The Muir Clerical Health Center's walls were lined with posters: "HAVE YOU CHECKED YOUR MANA LEVELS TODAY?" and "STATUS EFFECTS: KNOW THE SIGNS" and one faded one in the corner that said "ADVENTURING? MAKE SURE YOUR WILL IS UP TO DATE!" with a cartoon skeleton giving a thumbs up.
I'd been sitting here for over an hour, trapped in my own brain, which was currently doing laps around the same three thoughts it's had for days. Ever since the musical. Ever since that goddamn song.
She knew about the cucumber, the rope, the ladder, and the chicken. She knew about things I'd never dared utter to another soul. Things I'd only ever thought about while alone, in my bed, in the dark, with the door closed. Intimate, indelible, incriminating things. And then, she'd put them in a song.
How? How did she know?
Stat debuffs and fear auras are one thing, but to be able to pull someone's private sexual fantasies out of their head and put them to a minor key... that was something else entirely. That was a violation of a very personal nature, and I was not ready to accept that the demon queen had been inside my head and had seen things that I hadn't even admitted to myself. Then, there was the other problem: the problem beneath the problem, which was the dreams.
Not of the typical variety. Not the "you're late for an exam you didn't study for," or the "your teeth are falling out." These involved a woman with horns and a tail who looked at me in a way that made my whole body feel like a fever was running through it. And, if the demon queen could already read my mind and pull out the cucumber and chicken... maybe she could see my dreams too.
Please let her not know about the dreams. Let the mind reading have limits. Let it stop at conscious thoughts. Let there be a wall between waking and sleeping fantasies, because if she had seen the throne dream or the stairwell dream, or, worse yet, the one with the inflatable bouncy castle—
I picked up the pamphlet on petrification and held it in front of my face.
Six other people were in the waiting area. A woman with a greenish cast to her sling, which indicated an arcane fracture, a dwarf reading the same brochure as me, and two kids probably undergoing routine mana screenings who were fidgeting in their seats while their mother stared at the wall.
And the guy at the front desk. He'd been there when I arrived.
"I understand," he said. "But it's been three days."
The receptionist, a halfling woman with reading glasses perched on her nose, didn't look up from her scroll. "Sir, I've told you. 'Minor Slowness Debuff' is not classified as an emergency."
"I'm moving at sixty percent speed."
"That's still moving, sir."
"I can't run!
"Lots of people can't run. My mother can't run. She's not in the emergency queue."
"I'm an adventurer! I need to be able to —"
I was thinking about whether I should actually read the pamphlet about petrification when the front door burst open.
A man entered, stumbling and disheveled. His armor was partially fused with his flesh on one side, and his left arm was completely enclosed in a crystalline substance, gradually making its way up to his shoulder. His eyes were glowing, emitting visible light, two soft blue beams cutting through the waiting room.
The receptionist looked up for the first time since I arrived.
"Ohhh," she said. "Prismatic Drake?
"Yeth," the man replied, with a glowing tongue. "It breathed on me."
"Take a seat in the priority section, someone will be right with you."
"Thank you." He shuffled past us to the priority chairs.
"Ayla?" the receptionist asked, checking her scroll. "Room three."
I sat on the padded table covered in crinkly paper. A diagram on the wall displayed a human body, with every mana pathway traced in blue ink. Someone had drawn a mustache on the diagram in pencil.
The healer came in. She was short with a round face, wore wire-rimmed glasses and had silver-streaked hair that was escaping from a bun. She had a quill tucked behind one ear and another quill tucked behind the other ear and a third quill in her breast pocket. Her name tag said DR. AILM: SENIOR RESTORATIVE CLERIC.
"Ayla," she said, squinting at her chart. "What brings you in today?"
"Okay, um." I fidgeted with my hands. "This is going to really sound weird."
"I once treated a man who'd been turned inside out by a mirror golem and was still trying to eat lunch. Nothing sounds weird to me." She lifted the stool and sat down on it. "Go ahead."
"I've been around the demon queen... like a lot."
"Oh, I love her. She's so fascinating! I've published two papers on the theoretical physiological impact of sustained exposure to her Aura of Dread. Nobody read them, but they were very good."
"Um... right. So I've been fighting her almost daily for about eight months. And I was wondering… does her mind control work outside the tower? Like, you know. The psychic stuff, where she gets in your head. Because I've been feeling weird lately. Like, I'll be walking down a street and I'll get a flash of recognition for a place I've never been. I'll hear a song and my chest gets tight and I feel like I'm about to cry. Certain smells trigger this wave of... I don't know what to call it. Homesickness or whatever."
She was bobbing her head and scribbling notes.
"And she knows things about me," I added. "Things she shouldn't know.” My face was getting warm. "—Things I've never told anyone. Personal things. And then there are also... um... the dreams."
Dr. Ailm looked up from the chart. She studied me over the rims of her spectacles, then set the chart down and folded her hands in her lap. She leaned forward. "Ayla, can I ask you something?"
“I'm afraid to say yes.”
"Are you attracted to the demon queen? Because if you are, that's perfectly normal. Interspecies attraction is more common than people think," she continued, pulling a pamphlet from the shelf behind her. The cover said "CROSS-SPECIES RELATIONSHIPS: A GUIDE TO HEALTHY BOUNDARIES" with an illustration of a human holding hands with an Orc. "It's becoming much more normalized. You know, there is actually a support group I can recommend for you. They meet on Thursdays at the civic hall--”
"No, it's not like that. I'm trying to KILL her—"
"And those feelings can coexist! Attraction and aggression share a lot of the same neurological pathways. Elevated heart rate, tunnel vision, fixation on a single target. Combat and arousal are practically neighbors." She tapped her temple with the quill behind her left ear. "The body doesn't always know the difference. There's no shame in it. My cousin married a centaur. Beautiful wedding. Logistically complicated, but beautiful."
"Dr. Ailm, can we focus on the possible psychic damage to my brain, please?"
"Of course, of course." She picked up the chart again. She was smiling. "How many times have you died?"
"In total? Over two hundred."
Her smile faded. "Over two hundred resurrections?”
"Two hundred and fifty. Give or take."
"And you've been exposed to the demon queen's passive aura each time. For how long?"
“Usually like five to ten minutes per encounter before she kills me. But recently, about three hours. Long story.”
Dr. Ailm pulled the stool closer. "Follow my finger with your eyes. Don't move your head."
She moved her finger left. Right. Up. Down. I followed it.
"Now. I'm going to project a series of glyphs. Tell me what color you see." She drew a sigil in the air with her fingertip.
"Blue."
Another one. "Green."
Another. "Red."
Another. "Sort of purple? Like, sunset purple."
"That one's supposed to be orange."
"Oh."
She scribbled on the chart. "Color perception drift. Common after repeated aura exposure. Your mana pathways are compensating. Now, hold out your hands."
I held them out. She took my wrists and closed her eyes. A faint warmth spread through my arms as she ran a diagnostic pulse. It tickled. I giggled.
"Sorry."
"Hold still." Her brow furrowed. "Your mana reserves are excellent. Your core is stable, remarkably so. Most people at even a tenth of your resurrection count would be showing cascade degradation. Fractured pathways, mana bleed, personality erosion."
"Personality erosion?"
"Resurrection taxes the soul. Every death and revival creates a small amount of spiritual wear. Like making a copy of a copy. Most people past twenty resurrections start showing symptoms. Memory gaps. Emotional flattening. Loss of core identity markers."
"I feel very identitied."
"You do. Which is remarkable." She let go of my wrists. "The déjà vu, the emotional responses to random stimuli, the instinctive knowledge... none of that is consistent with the demon queen. She can't plant thoughts or memories. She's not pulling secrets from your head." Dr. Ailm tilted her spectacles down. "Which means whatever she knows, she learned it some other way."
That was worse. That was so much worse. If she wasn't reading my mind, then how did she know about the cucumber?
"What you're describing sounds like residual pattern recognition," Dr. Ailm continued. "Your mind is finding connections your conscious brain can't explain. Familiar patterns in unfamiliar contexts."
"And the dreams?"
"Dreams are your subconscious processing stimuli. If you're spending significant time around a powerful, emotionally reactive being — "She gave me a look over her glasses. "— your brain is going to have opinions about that. The pamphlet covers dream content in chapter three." She waved it in front of my face again.
"I don't need the pamphlet."
"Alrighty." She hopped off the stool and crossed the room to a wall of shelves crammed with labeled jars, bundled herbs, and rows of glass vials organized by color. She hummed to herself as she worked, pulling a vial of pale blue liquid from the second shelf, then a second, then a third, holding each one up to the light and squinting at it before tucking it into the crook of her elbow. She grabbed a fistful of dried herbs from a jar, sniffed them, nodded approvingly, and wrapped them in a square of cloth. She pulled a leather pouch from a drawer and packaged everything inside.
"One vial every three days. It'll stabilize your mana pathways and reduce the aura exposure symptoms. The herbs are for tea before bed. Good for spiritual restoration after resurrection."
"Got it."
"And Ayla? Stay out of that tower, at least for a few weeks. Two hundred resurrections is a number I've never seen in this office. Nobody has. Your body is holding up, but I can't tell you what happens at three hundred. You'd be the first."
I took the pouch and hopped off the table. "Thank you, Dr. Ailm."
"And Ayla?"
"Yeah?"
The Thursday group is very welcoming."
"GOODBYE, DR. AILM."
I could hear her chuckling as the door closed behind me.