The Siege of Skyhold: Mage Errant Book 5 by Bierce John

Author:Bierce, John [Bierce, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Scrimshaw

Hugh would honestly have preferred not to have to watch Talia get her bone ward armor. Their storage tattoos were one thing— it was a little uncomfortable to watch, but it wasn’t really that bad.

Watching Talia get her bones tattooed was, frankly, nauseating.

Kanderon was the one doing the actual tattooing, again— she’d had centuries of experience creating storage tattoos, and her control over the hovering crystal needles was flawless. More importantly, she could actually perceive Talia’s bone minerals clearly via her crystal affinity senses— something Hugh still had trouble with. Bones outside of a living body were much easier for his affinity senses to perceive than bones within a living body, for whatever reason.

The bone tattooing operation was happening in a massive empty hall between the library and the hospital wing, big enough to fit Kanderon’s bulk, though Hugh could have sworn the door was too small for her to fit through.

This time, Kanderon had grown a series of longer, even thinner needles, each the length of an arm, but almost too thin to see. Each was filled with an ink specially designed to soak into the crystalline structure of Talia’s bones— one that wouldn’t be harmful to her body over the long run. Once the needle had punched into the outer layer of bone, Kanderon would squeeze out some of the ink to inject it into the bone.

And there were hundreds of the needles floating in the air above Talia, awaiting their turns. There was also a complex sterilization ward for them to pass through before being refilled with ink by a complex crystal mechanism.

There were no less than a dozen healers attending the operation. Not all of them had healing affinities, interestingly— there was a marrow mage to enhance Talia’s blood production, Skyhold’s only two pain mages to make the procedure bearable for Talia, and even a flesh mage who also had a mirage affinity. That last was projecting an illusion of Talia’s skeleton and major blood vessels, to help Kanderon insert the needles without hitting any veins or arteries.

There were, notably, no bone mages, other than the marrow mage, who didn’t count, according to Talia.

Godrick and Sabae were also missing— Hugh was the only one of the apprentices being allowed to accompany Talia for this operation.

They couldn’t put Talia to sleep for the operation, unfortunately— performing any sort of surgical operation on a dream mage, even a weird one like Talia, was highly dangerous. So she had to stay awake the whole time, strapped down to the table so she couldn’t move, while Hugh held her hand.

The needles punching into Talia’s scalp weren’t too disturbing, but Hugh could hardly look at the needles punching deep into Talia’s arms and legs. Each only produced a single drop of blood, with the healers closing each injection site as the needle withdrew, but it would take thousands and thousands of injections to complete the process, so it added up quickly.

It took seven hours to complete the process, and Hugh

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.