The Deviant Path to Olympus

Chapter 14

"This is very wrong," Mimoza admitted while breathing heavy. Gaiana was practically carrying her now, walking her to their place as she limped across the streets. "I should've healed by now. That blade Pandora carried, it must've been... Some sort of poison for deviants."
Gaiana set her down at the edge of a boulder. She wanted to ask so many questions, but couldn't in her damaged state. "What can I do to help?"

Mimoza gave a small smile, "I'm bleeding, as you can see. The wounds aren't closing as fast as they're supposed to. You'll have to treat me like a mortal and stitch it to stop the bleeding."

Gaiana blinked at her. The phrase 'mortal' perturbed her. Was Mimoza not a mortal? Was she something beyond that? Either way, Gaiana followed instruction and stepped into the building to gather supplies.

Everything was still there. The stone tables, pillars, and foundation stones of her old home was all intact. But the wooden walls, rooftop, and interior possessions were burned down to soot and ash. Done with by her own two hands.

Gaiana stepped around the bodies of Sophus and Archos, not ready to truly look at them. She walked over to the intact storage room, aware that it was designed to survive potential fires. Inside between the shelves of handmade pottery she found a sewing kit with wool and needles. She picked it up and closed her eyes as she walked back to Mimoza.

Mimoza had passed out. Her mouth and eyebrows contorted as she breathed heavily in pain. Gaiana took a seat beside her and prepared the sewing kit.

Mimoza was badly wounded. She had to have been stabbed more than twenty times by that crystal-shaped dagger. It would've killed any normal man, and yet she still managed to breathe.

And yet Mimoza survived in a truly unnatural sense. The blood seeping from her flesh was purple. It had a strange brightness to it that natural red blood never had. Light also glowed out from the wound. Where blood should've gushed out from a gory black intestine, there was an ambient light shining out instead.

Gaiana wondered if her bodied carried a miniature sun.

Gaiana first covered the wounds with rags to stop the bleeding. "I'm guessing you'll run of purple blood if I don't seal this, right?" Mimoza couldn't answer. Her eyes furrowed while she dreamed in pain. Gaiana pulled out a needle from her sewing kit, "okay, let's hope I'm doing this right."

Gaiana removed the rags from each of the wounds and began sewing the cuts shut. The glows from Mimoza's wounds gradually disappeared as she closed each wound one by one. She brought more than enough wool to account for the twenty cuts that had slashed her body. Despite how wide the cuts were, her body connected together the same way as sewing a ripped rag doll would.

Seaming each wound stopped the light from flowing out. It was like encapsulating a lantern with flesh, preventing the light from coming out so that Mimoza could horde it all to herself. Gaiana finished the stitching once there was no more light coming out of her body.

Mimoza was asleep the whole time. She struggled less as the pain subsided. Gaiana didn't try waking her up. It was time for her to pull the charred bodies out of her destroyed home.

XXX

Astrin walked the rest of the way through town. The crystal was peculiarly strange. The aurora glow seemingly shifted like water inside glass. He knew how to follow it, but couldn't explain how it worked.

He reached the start of the countryside. There was a large plot of land that had probably once been a farm or garden. It had all the estate necessary to produce an agricultural business, but there were no plants to be found.

Only the smoldering remains were there. The building had to have been cleaved in half by a raging fire that burned most of the structure. It was a sad sight. Fires were common this time of year, and he could only wonder the toll this fire might've caused on the residents.