Warsinger - Chapter Eleven

We hung in a motionless, bone-chilling black void. I couldn't feel the other players, the saddle, or sense Karalti's mind. Fear began to gnaw at my guts as the nothingness dragged on and on... but then, I felt a rush, like the sensation of rising up through cold water, and we burst out into the middle of a raging thunderstorm.

Karalti roared as the wind sheared under her wings and sent her careening to the side. She was a strong flier, but the air around Vulkan Keep, the Volod's castle, was so rough that she almost went tumbling over. Suri screamed with real terror as she lurched into a steep dive, pulling her wings close in an attempt to streamline her body and minimise resistance.

"Hold on!" I yelled back to her, bent over the front of the saddle. "We have to get out of the shear!"

"Don't worry! We'll make it!" Karalti's mental voice was tight with strain as we plummeted through the metal-gray clouds and broke out into the rain. Lightning flashed by us, splitting the sky with the burned-plastic stench of ozone.

I knew from experience that the lighter an aircraft was, the worse the turbulence. As large flying things went, Karalti was pretty light: her innate magic reduced her terrestrial weight by three quarters, meaning she weighed a bit over two and a half tons on the ground but less than one when she was in the air. Her body jerked up and down and side to side as we streaked toward the parade ground at Vulkan Keep. I could see it already - the huge plaza attached to the Volod's skyport was blazing with lights, marking the way for incoming airships. As soon as I sighted it, Karalti read the image from my mind and angled in that direction.

The rain slashed us as Karalti broke through the worst of the rough air, fighting not to be tipped over into a roll. She groaned as she curved her back and snapped her wings out. Gravity slammed us down against the saddle, like flies being squashed under the invisible hand of god, gradually letting up as the dragon leveled into a shallower, slower dive. I shrugged it off, but Suri wasn’t doing so well. I saw her slump dizzily, her hands loosening. Strength and Stamina didn’t help with g-forces.

"Suri!” I pushed up and ran, balancing on the heaving surface of Karalti's back, and threw myself down to snatch her wrist before she went flying over Karalti’s shoulder. “Stay awake!”

“Urrrgh.” Suri was fighting it, struggling to stay conscious. I held on for dear life as Karalti lurched to one side - the side weighed down by Cutthroat.

"I'm not sure I can land properly!" Karalti said shakily. "Hector, I'm down to seven percent stamina-!"

"You can do it!" I snarled, bracing myself on the pitching platform, and hauled back with all my strength. Suri’s Stamina was coming into play now: she shook off  her faint, snorting like a bull, and clawed toward me. When she was on, I flopped down over her back, dug hands and feet under any straps I could find, and hung on.

Steam billowed from Karalti's boiling hot scales as she swung her heavy lower body forward, threw her wings back and beat them hard. Not only did she have to land while exhausted, she had to touch down on one foot so as not to crush Cutthroat against the paving stones. For a second, it seemed like she'd be able to pull it off - but then the shear hit her. A gust of wind slapped her from the side as her claws made contact, knocking her foot out from under her and tripping her. The dragon bellowed. With her second heart pumping, she was still only half a ton, but in her effort not to crush us all, she twisted awkwardly onto her keel. The ground shook, and I felt something in her chest snap with a dull wet crack of bone separating from cartilage as she slid to a stop on her belly, heaving for breath.

"Fuck! Karalti!" I forgot everyone and everything else in that moment. I pushed up off Suri, vaulted down, and ran to Karalti's head. She was still breathing, and her pulse was strong. I felt along her neck as she groaned, down to her wingshoulder. She was too large and I was too gentle to feel anything wrong at first - but when I shoved, she snarled and reared her head.

"Urrrghhh... I hurt." Karalti's mental voice was groggy. "Is everyone okay?"

I looked back. Cutthroat was running for us, calling for Suri. Suri was sitting up on Karalti’s back, having a discreet panic attack. "Yeah. Everyone made it except you. What's hurting? Can you move your wing?"

Karalti got her clawed hands under her chest with some effort, and pushed herself up - or tried to. The left arm wobbled and nearly went out from under her. Whimpering, she lowered herself back to the wet stone.

"It's okay, girl. You're gonna be okay. I think you just cracked a couple of ribs." I stuffed my panic down, stomped on it for good measure, and tried to think calmly. My own chest was aching, and I hadn't even hit anything. "Shit shit shit, at least you're immune to mana. We can brew you potions to fix your chest up, okay?"

"Sure. Don't worry - I'm alright. Take care of Suri." The dragon rolled toward her right side, huffing with discomfort.

While Karalti caught her breath, I checked my notifications:

[Karalti is Injured! Maximum Stamina has been reduced to 25. Karalti cannot Fly. HP: 1441/2141]

Jesus: that fall had cut her HP by nearly a third. I didn't have any ranks in Field Medicine (Dragons) yet, so no HUD prompts appeared to help me diagnose her injuries. All I had to go off was my relatively basic understanding of her anatomy. I carefully began to push around her ribs, searching for a break - and quickly realized that with a creature of this size, 'carefully' wasn't going to cut it. I had to put my whole bodyweight into imaging her, stopping only when I felt her flesh dimple and she huffed with pain. Even then, it didn't feel like human ribs.

[You have gained a new skill: Field Medicine (Dragon)]

[This is an Advanced Crafting Skill. You can only learn up to Rank 4 without a tutor.]

"Owww!" Karalti snapped her jaws and hissed.

"Sorry, Tidbit." Even though I now had the skill, I didn't have enough ranks to gain special insights. "Yeah, I'm sure you snapped some ribs off your sternum there. Don't worry, okay? We'll brew you a ton of Bonefuse, and you'll be okay."

"Fuckin' hell, that was rough. Is she alright?" Suri made her way over to join me. She was still wobbly on her feet: rumpled, dirty, exhausted and windblown.

"She will be. But I have to brew an ass-ton of potion, and we have to be at the parliament house in an hour." I unequipped my helmet and yanked at my braidhawk in frustration.

“No way. We didn’t take that long, did we? I thought we had six hours left on the clock?”

“Look at the time. I forgot that this game had fucking timezones.”

Karalti whimpered. "I'm sorry!"

"No, Tidbit, it's my fault. You handled it as well as you could. I'm an idiot and didn't think ahead." I rubbed Karalti's arm, frowning. "We have an hour to find clothes… Karalti can’t fly…”

"We'll figure something out, alright? Come on - let's go get Masha and see if she can help Special-K here. We can't leave her like this."

But fortunately, some clever NPC was ahead of us on that particular curve, because we'd barely started to push our way through the crowd of onlookers before the sea of people parted to admit the Masterhealer of Vulkan Keep. Masha was a tiger trapped in an old woman’s body. She was roughly four feet tall and three days older than dirt, with the steely eyes and clenched-jaw underbite that made me salute her like a drill instructor on reflex. 

"Tuun!" She shrilled. "Report! What happened?"

"We got caught in the storm, ma'am!" I replied - before remembering she wasn't actually my D.I. "I think Karalti's got a couple of broken ribs."

"You think or you know?" The woman's eyes narrowed to dark slits.

"Think, ma'am. The world is short on dragon doctors, and this is a first for me."

“True enough.” Masha pursed her wrinkled lips as she palpitated Karalti's chest and side. The dragon winced as she lifted her left wing, turning her muzzle toward me for comfort. I rubbed her snout, watching as the healer ran into the same problem I had - her sheer size. The diminutive woman grunted as she tried to find the injury, and was nearly knocked over when she shoved a tender spot and Karalti's wing dropped.

"You're right. Broken ribs, and one look at those big uneven pupils of yours tells me that you have a concussion, too," Masha said briskly. "No flying for you tonight, missy. "

Karalti groaned, and lay her chin down on the wet ground.

"Will a Bonefuse potion fix her ribs?" I asked. 

"Pos-sibly." Masha drawled. She rubbed her chin, scowling up at Karalti's shoulder. "But it's hard to say. I've never treated a draak before. Given the ingredients are so universal, I'd expect that it would help her, provided she had an appropriately-sized dose. Bonefuse is approximately one dram of potion per pound of bodyweight, and she weighs...?"

"Approximately two-point-seven-five tons on the ground."

"On the ground? Hmm." Masha looked up at the sky as she performed the mental calculation. "So she needs about five and a half gallons of Bonefuse, which iiiiisss… a lot of mana, Tuun. A lot of mana. The average potion vial is a mere five ounces."

"I don't care how much it costs. I'll pay for it." But with a sinking heart, I knew it was going to cut into the gold we needed for Myszno. "What do I owe you?"

"It is not the cost so much as the availability. We need about a gallon of liquid mana or powered greencrystal," the healer replied. "It will take time to source it, and will cost about a hundred olbia."

A hundred olbia was a lot, and it was money that took food from the mouths of my citizens in Karhad. But one look at Karalti, shivering and panting on the ground, and my mind was made up. If we worked hard, we could earn it back from quests. "Done. Are you able to do that? We have to go meet with Ignas at the Orlahatz."

"Of course. I would not leave this holy creature to suffer such." Masha bowed to me, and bustled off back toward the tunnel that led to the castle. “And while I’m down there, take a bath! I don’t know what you were doing before you crashed, but you both smell like a pigpen!”