The Healers Guild smelled nothing like Nick expected.
He had imagined incense, perhaps, or the clean sting of alcohol, or some floral mixture brewed by people who thought suffering became more dignified if it smelled like lavender.
Instead, the first thing that hit him was soup.
Rich broth, boiled roots, sharp herbs, fresh bread, soap, sweat, damp cloth, old blood, and somewhere beneath it all, the unmistakable stale bitterness of too many people packed into one building with too many reasons to be afraid.
The guild itself stood three streets away from the cathedral that dominated the center of the city, and one street away from the shrine to Beauty, which Nick suspected was not an accident. The building was broader than it was tall, built from pale stone with green-tiled roofs and wide arched windows left open to the morning air. Ivy crawled along one side of the wall, carefully cultivated rather than allowed to run wild, and a line of wagons waited beneath a covered archway where attendants unloaded crates of bandages, glass vials, firewood, and sacks that smelled strongly of dried mushrooms.
Above the main entrance hung a carved wooden sign depicting two hands cupped around a small flame.
Two hands trying to keep something alive.
Nick stood outside for a moment, watching a pair of apprentices carry a stretcher through the front doors. The person on it was awake, pale, and missing most of their left arm below the elbow. They were laughing weakly at something one of the apprentices said.
It was entirely too familiar to Nick to be comfortable.
“Alright,” he muttered. “Let’s find out how expensive ‘mercy’ is.”
He stepped inside.
The main hall of the Healers Guild unfolded before him in organized chaos. Long desks lined one wall, where clerks took names, payments, injuries, affiliations, and what appeared to be confessions from people trying very hard to explain themselves without saying something too embarrassing. Rows of benches occupied the center of the hall, filled with injured adventurers, laborers, soldiers, children, and a few people who looked perfectly healthy until they shifted and revealed the distant, hollow stare of someone whose wounds weren’t visible.
Priests in pale blue-gold robes moved between patients, hands glowing with soft divine light. Herbalists in green aprons carried trays of poultices and steaming cups. A woman with spectacles and ink-stained fingers barked instructions at two apprentices while examining a chart covered in notes. Farther back, behind half-open screens, someone screamed.
A healer near the front desk glanced up at Nick, smiled automatically, then froze.
Nick suppressed a sigh.
He could practically feel the moment her mind tried to categorize him and failed. Beauty’s influence tugged at the room in small ways, turning heads and slowing conversations. The priestess recovered quickly, though, which already placed her above most people he had encountered since receiving the damn curse.
“Welcome to the Healers Guild,” she said, her voice only slightly strained. “Are you injured?”
“Define ‘injured’,” Nick half-joked. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
Her expression became professionally cautious. “Then are you here to sponsor treatment, purchase supplies, consult a specialist, request battlefield support, submit a resurrection observation, arrange long-term care, report an outbreak, register a curse, or complain about fees?”
“…”
He wasn’t sure how to respond to the overwhelming list of options.
“We heal people,” she explained, seeing his hesitation. “People are complicated.”
“Fair enough.” He pulled out his adventurer identification and placed it on the desk. “Nicholas Draegan. I’m here to speak with someone who was involved in the response to the skill point farm incident.”
The priestess looked down at his card, then back up at him with interest. Behind her, one of the clerks stopped writing.
“The Reaper incident,” she said quietly.
‘…Reaper?’
Did Cain get a nickname or something?
She picked up his card, examined it briefly, then tapped a small bell beside the desk. It rang once, low and clear. “Please wait here.”
Nick looked around while she stepped away.
The longer he stood in the hall, the more obvious it became that this guild was less a temple and more a city inside the city. A pair of priests argued quietly with an herbalist over a patient whose wounds had closed too quickly around an infection. A burly man with a shaved head sat with both arms crossed while a woman in plain gray robes spoke to him in a voice too low to hear, her posture calm, patient, and utterly immovable. In a corner near the window, three children with bandaged faces played a counting game with polished stones while an apprentice pretended very hard not to cry as she watched them.
Healing was never a soft thing.
It was triage, logistics, arguments, money, prayer, chemistry, habits, and exhaustion all stacked on top of one another until the whole structure somehow kept standing.
A man approached after a few minutes.
He was tall, thin, and old enough that his hair had gone mostly white, though his back remained straight and his steps precise. He wore no holy vestments. His coat was dark green, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and his hands bore the faint stains of someone who had spent too many years crushing herbs, mixing tinctures, and scrubbing blood from under his nails.
His eyes were sharp.
Nick liked him immediately.
“Nicholas Draegan,” the man said. “I’m Master Iven Caul. Chief registrar of non-divine treatment and guild liaison for incident review.”
“Did you come up with that to make people stop asking what you do?”
“It has saved me many conversations.” Iven looked him over with the detached interest of a man deciding whether Nick belonged on a cot, in a file, or in a locked room. “You were present at the recent Goblin Den massacre, the collapsing of the Siege Vault, and the recent cathedral inquiry.”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Do you keep files on everyone?”
“No. Only people who increase my workload. Or sometimes those who are likely to do so soon.”
“Fair.”
Iven gestured toward a side corridor. “Come with me.”
Nick followed.
The corridor beyond the main hall was quieter, though not calmer. It branched repeatedly, each passage marked by painted symbols rather than words.
A blue hand. A green leaf. A silver needle. A white candle. A black circled ringed in red.
Nick nodded toward the symbols. “Departments?”
“Methods,” Iven said. “Divine restoration, natural regenerative arts, surgical and pharmaceutical care, mental health, curse and soul trauma observation.”
“That last one sounds… unique.”
“Indeed.”
They passed a ward where holy light spilled beneath the door in gentle pulses. Through the narrow window, Nick caught a glimpse of a priestess of Beauty kneeling beside a patient whose skin had been burned nearly black. Her hands glowed as she sang under her breath, the melody soft enough that the words disappeared into the rhythm.
A few doors later, a druidic healer pressed both palms against a soldier’s chest while roots crawled from a bowl of dark soil beside the bed and wrapped around the man’s ribs like a living brace.
Farther down, two assistants in white aprons debated the dosage of a tincture while a patient complained bitterly that the tingling felt like ants made of lightning.
Nick’s pace slowed.
Iven noticed.
“Most visitors think healing is one discipline,” he said. “They imagine glowing hands and, for some reason, gratitude.”
“I’ve been guilty of that.”
“Most people are. Divine healing is fast, visible, and comforting. It is also expensive, limited by faith, dependent on the healer’s condition, and occasionally useless against problems that don’t seem to care about theology.”
“That sounded personal.”
“It became personal sometime around my third patient who died while a priest insisted the wound was healing.”
Nick glanced at him.
Iven’s expression remained calm.
“There are branches of healing because bodies fail in different languages,” he continued. “A curse does not care about stitches. Infection does not care about courage. A shattered mind does not always respond to prayer, no matter how beautifully someone sings.”
They reached a smaller office lined with shelves, ledgers, and anatomical drawings. A kettle steamed on a little stove near the window. Several chairs had been arranged around a desk buried under papers.
Iven sat without offering ceremony and motioned for Nick to do the same.
Nick took the chair opposite him.
“So,” Iven said, folding his hands on the desk. “You want to know why healers responded to the Reaper incident.”
“I want to know what you saw.”
“Those are different requests.”
“I figured I’d start with the one least likely to get me thrown out.”
That earned the faintest twitch at the corner of Iven’s mouth.
“We saw the aftermath,” he said. “Some of us arrived with the joint response force. Others came later, when the dying stopped being polite enough to wait their turn.”
Nick’s jaw tightened.
Iven noticed.
“You disapprove of what was done there,” the healer said.
“Yes.”
“So did many of us.”
Iven leaned back in his chair.
“Are you expecting me to defend the institution?”
“I was expecting the usual speech about stability and preserving the status quo, either literally or through implication.”
“You’ll get that from someone else if you wait long enough. I’m a healer. Stability is what people invoke when they want us to keep repairing the same wound without asking why it keeps coming back.”
Nick stared at him for a moment. Then let out a quiet breath.
“That’s one hell of a line.”
“It has had years to mature.”
Iven opened one of the ledgers on this desk and turned it around.
Nick looked down.
Names. Injuries. Species. Treatment costs. Recovery status. Psychological observation notes. Follow-up recommendations.
Some entries were marked with small black dots.
“What are those?”
“Patients who asked whether they were allowed to die.”
Iven tapped one of the names. “A farm-born orc, approximately fifteen years of age. It had repeated bone deformities from confinement and experienced severe malnutrition. It barely understood language beyond command phrases.”
Nick didn’t speak.
Another tap.
“A goblin female with severe reproductive trauma. Missing one eye. She bit three apprentices and apologized afterward.”
Another.
“A beastkin child that would not sleep unless another monster lay between her and the door.”
Nick looked away from the ledger.
Iven closed it gently.
“Strength broke that place,” he said. “Greed maintained it. Cowardice ignored it. Then a masked man arrived and turned the entire wound septic in one night.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed. “You think Cain made it worse.”
“I think the Reaper made it impossible to ignore.” Iven’s voice remained even. “Those are not the same thing.”
Silence settled between them.
Nick studied the old healer carefully.
There it was again.
The world refusing to fit into the neat shape he wanted.
“Some people at this guild are grateful,” Iven continued. “Some hate him. Some believe he should be banished. Some believe he did what every priest, noble, guildmaster, and guard captain lacked the courage to do.”
“And you?”
“I think men who solve problems with corpses create work for healers.”
Nick almost laughed.
It caught somewhere in his throat instead.
Iven poured tea into two cups and slid one across the desk. Nick accepted it mostly because refusing felt more dramatic than drinking.
The tea was bitter enough to qualify as punishment.
“You said you handled soul trauma observation,” Nick said after a moment.
“I said this guild does.”
“But you know enough to mention it.”
“Sure.”
“Then tell me something. What happens to people who die too often?”
Iven’s hand stilled on his cup.
For the first time since they met, the old healer looked genuinely wary.
“Why are you asking?”
“Because this world treats resurrection like a safety net,” Nick said. “But, in reality, nets can fray.”
Iven watched him for a long moment.
Then he set his cup down.
“Officially, repeated resurrections carry no permanent spiritual cost when performed through proper divine channels.”
“And unofficially?”
“Unofficially, people come back different.”
Nick said nothing.
Iven opened a drawer and removed a much thinner folder tied with gray string. He did not open it.
“Most changes are explainable. They revive with trauma, pain memory, fear conditioning. Some people become reckless after dying. Others become cautious to the point of paralysis. Some develop aversions to the thing that killed them.”
“And the changes that aren’t explainable?”
The folder remained beneath Iven’s hand.
“Occasionally, a patient returns with memories no one can verify. Or missing memories that should have been foundational. Rarely, they remember conversations that occurred after death but before restoration. Most priests insist those are brief visits to the afterlife. The patients sometimes agree.”
Nick’s chest tightened.
The afterlife.
As a person who had seen gods die, he found it hard to believe in an afterlife.
Something about this whole system seemed off to him. It kept people moving, but the very foundation was antithetical to the fundamental premise of life:
All life had a beginning and an end.
It was a teaching of Elyra that Aurelia used to repeat often.
“You look less surprised than I would prefer,” Iven said dryly.
“I’ve had a strange few weeks.” Nick looked toward the folder. “Do you have records?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see them?”
“No.”
The answer came so quickly that Nick almost smiled.
“Fair.”
“You are interesting, Lord Draegan. You are also becoming visible, which makes you dangerous to involve in quiet work like this.”
“Lord?”
“You’ll find, in due time, that you effectively possess the title. These things spread when people are frightened enough to be polite.”
Nick leaned back, sighing. “Wonderful. I didn’t get the impression that people were particularly scared of me.”
Iven studied him over the rim of his cup.
“Fear only reaches the masses when it serves a political purpose, or when a situation has devolved too far for seamless recovery. People are already building a shape for you,” he said. “Hero. Noble. Priest. Threat. Savior. They’ll settle on whichever version makes them feel safest.”
“That sounds inconvenient.”
“It is how societies digest anomalies.”
Nick looked at the closed folder again.
“And Cain?”
Iven’s expression hardened slightly.
“They’re doing the same with him.”
“What shape are they building?”
“Punishment,” Iven said. The kind people whisper about when they want someone else to be afraid.”
‘Punishment…’
“The name ‘Reaper’ is spreading through the lower districts. Some use it like a curse. Some like a prayer. Neither habit leads anywhere healthy.”
Nick’s fingers tightened around his cup. Bitter tea steamed between his hands.
“I came here because healers were there,” he said. “I wanted to understand why.”
“And?”
Nick looked around the office, at the ledgers, at the drawings, and at the closed folder. He took in the smell of herbs and old paper and exhausted mercy.
“I suppose it’s because you’re the ones left with the truth after everyone else finishes telling their version.”
Iven’s expression softened by a fraction.
“That is closer than most get.”
Nick stood.
“Thank you for your time.”
“You’re leaving already?”
“If I stay longer, I’ll start asking questions you won’t answer.”
“You already have.”
“Then I’ll start asking them better.”
Iven smiled. It was small, tired, and deeply inconvenient.
“Come back when you know what you’re asking for.”
Nick paused at the door.
“Is that an invitation?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
He stepped back into the corridor.
The sounds of the guild returned around him as he made his way toward the front hall—prayers, arguments, coughing, crying, laughter, and the endless murmur of people trying to stay alive one more day.
As he passed the mental health wing, he glanced through a half-open door.
A woman sat across from a young soldier whose hands trembled violently in his lap. She did not touch him or glow or chat. She simply sat there, present and patient, as he tried to breathe through whatever battlefield still lived behind his eyes.
Nick slowed.
For a moment, he thought of Ray.
Then Lexi.
Then Cain’s rescued survivors tucked away inside the wardrobe.
He kept walking.
By the time he reached the front doors, the soup smell had grown stronger. Someone was serving bowls near the benches. Patients passed them along carefully, and one child with bandaged ears grinned when an apprentice slipped him an extra piece of bread.
Nick stepped outside into the sunlight.
The city looked the same as it had before.
That was the problem.
Everything looked the same, even after you learned how much pain it took to keep it standing.
Project Knightfall 