Broken Wings

Taste of Power

"So just how much is this going to hurt?" I asked warily. Anea had only waited until the last piece of fish was between my teeth before insisting on examining my wounded arm. When I rolled up my left sleeve to show it to her though, she'd shaken her head and explained she was going to look inside my arm. She was going to use her magic to simultaneously enhance my awareness of my body and her own empathic abilities. She said it would be similar to what I experienced right before she decided she needed to scare me into breathing fire. This time, it would take longer and be focused on my left arm. I was not eager to have my senses amplified in that arm.

"It won't be pleasant. It might hurt very badly," Anea admitted in a sympathetic tone. "But it won't actually cause any further harm." She raised a forepaw and made a show of flexing the talons. "You said you can't move two of your fingers. That means I can't just make you heal faster. I will have to ensure your tendons also grow back together properly. I can't do that if I don't know exactly how they are damaged and where they are now."

"Will it matter if I pass out?" I asked, not encouraged by Anea's words. I am not doing this more than once.

"No," she snorted, grimly amused. "It shouldn't be that bad, but if you do start to fall unconscious don't bother fighting it. I'll be talking to your body, not your mind. I won't make this last an instant longer than it has too. Are you ready?"

I sucked in air between my teeth. "No. But go ahead. Let's get this over with." Anea bobbed her head once, then focused her gaze on my arm. A second passed, and her golden eyes shined brilliantly. That same moment, I felt everything in my left arm from the middle of my bicep on down.

Countless muscle fibers contracted in reaction to tiny electro-chemical jolts running down the long, web-like nerves woven into and around the tendons and ligaments connecting flesh to bones and other flesh and the blood vessels carrying vital fluids to and from all surrounding tissue. Intense pain signals raced up dozens, hundreds of nerve tendrils as each miniscule movement disturbed and further damaged the traumatized mess of shredded and blistered meat surrounding the void where devastating violence had torn hundreds of tiny blood vessels and several large ones asunder, snapped the cable strong tendons, and rended millions of cells from each other. Even now, those cells were aggressively dividing, demanding and receiving the necessary energy and materials to replicate until they filled the unacceptable gap with themselves and reestablished the order they existed to maintain. And my eyelids blinked closed then opened as all of that knowledge and more flooded my mind in the first split second of Anea's investigation. The pain of my wound was immeasurably amplified, but it was almost drowned out by the ocean of information engulfing my mind. There wasn't room to react in any way to what I experienced; I simply existed and rode out the storm until the torrent of sensation and awareness ceased just as abruptly as it started.

"Holy shit," I wheezed, readjusting to the blissful numbness of my baseline sensitivity to touch and pain.

"I know," Anea murmured, still intent on my arm. "It's a lot of damage, but most of that will heal without any special direction. We just need to be sure no infections take hold. Those tendons are the big problem, just like we thought. They don't know how to heal if they aren't touching." I was taken aback.

"Wait, you understood all of that?!" I asked, incredulous. Receiving that much information all at once had been like trying to drink from a firehose a foot wide. I'd already dumped most of it, and what was left was so jumbled in my memory it all but incomprehensible. I hadn't even been able to keep track of time; I had no clue how long Anea's inspection had taken. "Were you seeing everything at once like I was?" The intensity in her eyes softened as they swiveled to meet mine.

"Of course. It is a lot to take in all at once. It took me about a decade of practice before I was able to get any real use out of Scrying." I just shook my head, intimidated. I couldn't believe any amount of practice would allow me to take in and process that much information all at once. Maybe her experience with this technique let her focus on what she needed to know. Or maybe her larger brain just had a higher capacity for input than mine. I decided not to ask. I'd rather not confirm that on top of every other way Anea overmatched me, she was also far more intelligent.