Chapter 11: A Gift Given

“…where is he?”

Patience was not the easiest thing in the world.

It took real effort and practice and (annoyingly enough) patience to have patience.

Years of watching pots boil, managing a garden, and reading books so old and dusty you had to be careful opening them had done a great job in training his patience.

…but everything had a limit.

And six days was pushing that limit.

Six days, Ken sat with his face in his hands, the door leading to the outside just steps in front of him. It might as well have been on another floor for all it mattered.

The heavy quiet that had settled on the herb shop was almost like the waste-dirt he remembered growing up, thick and gritty and choking the way it got in your throat. All that hope had from Wei’s words had finally guttered out somewhere around yesterday, five days of waiting doing the job at killing it pretty good.

Six days is crazy. He hadn’t just sat here doing nothing. Ken had cleaned the first couple days, something to keep his hands moving when his feet didn’t want to stay still. He even tidied things that were already tidy, wiping down already spotless and shining counters.

Anything and everything that he could find to do, from watering the garden in the back, to sweeping the stairs, and even rearranging the perfectly organized jars of herbs in the back rooms, he’d done it all.

When there was nothing left to clean, he tried to study.

Ken sat down with the old man’s books, the heavy leather covers familiar in his hands, and stared at the pages till all the handwritten words blurred into a bunch of meaningless squiggles.

His eyes hurt by the time he was looking at his fifth book of the day, one with diagrams of parts of the body that started looking more and more like unfamiliar maps as he fought to stay awake. There wasn’t much else to do at this point, other than more reading, considering he’d cleaned all four of the already-spotless brewing hearths.

Hell, he’d gotten on his hands and knees and scrubbed the heavy wooden workbenches too, until the only smell left on them was the faint scent of a hundred different herbs.

At this point, the only thing left to do was just wait.

So, he did.

Outside, the massive lamps the whole city used as fake suns had already made their slow crawl across the metal ceiling and dipped below the horizon of stacked buildings, plunging the world into a neon-bathed twilight.

It was nothing new. He’d seen them set a thousand times before.

And rise again.

And set.

And rise again.

This last week was no different.

I know this place is supposed to be giant, but it’s insane. He wasn’t an idiot, and even without his master’s teachings, he could do the math well enough.

All the time he spent in the junk-hills before Weir, he had stared at the Wall almost every day he could trying to make sense of it; just staring at the Wall as it stretched from one side of the horizon to the other. It literally blocked out everything else, stretching up so high that you couldn’t think it was anything else but literally the edge of the world. If this city, this single floor, was even half as wide as that impossible horizon… has to be the size of a whole country, at least.

And there were supposed to be a hundred and forty-three more floors stacked on top of it?

I mean… Ken shook his head slow, unsure how to even deal with that. Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess.

Pushing the pointless thought away, Ken went back to staring at the door.

The only light in the shop now came from the single lantern burning low as it flickered on the small table next to him. Well, that and the colorful neon bleeding through the front window from the city street outside. Long moving stripes of bright red and harsh purple bled throught the windows and across the floor, twisting the shadows of the apothecary into something scarier than usual.

Seriously, it doesn’t make sense. Old Wei had never been gone this long before. Not once in three years. Two days, maybe three at most for the really rare ingredients, but never six.

Something was wrong. It had to be that.

Old Wei wouldn’t just leave him here like this without a reason; the old man not the type to make promises, especially about something like this, and  then just disappear all of a sudden.

Unless… The thought was dumb, ridiculous even, but it still hit him no matter how much Kenshi wanted to push it away. His hands curled into tight fists against his knees as the apprentice shook his head. Unless he couldn’t come back.

He knew Wei was strong, fast too even. He’d seen the old man carry several stacked crates as easily as Ken could carry one regular filled box. The old man was stupid strong, sure, but Ken knew what the Outside was like.

Past the apothecary, past the City walls, the Outside had rivers of posion, crumbling towers of trash and roaming beasts strong enough to rip an arm off as easy as anything. There was a reason the village treated its Hunters so well, and it wasn’t just because of war.

Soon enough, the massive lamps that lit the city rose again, the lamp behind Ken long having died. He sat there still, brown eyes tired and drooping, from a night of no sleep as the seventh day rolled around.

The seventh day.

No Wei.

“…where are you, old man?” His gaze stayed fixed on the heavy, bolted door in front of him, on the thick iron bar he’d slammed into place.

He willed it to move, almost demanding something t-

Thump… thump… thump. Ken’s eyes widened as the door in front of him thudded loud with the sound of a knock. Thump-thump. Thump… thump… thump.

A sudden, heavy SLAM against the door made him jump to his feet. A grunt spilled out of his lips, pain and shock and everything else that came with hitting your head on the edge of a table making his vision spin. *I’m good, I’m g-*The sight of a wicker tray full of dried sun-petal blossoms were scattered all over the floor in front of him, the fragrant yellow flowers just annoying him with a new mess he’d have to clean up.

But none of that mattered, not right now. Not with Ken’s eyes still on the door, eyes wide as he scrambled to his feet. The knock… Three slow, two fast, three slow.

Ken swallowed a mouthful of nothing. “M-master?”

No voice spoke back.

Instead, a shaky, dragging scrape against the door answered him, Ken almost taking a step back as he heard it. The sound was weak, but heavy, the sound of a fist with no strength behind it sliding down the thick wood, a thump of flesh and constant movement back and forth.

“Old Wei!” His voice went louder, deeper, the apprentice unsure what to do. The knock was exactly what his master had told him, but…

“K-Kenshi…” A voice pushed through the door; weak, strained, ragged and wet with so much pain he almost didn’t recognize it. “b-boy… Ken…”

It’s him! Relief hit like a punch to the gut, Ken suddenly able to breathe again as he moved forward again. Terror vanished, all joy and relief pushing him as he scrambled toward the door. “Old Wei!”

His hands, usually so precise with the delicate, patient work of alchemy, fumbled with the heavy iron bolt, clumsy and uncertain all of a sudden. But he didn’t let that stop him, and soon enough, the apprentice lifted the bar and slid back the bolt with a loud, scraping groan of protesting metal.

The door burst inward, slamming against the wall behind it, as if all of Wei’s weight had been leaning against it.

With another groan leaving his lips, the old man stumbled in on jerky legs and Ken felt his mouth dry up as the world just… stopped.

He was pale.

Not… not him him.

His master… his master was pale.

Wei’s face was gray, gray like wax; the sort of color Ken had only ever seen on the dead and dying back in the Junk Valley. The old man’s clothes were torn and soaked in blood, the red dark and glistening against dark cloth.

“N-no, Wei, Wei!”

Ken’s chest heaved, breath coming out almost as rough as his master’s as his eyes trailed down to the hole. The massive, gushing hole right through the shredded fabric of Wei’s tunic and the mangled, pulpy flesh staring right back at Kenshi.

H-how… The fifteen-year-old flinched backward, jaw hanging open. How is he even… standing?

As if just now realizing how badly he was hurt, the alchemist collapsed, not just falling but just dropping forward, the entire weight of his master crashing down right on top of him. Ken grunted  at the sudden force; a crushing, sudden impact that drove the air from his lungs in a single, shocked gasp. His unprepared body was slammed to the floor, the old man’s heavy form pinning him down like a slab of rock.

Wet.

Sticky.

Warm.

It took all the effort in the world to keep his tongue in his mouth, vomit forcing its way up as blood drenched him. N-no. So much red splattered his face and soaked right through his own tunic in a way that made him want to crawl out of his own skin.

Then the smell hit him; coppery, sharp and so metallic, it forced its way into his nostrils and coated the back of his throat till he had to swallow down the mess working up his throat. He gagged again, mouth still shut as spit sputtered out through gritted teeth.

“W-Wei?” The words came out choked, his hands slipping in something thick and hot as he tried to push himself up. “H-hold on, j-j-just—”

His brain went blank for a second, then kicked back into gear running through every lesson he’d ever learned way too fast for any of it to stick. Stop the bleeding. He’d need a clotting agent, something to seal it up. Red-vine? No, that just made blood replenish faster, that’s the opposite of what— scrap, what stops it? Gray-fur moss; that would do it.

Need moss, need to make a poultice, need to get up a-

He tried to squirm out from under the old man, tried to push Wei off him so he could actually move, but his hands just kept slipping in all the blood. “Wei, let me up! I can help you, I just need t-“

Wei’s head lifted from his shoulder.

“Mas-“

The word died somewhere in his throat as those purple eyes blazed with light, something burning behind them that made every muscle in his body lock up. The friendly round face was gone, all of it pulled tight and sharp into something else, the mouth a thin cruel line.

This isn’t…

This thing wasn’t his master, wasn’t his grandfather, definitely not the old man who made bad jokes and taught him how to grind herbs.

“W-Wei?”

The thing wearing Wei’s face didn’t say a word, no answer for it to give. Before Ken could pull back, a hand shot out and grabbed his arm, the grip so strong he felt his bones grinding together under the pressure. “Mas-AAAAAAHHH!” The scream tore out of him before he could stop it, sharp and high and embarrassing, the pain lancing all the way up to his shoulder like someone had shoved a hot iron through his arm.

Another hand clamped over his mouth before he could scream again, a bloody palm sealing his lips shut as clawed nails dug into his face. “Mmmmpf-mpppffff!!!!” His head was forced back and down against the floorboards, hard enough he felt his head shudder as it slammed against the wood.

“KEEEEEEEN!” The thing’s voice came out raw and guttural, torn from the throat of something that wasn’t human anymore.

Something thick poured from its mouth and nose, deep purple like a bruise, not smoke because smoke didn’t-couldn’t-wouldn’t move like that. This was alive, buzzing and writhing and pushing itself at him; a swarm of angry wasps rushing at his face, forcing its way past sealed lips and into his nose, his eyes…

No no no—

Pressure built inside his head, his chest, deeper than that even. An agonizing expanding force like he was a clay pot being filled with way too much water, the cracks spreading through him as something scraped away at his thoughts. His memories. His name.

Everything that made him him getting torn apart and scattered in the wind, leaving only the raw screaming part of him that knew it was about to break.

Ken screamed against the hand clamped tighter over his mouth, a choked wet sound that went nowhere, and then something in him just snapped. His body moved on its own, instinct in the back of brain thinking over as he thrashed and kickied with a desperate strength he didn’t know he even had.

The fifteen-year-old scrambled backward on his hands and feet, away from the thing wearing Wei’s face, away from those burning purple eyes and the non-human hunger. His vision was going dark at the edges, his chest hurting as his lungs weren’t working right. Each breath he tried to take just caught in his throat, useless panicked gasps that brought in nothing.

Can’t breathe can’t breathe can-

He crawled blind, hands slipping in the spreading pool of blood, back slamming into a wall hard enough to rattle his teeth. The back room, he’d stumbled into the dark shadowed back room somehow. His legs gave out and he collapsed onto the floor, body seizing up in violent uncontrollable tremors that shook him from the inside out.

The world was all just pain.

Pain and pressure and the feeling of something foreign and painful and wrong crawling through his insides.

I’m dying. He knew it the way he knew his own name, the sure feeling settling in his gut like a stone. This is how I die.

What was nside him was nowhere near as solid but even more real, the energy trying to crush the life out of him; squeezing something out to make room for the buzzing thing that had been forced inside.

Then through all the chaos roaring in his head, Ken heard it. A voice, a memory, louder and older and deeper than the pain.

The emptiness comes… His grandmother, her knobbled fingers on his chest, her rough voice in his ear.

G-Gram?

You breathe. Feed it… or it eats you.

Instinct took over and Ken took a shaky shuddering breath in. He held it for a second that felt like forever, the pressure in his chest building to an unbearable screaming point.

Then he let it out, long and desperate.

In-out. In-out.

He took another breath, forcing air into lungs that felt like they were full of broken glass. And another. The exercises, the stupid exercises Gram had beaten into him twelve years ago.

Feed it slow.

The world went black.