The Dragon Thief [I]

Crossroads [8]

Crossroads

Lannasia

A small crack of light pierced Lanna's vision calling for her to shield her eyes with a hand. She slowly let herself rise and felt a woollen blanket gently fall from her chest. Her eyes quickly adjusted to the bare room around her. Wooden floorboards and white walls. Lanna glanced to the single bed she laid in, seemingly the only piece of furniture in the room beside a singular wooden chair. Lanna didn't recognise the place.

When she tried to move off the bed, her muscles groaned and refused to cooperate. It felt like she had just run a hundred laps. She inspected herself, seeing no visible signs of injury, no cut or bruise on her body. The pink scar on her arm was the only imperfection she found, and even then, it didn't give her grief. Carefully, Lanna tried to recall what had happened before she awoke in the strange room.

She last remembered fighting in the Salzkadra's den. Nox and herself had concocted a plan to paralyse the beast to escape the cave with Alderyth. To her knowledge, that much had happened. She furrowed her brows and thought harder. Did the creature break free and resume attacking them? She struggled to remember exactly how that event ended, only remembering the fragmented feeling of a searing heat and an explosion. Lanna paled.

"Am I dead?"

She looked around again. The room's only window reflected brightly as the sun set in the pink sky. She'd never thought much of an afterlife existing, but if this was it, she was honestly disappointed.

Just then through the room's closed door burst Nox. Lanna watched as he flooded in wearing grey trousers and a black pea coat, the most Lanna had ever seen him casually dressed. She let a sigh out.

"I'm dead, and yet you're still here?"

Nox paced to her bedside wide-eyed.

"You're awake?" he asked, his eyes darting from her head to her toes, as if he believed he was seeing a ghost. Alderyth walked through the door soon after and joined them in the bare room. The master mage was dressed in his normal attire of white robes with a blue lining. It billowed around him as he approached Lanna, a smile on his face.

"Lanna, I'm glad to see you are conscious. We came as soon as the healers told us you were awakening."

Lanna slowly shook her head.

"What are you doing here?" she quizzically asked. Alderyth reached out and gave Lanna a pat on her shoulder, a small comforting gesture.

"We brought you here and have been waiting for you to arise," he answered. "It's been two weeks."

"Two weeks?" Lanna glanced back out at the dipping sun.

"You have been recovering since then."

Lanna was still confused.

"Where are we?"

As if on cue, a woman walked in dressed in a straight white gown. The gown had matching blue streaks to Alderyth's robes. She silently and quickly dipped in and hung a gas lantern from a hidden hook in the wall. Alderyth continued unnoticed.

"We are in the Healer's quarters at the Mages' Guild. The guild has some of the world's best healers available."

Ah, so not the afterlife.

Nox crossed his arms and asked, "Feeling pretty crap?". Lanna shrugged and pulled her blanket closer to her.

"I've felt better, sure."

Admittedly, there weren't many other times she'd felt so sore or weak. Lanna felt on par with the time she was stabbed on a Thieves' Guild mission with August in the Isle of Jux, where she was tasked with stealing a Rogue Academic's blueprints of sabotaging the Elchwen economic system. Luckily, on that mission, the ex-academic was all brains and no brawn and had missed an organ. Still, she could vividly remember the pain of the knife slicing into her and how she was forced to recover for a week afterwards. The exhaustion then was admittedly nothing compared to how she felt now.