I Live!
I know I am barely scraping in at the last minute on Friday but I am still posting on Friday, so I’m taking it as a win. The artwork will need to be added later but I plan to have it up on Sunday at the latest.
As for the story itself since it is October I was planning to do somehting a little spooky adjacent for the month. Please be warned that this short story makes references to a voluntary surgery and that it makes allusions to impending eye trauma. Nothing is described in the story but if that is something you dislike / gives you the ick, you have been warned.
Now on to the story:
An Eye’s Worth
Living with only one eye probably wouldn’t be that bad.
Brit leans over her desk, staring at the tray of sterile tools she has neatly laid out a whole ten minutes ago.
Sure, adjusting would be a pain, her depth perception would be shot and the actual removal process would be… well… it would certainly be an event. But she could do just as much with one eye as she could with two, and most of her spells were wide area or near cast spells anyway. She’s always had terrible aim and was never interested in precise magic.
She swallows thickly and the eye patch weighing down on her right eye seems heavier than ever before.
“This is stupid,” she mutters, pushing away from her desk and starting to pace around her work-room, wrapping her arms around herself. “I’ve been working on this potion for month’s, I nearly died multiple times to gather all these ingredients. Like the time I was climbing Fog’s Head for the mist root, or that fight with the gillhoppers in DeadEnds swamp for the Elver blossoms, and not to mention the multiple trips into the Everwin Crypt. I got laid up in the infirmary for three weeks the last time and Flare spent a whole two hours lecturing me about poison awareness!”
The point was, physical injury had never stopped her before.
But none of her previous injuries ever carried the risk of being so permenant, either.
Brit reaches a hand up and gently presses her palm to the eyepatch.
Once her eye is gone it’s gone, there would be no magic spell or charm that would bring it back. She’s long since mastered high level healing so the wound itself will be quickly patched up, but that would only stop the bleeding and close the injury. No spell would bring back the lost body part.
Turning back to her work table she drags the potion formula over and double checks the ingredient list: Three Mist Root, Five Elver blossoms, two drops of GoldWater, one Celian Crystal, ten Felt Runes (crushed), one Dragon Heart and the thrice blessed eye of a Mage.
Without conscious thought she picks up her check stone and begins the standard walk through, making sure each of the items she has will work for the spell and watching with almost detached interest as each item glows a soft gold. She finishes, raising the check stone to her right eye and watching the check stone glow gold in approval in the reflection of all the vials and bottles lining the worktable.
Making sure everything she gathered would work had been one of the most important tasks she gave herself before starting the project. Most of the ingredients are hard enough to come by, a Mage’s eye most of all. Magic isn’t exactly common, and it was even rarer to find someone with the training to be granted the rank of Mage. Brit only knows of two others in the whole country, “And it’s not like I could just ask them to borrow an eye.”
“Well,” she glances over at the black grimoire carefully sealed away on her shelf. “Morfigan probably has plenty of eyes, she just wouldn’t have let me have one of hers.”
Not that Brit could have used it. Finding a guardian spirit that would bless her eye wasn’t exactly easy. She highly doubts she would have been able to find one to bless a random eye she brought with her, at least not a guardian spirit that would let her leave with all her own limbs intact.
Brit presses her hand against the eyepatch again and winces at the pressure. The eye patch became a necessity after the second blessing, both to protect the eye as well as allow her to function. The second blessing allowed her to “see past the walls of the flesh into the immaterial”, which meant she was seeing spirits and ley lines and a whole host of other things unaided at all times. Cool for the first minute, migraine inducing for longer than an hour.
The whole quest, from artifacts to her own blasted eye, has been a months-long slog through terrible weather and near-death encounters, all culminating in constant headaches.
“But the potion will be worth it.”
Her eye drifts further up to the top of the page where the arcane runes spell out “Elixir of Revival”. Same as a healing potion, it would not be able to return lost limbs or organs, but if a single drop was given to someone within a few minutes of their death it would call their soul back to their body and fully heal them. The recipe itself made ten drops worth, and she is certain her party will need every one.
The party was going to fight The Demon king tomorrow, and they were going to go without her. She knew it would be that way even before the rest of the party figured it out. The group that went in would need to be both small and powerful and while she may be one of the best potion makers around; Brit can admit she isn’t much good when it comes to combat. All she can do is make sure the party that goes to fight took as many of the best potions as she could make for them.
And this is the very best thing she can offer.
“For the others. For Flare, and Clove, and Vless.”
Taking a deep breath Brit turns back to the desk and snatchs up her tray before going to the comfiest chair in the work room. She carefully drapes a work cloth over the chair and then sits down and wraps a second work cloth around her shoulders.
“Alright, you’ve got this,” Brit places a strip of leather between her teeth and bites down hard as she carefully removes the eye patch, one side of her vision lighting up with ley lines, spell runes and auras bright enough to be blinding.
Leaning back, she carefully places the extractor against her right eye, pressing her left eye tightly closed and beginning the count down.
Five…
Four…
Three…
Two…
One.
