¤ Climbing Back Up

A young girl sat unmoving on the edge of her bed, still as a statue. Shapeless robes of plain, undyed cotton hung close to her, their drapes tracing a frighteningly slender frame. Her right arm, which she held stiffly in a cast before her, was heavily bandaged. Her back was half towards the ward’s door, her face hidden by hair that cascaded willy-nilly over her shoulders and down her back, the silver curls tangled and dull from neglect.

Today was the day that Silver would finally leave the clerics’ wing. Just last afternoon, after one last Healing, Esther, head Priestess of the clerics’ wing, had announced her fit for discharge. In the Priestess’ opinion, the girl’s recovery had been very satisfactory, her broken ribs completely and properly mended. Nothing was left to indicate the bloody devastation once there but large scars running down Silver’s side where the Lycanthrope’s claw had broken skin.

These, Esther assured her patient, would fade given time.

‘As for the arm, perhaps I would have good news for you on your next visit in another week’s time.’ Esther had smiled encouragingly, touching Silver lightly on the shoulder. It was not going to be so, but Esther could not be faulted for trying to be optimistic for the sake of her patient.

The patient in turn had only listened without speaking, nodding expressionlessly.

This sullen silence had worried Esther, who had not heard Silver speak ever since the day she had revealed to the girl that her arm might not heal properly. There were worse hurts than physical ones, Esther knew. But both Rei and Grendel reported that Silver had not confided any worries in them; there was nothing the Priestess could have done but put her doubts away uneasily and let Silver leave the room.

There was a polite knock on the door now, a gesture unnecessary in a shared ward like this one, where Silver had been moved to as her condition improved. But she was the sole occupant of the four-bedded ward, and it seemed churlish to intrude into the girl’s space without asking.

The girl showed no sign of hearing the knock; she still sat there, head bowed. There had been a time before this, when she would still check to see who was standing at the doorway. But Brandon never visited, and it swiftly made more sense to save the energy it took to look up and turn her head to check.

‘Silver.’ It was Rei who had knocked, his bespectacled eyes wide as he peered into the ward from where he hovered at the doorway. She did not respond. He tried again. ‘Silver? I’m here to bring you back to your rooms.’

Still no answer.

He hesitated a moment more, before moving into the ward, walking as softly as he could down the short aisle between the beds. ‘Are you ready to go now?’

Finally, the girl shifted, a reluctant sign of life; she looked up and sideways at Rei.

It was now his turn to be unable to move.

The eyes Silver turned on him then… they were blank and unseeing like a grey stone wall, yet Rei had felt as if he could have drowned in the wordless anguish in them. He took one step forward, with half a mind to hug his friend and demand to know how she felt, to force her to speak, because there weren’t supposed to be secrets between best friends!

But the moment passed too soon. The trance was broken and his gesture forestalled, as Silver got up slowly from the bed. She wavered a little on her feet before drifting past Rei towards the ward’s door, leaving him scrambling to pick up the little bag with her belongings and follow hastily.

The walk back to her rooms felt as if he was accompanying a ghost to its grave. She did not answer the people that greeted her along the corridors, leaving Rei to field their concerned questions, nor did she show any outward reaction as Rei led her through the stairwell where her accident had occurred.

The Masters had met to discuss the ‘accident’ a week after it took place, and it was concluded to be an unwise, prideful mistake on an Apprentice’s part. A hundred hours of service to the Library would allow the girl time enough to reflect on her mistake.

No more punishment would be meted out for breaking and entering a Master’s office, of course. The girl was already punished enough. Retribution was always a fair thing, the other Masters had agreed smugly. She would be allowed to continue in her Apprenticeship, but whether she would graduate as an Ad Lib… well, we shall see. If she is able to complete her second job advancement…

Grendel had stormed out of that meeting then, frustrated at his colleagues for refusing to hear how Silver could not have defied rules or how she could not have done it something so foolish.

Even after leaving the clerics’ wing, Silver continued to remain silent, not speaking, not eating. The trays of food that Rei brought up to Silver’s rooms were barely touched, and she hardly left her rooms.

It frightened Rei to feel so helpless every time he looked at Silver’s vacant eyes, that blank gaze which walled him outside his best friend. At some points in time, Rei feared that he would open the door to find Silver dead- no, that thought was too much to bear.

More days, falling away softly like petals from a withered flower. Then, a miracle.

The mess hall was rather quiet, the relative calm before the main storm of hungry Librarian masses descended upon it. But it was still full of chatter and clink of cutlery, loud enough to mask the occasional whisper or low voices.

And in the midst of this mild din, a pale girl with silver curls wandered in, green robes marking her to be an Apprentice drawn close around her pitifully thin frame. A cast bound her right arm, which she carried stiffly before her. She picked up an empty tray with her good arm and collected her food, before settling down quietly at the corner of an empty table.

Rei could hardly believe his eyes. He excused himself from the table he was sitting at as quickly as he could, and hurried over to the pale newcomer. ‘Silver?’

The girl looked up from her tray. There were already some healthy inroads made into the food there.

‘Hey.’

That quiet acknowledgement, the first word Rei heard her speak in ages, was enough to make him grin madly; it was only Silver’s dry reminder for him to mind her healing arm that kept Rei from hugging her for too long.

Silver rejoined the world of the Ellinia Library, slowly but surely. She turned up at the lessons and lectures held for Apprentices, she signed up for placement in the duty rosters and stoically began to serve out the hundred hours of service assigned to her. She even volunteered to go back to help Grendel with his experiments, and only let Grendel log it in as part of the hundred hours after the old wizard pressed her to let him do so.

She looked up the complex system of Project rights in the Ellinia Library, roping in Rei to help her check out details. After much discussion with Grendel, Silver started work on a proposal to cede her rights to the joint Project with Brandon.

It meant that she would not be officially acknowledged as an author of the old Project. But she would retain the rights to use the material that she had contributed to the Project; there was a little clause somewhere in a legalese-laden scroll that mentioned that.

The appeal to withdraw from the joint Project was quickly granted with the terms Silver proposed for, with no contest from Brandon (why should he mind it anyway?), and in the hour after she received news of her successful appeal, she had gone and removed all her notes from the old Project portfolio. Rei helped her collect the rest of her work from Brandon, with the help of a comprehensive list of things that Silver remembered having passed to him.

Silver never saw Brandon once throughout all that, nor did Brandon seek her out. It no longer mattered, and Rei did not question that. He also kept to himself his sighting of one particular Project portfolio while on duty in the Archives again: it had Brandon’s name together with Veronica’s on it.

Meanwhile, Silver drew up a new Project proposal: she proposed to investigate on ways to seal Summoning Sacks up. Her new thesis was in clear defiance of her previous Project (or rather, the one that now belonged to Brandon): Silver would now work to prevent the misuse of Summoning Sacks and the damage it would cause, something that was all too familiar to her.

It would require knowledge of magic that the archer did not possess, but what else was the Library’s great store of scrolls and books on magic for? Although the deadline for Projects was but a month away, much of the preliminary research on the Sacks already done and in Silver’s possession, thanks to that little clause. With some help from Grendel, Silver felt sure that she could pull it off.

By the time two more weeks came to a close, Silver had plunged right back into life, never allowing herself one idle moment. The pale girl with her arm in a cast was a common sight at the magics section of the Library, and the Librarians that manned Ellis saw her very often too.

To Rei, it felt as if Silver’s newfound obsession for work was a stake that she thrust into the slippery slope of depression to pull herself back up. The wall that kept Silver’s thoughts in still stood, stubbornly keeping everyone else out. However, the haunted look in her grey eyes had disappeared, replaced by a humourless determination. Secretly, Rei feared that another Master Solomon was manifesting itself in his best friend, too stern and too serious.

But anything was better than that silent wraith he had escorted back to her rooms two weeks ago.

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Uh. Nothing much to say. This chapter is just a 1,716-words-and-grammatically-incorrect bridge to get us all back closer to the more exciting story-present (which is already written and ready to go, only for the lack of bridging XD). Nothing you don’t know.

You guys are tired of the ‘this is lousy’ rant by now, yes? But perhaps now you will realise that, for once, IT IS TRUE. Yayz.

Ice Cream Cookies~!