her head stubbornly. "There was no record of another raising."
Charlie crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. "Fire collected for centuries. Isn't that what you said? For this exact moment? Pretty sure I heard that in your speech to the witches. Yet there were only fifty jars of fire."
Marianne sighed and rubbed her forehead. “So, it’s likely he was raised before, and that’s why he is old and frail.”
Deborah looked at the floor, unwilling to admit it.
But if he’d been raised before, did that also include the dragon? Is the dragon as old and injured as the protector? Does that mean we just need to bide our time until the dragon dies, or is it healing with the magic it absorbs?
