Warrior, Renewed: Book Two of the Comhairle Chronicles

Chapter Seventeen: Back Here Again

“Follow the end of my pen,” Jäger requested, his hand moving in front of Eallair’s face.

“Again, I can’t see your pen, only the edges of your hand because of your aura. The rest is dark,” he answered, not for the first time. “I can follow where I think your pen would be based on that, but I can’t see your pen.”

Although that was only partly true. He couldn’t see the pen’s colour or if it had decoration on its surface, but he could make out a faint representation of it’s edges cast in the same hue as Jäger’s aura, as though the doctor’s light reflected off it’s surface, creating the ghost of an image that faded into nothingness the further from the light source it got.

Frowning, Eallair held his hand out towards where the pen disappeared. With proximity, the luminescence of his own orange aura reflected off its cap, bringing it into a hazy focus. It didn’t make him anything other than legally blind, but he hadn’t ever realised that the light of auras could... bounce... off surfaces the same way reflections allowed other light sources to render the world in a wide variety of colours.

“Eallair?” Jäger prompted. “Is something wrong?”

“Apart from being back in the medical wing? Apart from not being able to see?” he retorted, more icily than the doctor deserved. “No. Not wrong, exactly. It’s just... I can make out the edges of the pen if a living aura gets close enough. It’s like... what I imagine humans see if they hold a glow stick into the darkness. It isn’t strong enough to breach the shadows, but if hold my hand close enough to an object, its surface reflects just enough of my aura to imply edges. They're faint, almost spectral, but they’re there.”

“Have you ever noticed that before?” the doctor asked.

He shook his head. “No, but once I reached adulthood it became a battle between seeing and the sight. Too much for my brain to process. The glare of bright auras erased visual acuity, or maybe the detail I could see masked the reflections cast by auras. Either way, there was too much to make sense of. Now there’s a void and that’s given my brain a chance to process some of what I missed before. Not enough, though. Nowhere near enough.”

“We’ll worry about what is or isn’t enough later,” Tanc interjected, squeezing Eallair’s other hand, the one not reaching towards the doctor’s pen. “It’s something. Something’s better than nothing.”

Eallair doubted that. He couldn’t read or watch television. He couldn’t play pool or snooker with Tor, or see the colour of his mate’s eyes. It might as well be nothing. What could he do if the most he could see was a few centimetres of surface held close to his body?

“We’ll figure it out,” Tanc insisted, probably reading his frustration in his expression. That was something else he’d lost the ability to do; read expressions rather than auras.

“Shit,” he breathed, closing his eyes as a fresh wave of horror crashed over him. “At least before, even though I could see people’s lies, I could also see their expressions. I could read what they needed from me in their frowns or smiles; see if they needed me to pretend or if they tried to deceive. Now all I can see is the truth and I’m going to put my foot in it, just like I did as a kid before I learned that social cues were more important than reacting to what others couldn’t see. I need to navigate deception, and wounds, and all the things everyone hides, and now I have no other frame of reference to avoid offence.”

“Between Aodh’s gift as a seer, Deòthas’s lack of tact, Tor’s direct approach to truth, and every other socially awkward arsehole in this place, I’d say that won’t be as troublesome here as it would be in the wider world. It might take a little getting used to for you and us, but it will be alright,” Tanc promised.