[Flashback] Silence Speaks Louder than Words (Solo)

[Dhalvasha]

Spring 5, 505 AV

Ordinarily, the cries of pain from his patients never truly bothered Dhalvasha. When he worked, he immersed himself within a different world, one hewn of discipline, action, and reaction. Today, however, he could not seem to tap into his usual state of inner peace. Instead he found himself hanging on the grated ends of every yowl and piteous moan. The patient in question, one Delesha, of Web Curanide, had injured herself during a hunt not a few hour ago. On the trail of some mountain deer, she had misjudged her shot and rather than pierce the deer, instead took a wasp hive from the branches. In her hurry to escape, she had fallen prey to a mistake of clumsiness, slipping and falling down a short, rocky, gulley. It was a relief she had worn her exoskeleton armor, otherwise she might not have managed to drag her way back. It was her cries for help, not her admirable progress, which spirited her to Dhalvasha’s care.

In the Place of Purging, Dhalvasha was a tenuous doctor, working based on a trial period set by the master of the domain. He and Dhalvasha had never seen eye to eye. Svorador was a stern picture of his profession, every bit as commanding and skilled as his reputation indicated. Unfortunately, the dismissive way he treated other Symnestra and his obsessive fixation on the surrogates put the two at odds. Dhalvasha believed in putting more concern in the Symnestra patients and less in the Surrogates. Their importance was to survive long enough to die, and in doing so continue the race. Treating them like princesses was beyond the point, and honestly a pittance compared to what they would soon experience. If Svorador was so concerned about his precious surrogates, than perhaps a case study in neutralizing newborn venom would have been a more fruitful, if not more noble venture.

His patient screamed again, twisting in agony underneath Dhalvasha’s fingers as he examined her right arm for signs of a break.

“It hurts, it hurts damn you!” she hissed between clenched teeth. Her eyes blazed red in the dim lighting of the room as she rocked against his influence.

“Please,” Dhalvasha murmured, running his claws across the length of her arm, “You must calm your thrashing, you’ll only aggravate your injuries.” Catching her eyes with his own, a connection was forged. In that instant he pierced her personal aura with his own influence, flooding her mind with calming whispers, assurances of safety and peace. Delesha held his eyes with her own, staring blankly as an overwhelming sense of calm seeped into her body. The knotted muscles in her arms and chest softened and she lay back down on the slab quietly. With an audible sigh, Dhalvasha continued his examination, running his fingers over the sharp angle near her wrist and another barely raising the skin on her left leg. Two broken bones, likely fractured to extremes. Exoskeletal armor may be useful in some cases, but the Symnestra skeleton could only take so much stress on a single bone before it snapped like tinder. She would not be walking for some time, assuredly, but neither injury appeared sever enough to hamper her hunting thereafter.

Before setting the bones, Dhalvasha set himself to examining the angry red blotches stamping her skin from head to foot. Nearly fifty three individual stings in all, sites that oozed a yellow pus and pushed upwards in angry defiance of natural skin. None of them were fatal, although had several more set themselves upon the huntress she may not have survived. Wasps, as a whole, were vicious creatures when disturbed, and had a strange penchant for exacting vengeance for damage done to their homes. In that way, were not all races a bit like wasps?

No.

A God had created the Valterrian and yet no human army stood poised to attack the gods should they appear. Like all problems the gods created, people leaped at the chance to forgive them should they bless them with a measure of power.

In such an analogy, the wasps would forgive the Symnestra of destroying their nest so long as the huntress had promised to crush a nest of some rival hive, or perhaps shower food upon the ground beneath them.
Fools were those that sold their loyalty for convenience.

Dabbing some of the stings with a cotton swab, Dhalvasha collected a sample of both the stingers and the venom, dropping them into a glass jar at the end of the table for further study an analysis. While inconsequential in small doses, introduction to the right (or wrong) location in the body would promise a swift and painful death…likely through suffocation.

Wiping the back of his hand across his forehead, Dhalvasha banished perspiration and sighed. Setting the bones would be an effort in strength and possibly patience. It was unlikely his Hypnotic suggestion would hold her for long, so he had to be quick about his purpose.

Taking her arm he felt for where the bone had fractured. Sure enough, the line of form was broken neatly, but not in such a way that it would make setting it overly difficult. He had to imagine it like pieces of a puzzle, a dangerous puzzle where exact positioning would ensure solvation, while incorrect would mean another attempt later. Then and again, life was an experiment of progress. Failure now was not indicative of failure later, merely the long road of ups and downs that characterized learning.

He pushed, roughly, suddenly, forcing the two bones to meet together and gripping down on the wound. The huntress screamed, thrashing wildly on the table and for perhaps the tenth time in the last week, Dhalvasha quietly cursed his superior for not supplying proper anesthetics. “Calm yourself,” he growled amidst her agony, “I didn’t set your bones so you could break the others!” Djed flowed through his words like individual conduits, filling her mind again with a river of suggestion. Calm down, lay still, be at peace, sleep, relax…all the words he felt represented the state of mind he wanted her in.

A bitter coppery flavor exploded along his tongue and Dhalvasha reared back, raising the back of his hand to his lips and bringing it away spotted in blood. Now the bitch had caused him to overgive…fantastic. Gritting bloody teeth, he pulled away from the effort, letting the patient mumble and cry in quiet heaving sobs, more breath than noise. Quickly, taking advantage of the lapse in thrashing, Dhalvasha rose and retrieved gauze, wrapping it securely around the wounded area and tying it tight. He’d fashion it into a sling later as the more pressing matter was her leg. Another examination to the bruise forming around the bump revealed he had mistaken her leg for broken, when it was simply sprained and stung. Putting a hand to his head, Dhalvasha reminded himself that he should rest afterwards, if only to replenish his state of mind. She would need to stay off the leg for a week or two, nothing serious, and then could return to hunting…provided she took care of the arm and used a crossbow.

Sitting back from the huntress, now resting, Dhalvasha swallowed the excess blood in his mouth. He knew he’d find no wound where the blood had sprung from, that his body had warned him of his limits as a Hypnotist and he’d come dangerously close to crossing it. Perhaps some practice was in order, or some refining. He could not afford to become one of the hopeless, the lost, those empty minded creatures who had reached the edge of power and simply fallen off.

Taking a deep breath, and then another, Dhalvasha rose from the table and passed out of the Place of Purging. He needed a break from this, a place to concentrate solely on himself or his own studies.
He headed beneath Kalinor, the area directly below the city but well above the ground. It was quiet there, he knew, and perhaps he would find solace in that embrace of shadow.

[Dhalvasha]

For a Widow, climbing was not neccesarily a question of skill, but rather of instinct. Hand by careful hand, Dhalvasha crawled along the pitted stone and spider web cracks with ease. He could not boast the fastest scurry, a creature of habitual cares and measured paces, but he cared little of hurry. Lesser being always worried about life. Even with years streched out before them, they worried of the moments always slipping by. Rather than take hold of their future, they wallowed Ina hyper sensitive awareness brought by their fear of mortality. Dhalvasha shared little of that. His fear was born of a need to accomplish and achieve. Length of life meant nothing if it was not used Properly. An infinite amount of time doing nothing was still the equivalent of a second's worth of nothing.

Pausing in the darkness, his eyes piecing through the murk residing in the nothing below him, Dhalvasha became intimately aware he was not alone beneath the city. Hundreds of pale luminescent spiders scrambled in his wake, parting a soft glow from their bulbous bodies. Hundreds, if not thousands clustered the rocks a d strands of web holding Kalinor up. From below, Kalinor must seem remarkable indeed. Smiling, Dhalvasha produced a jar from the folds of his clothes. His weight was easily supported by his two feet and he used both hands to quickly unscrew the jar and scoop the slower stragglers into their glass prison. Their minds, simple and without higher function, easily succumbed to his mind as he pierced their minute auras.

Hypnotism, a discipline of kings and paupers, required little save control to command safely. Of the practiced Hypnotists he knew, a common symptom seemed to be a growing sense of confidence. Weakness was bred of fear and ignorance both. If skilled Hypnotists fooled themselves into downfall, then they were so much the lesser for allowing themselves to stumble so foolishly. A true mastery was born with healthy respect for the art, a willingness to retire it in the face of more permanent damage.

Dhalvasha hung there, motionless in his meditation. Pale bodies pushed against their glass prison to no avail and he was deaf to their frenzied scrabbling. In essence, he was nothing. He hung within the absence of life, sound, existence. He felt as infants must feel...alone with the world both near and forever away. Alone with his ego and soul, the Symenestra spent a small eternity simply living, allowing himself the same virtue of function as the spiders he now had. How marvelous their simple lives, how utterly perfect their lack of expectation and ambition.

For peons, they were perfect.

But for Dhalvasha, they were only the creatures excusable for setting their sights so low. He, on the other hand, had no reason to dawdle here. The silence had invigorated him...and his tiny acquaintences had provided him with an alternate use of time and focus.

Grinning, he retreated back the way he came, a ghostly giant amid the miniscule phantoms

[Dhalvasha]

In his home he found new use for the little creatures, bumbling bodies of white and bulbous ends. He fished them from their jar homes, one by one, and enchanted them with lines of Djed speared from ruby eyes. Humming, mostly to himself, he placed them each upon the discarded tools of poison and venom identification, bottles and beakers and contraptions he had been loathe to name. The trick was observing the venom in its natural form, how it worked on creatures of small to medium size. The trick in all poison, and even medicine, was in dosage.

So he put the creatures with a snake.

The reptile was small, a grass snake from the surface. It undulated and twisted its coils in annoyance and the minuscule intrusion. Like abrupt soldiers, the tiny arachnids set on the snake in strange ordered attack. Dhalvasha watched, surprised. They had clustered together when he'd found them, but he assumed it was of natural fear rather than some sense of community. The snake twisted, tiny fangs piercing scales and pumping venom. Biting at its attackers, the snake quickly found it was no match for the amount of creatures Dhalvasha had set upon it, and soon found its blood reacting to the venom.

It took roughly three minutes for the venom to still the snake...and by then the spiders were already spinning webs again, already happy to begin their new life on the bones of such a grand prey. The Symenestra allowed himself a chuckle, turning away from observation to coax more of the spiders into biting the thinly layered jar through the paper top. Imperceptible venom dripped, and Dhalvasha patiently waited for it to collect in the bottom, biological poison for the one who applied it and survival for those who produced it.

Hypnotism was his method of conduct, finding it easy to coax the little ones to dance to his influence. Spiders were not like people though, they questioned him more readily...they shook effects.

They required more effort. Easier, perhaps, to placate survival and require little but the action of the beast to his end, an ultimate end.

Poison, venom, distilling, study.

Into the night the Symenestra labored, dreams of beautiful progress and madness as he fed the spiders to each other and other beasts, marking their venom progress.

Understanding them would bring him closer to curing the chemical

Closer to curing his own.

All Symenestra.

[Dhalvasha]

It was the midnight prodding of duty which led the Symenestra back through the winding paths and webs to the Place of Purging again. He stood, imperceptible, at the edges of notice. Doctors moved around him, trained men and women of noble aspirations and oiled mechanical tracks. They did as the head purger demanded, and not a one paused to ask why. Healing, well, medicine in general was a task better fit for the gnosis marked, those who mended with the help of divine confidence rather than the fledgling skill of medicine still developing. Personally, Dhalvasha was still only a learner. He borrowed the books on medical theories, the maps of hastily drawn out skeletons, memorizing as best he could the different numbers of joints in fingers...phalanges, and arms. Bones, bones, everything was a connective part of something greater.

Quietly, he slipped back into the room of his patient. She slept now, another more skilled doctor already settling in to correct his work, minimize his mistakes, and retie the sling around her arm. In the end, she would remember the second, not the first...as the more helpful. In times of need these simple creatures turned to others, the constant verification that society was an instinctual part of all sentient creatures. They all needed each other, they all wanted some comfort of belonging.

The young doctor had Shai, had his son, but the empty place where a surrogate would have filled, a woman he should have saved...it yawned wider than the nothingness beneath Kalinor. It yawned wider than the outside and its sky-cave ceiling. It yawned and was filled with all the pondering ineptitude of a stumbling doctor looking for point and progress.

What was he here but a fixture...the unfortunate byproduct of decisive distance. He no longer said the prayers to Viratas in his heart, hadn't for some time now. The echo of the Symenestra god of blood had vanished from him, left his interactions hollow with his other kind. How could they put such faith in an ambivalent god? It cared nothing of their plight, blood and blood and blood and blood again till nothing but dust choked arteries and that grand scion of visceral sacrifice would go dry for want of crimson moisture.

Sighing, Dhalvasha took a book from the shelf and read, his crimson eyes dancing over the scrawling entry of doctors before him, their comments on effective plant poultices, anesthetics questionably drawn from paralytic venom...all the details of sentient creature's progress toward the ultimate knowledge of self.

What they were, how they worked, and who could fix them when the parts broke down.

Yawning, Dhalvasha laid over the book and flipped the pages quietly, alive and thinking only to the rhythmic sound of his patient breathing on the medical table. In the morning she would be gone, and likely return again, and again, and again...till one day her friends were too far, or the fall too great, or the challenge too dire, or time simply too short for anyone to do anything at all.

If anything, medicine was the prevention of natural progress...and in his heart, Dhalvasha knew that.

But he sought more than simple paltry parlays with Dira.

He wanted to cure his people of their affliction, he WOULD cure them. Viratas had proven absent and nothing else filled the void. In lieu of that, he would.

The thought glowed on his mind as he drifted into sleep, the pages flapping in a wind neither of the two Symenestra could feel.

[Poison]

THREAD AWARD!

Skills: Hypnotism 3, Medicine 3, Acrobatics 1
Lores: Calming Surrogates, Recognizing Wasp Stings, Setting Broken Bones, Signs of Overgiving, Effects of Spider Venom

This was a good thread!

I especially liked how Dhalvasha apparently made a few small mistakes, and another doctor had to correct his work and that he overgave!

At his current level he shouldn't be able to do everything perfectly, and you incorporated that into your posts.

That's why I gave you 3 XP rather than 2 as I was initially going to.