17:38 / 24:37, Rotation 526 / 687, 231 AE, 13.915293, 88.371021, Aryss

  Somewhere in Isidis Planitia, the knights finally had a rote of rest, their reward being green miruvor, a simple pure methyl alcohol cannabinoid tincture – infused with synthetic flavors of extinct fruits to make it more bearable to hold under the tongue before swallowing – to ease the healing of their wounds. It was the one painkiller they were allowed to use as a recreational intoxicant. Green miruvor was for healing, brown miruvor was for slaying. Clan miruvor, a clearer amber liquid, was not for them.

  The Knight Leader was naked and doused in bacta – spirits loaded up with healing compounds – that anesthetized him, kept his wounds moist and embedded in nutrient laden ectoplasm for keratinocytes to travel freely across, clean out dead tissue, and lay down fibroblasts. The black liquid covered him in the bacta bath up to his neck. A clear plexiglas shell trapped hyperoxygenated air – a treat only for wounded soldiers to more quickly get them back in fighting shape – and the Knight Leader took it in generous, heaving breathfuls. It smelled like absolutely nothing, but that was why the Knight Leader was grateful for it. Nothing was still better than the musky, stale, putridly sour odor of his own dried ectoplasmic sweat, which was the only aroma accompanying him inside the shell of the carapace. And even still, stinky air was better than no air at all.

  Two Aryssal rotes ago, to get back to the reaver without suffocating, or having bubbles form inside his body as the pressure dropped now that the lava tube had been blown open and so the trapped air leaked out rapidly, the Knight Leader had to quickly scavenge Avecia’s pressure jumpsuit and coif, and breathing mask. Their carapaces had been mangled, and he had not enough suits that remained undamaged to protect all the knights still living.

  The psion’s suit was spirit-laden so they stretched it as thin as possible to accommodate his relative bulk, but it was still a tight and uncomfortable fit. It was a bit embarrassing.

  By the time he and the Conduit, whose name he did not yet know, managed to psionically rouse Second, Third, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth before the lava tube was drained of air, the Knight Leader was barely alive, and he collapsed in the bacta tank in total exhaustion, and slept for eighteen hours straight, and as he slept the spirits had set the greenstick fracture with gryphantene-bone binding, the gash had sealed and stitched itself together, the cut on his cheek filled to the pink of new flesh. The spirits entered through his blood vessels and set his rib and cleared out the dead blood near his kidneys from a painful bruise on his abdomen, and that of a big bruise on his thigh, and set the bone in his fractured wrist.

  He almost slept straight through the celebrations of a mission success. He had awoken just in time for Third to pop open his healing tank and squirt a dropperful – one sublingual dose of the green dragon – into his open mouth. Third shut the clear hatch to his tank again and returned to socializing with the rest of the knights, something few soldiers got to do until they were sent into the psionic sparseness of a ranging.

  Rolling the liquid in his mouth – it still tasted quite foul despite the artificial flavors, for the earthy tastes of cannabinoid extract and acrid taste of pure alcohol were hard to mask, foul he was accustomed to for the Knight Leader had hardly any acquired palate – he sunk his face under the warm, black bacta. The sounds of the other knights talking and the reaver’s treads rumbling along the ground, already muffled by the plexiglas, all but evaporated once his pointed ears were sunken too, and black bacta filled his ear canals.

  He kept his eyes open under the bacta – it did not hurt his eyes at all, in fact it helped soothe them with a sharp, minty freshness – but as the bacta was black, his vision melted away to serene and empty darkness.

  Finally, his crooked nose submerged too, and the bacta entered his air passages. Elvans could breathe easily in bacta, as it sensed its entry into the sinuses, and trachea, and bronchioles and formed threads all along to bubble in the oxygen needed.

  Breathing this way was slow and sluggish, like every inhalation required great suction to pull the air through thick snot, but it worked just as well, if not better than normal breathing. The breath was augmented by the spirits to better diffuse into the arteries and inject fresh vitality into the extremities. When dealing with sinus congestion, the trick is simply to breathe in slowly. Now, with the pace of his breath measured and controlled, it felt effortless.

  He now saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, even felt nothing, encased and floating in the body temperature bacta, tasted… well he was still holding the green dragon under his tongue. He swallowed it. Spicy. His burp bubbled up under the bacta. Now he, mostly, tasted nothing too.

  His bacta tank had become a sensory deprivation tank.

  It was easier to think with the Conduit this way.

  He had made contact when he aroused from his bacta slumber, just a moment before. He didn’t realize it, but Vilithe, though he did not know her name, had been probing his dreams, but most of what she could get was simply the meaningless noise of cognition attempting to understand the absurdity and randomness of experience.

  In his dreams she saw some sort of hallway, though he did not remember it. She saw a shadowy figure from another side of a sliding doorway watching him as the doors slid closed, but it was just a silhouette on a strange red light, though he did not remember it. As he had gracefully emerged from his rapid-eyed bout of dreaming, through the mysterious intermediary layers of sleep, before awakening as one should for good rest, he didn’t remember any of that.

  The dream ended as he awoke in darkness, his gasping head shot up and smacked the plexiglas, and the Conduit thought to him, Are you okay, Knight Leader? And he thought Yeah-, but then Third opened the hatch on his tank to give him the green dragon.

  So now that he was back in the darkness, he tried thinking about the Conduit, but it was hard, because he had no idea what she looked like, what her name was, or what she was like as an elvan at all. And he was no psion. He had no idea how this worked.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Hello?

  Are you there, Conduit?

  I’m right here, Knight Leader.

  He felt himself grinning uncontrollably. Weird. He could feel it distinctly because he could really feel nothing else. And then he realized that it was probably because he was high off the green dragon. Or was it just giving an assist?

  Heyyy- he assumed the instant sluggishness of the hard alcohol and tetrahydrocannabinol high trailed the psionic ‘y’ of his greeting as he thought the word, by itself quite meaningless - hey - he had no idea how emotion was supposed to be conveyed without inflection of voice or language of body, for all psionic conversations heretofore had been commands or mindflays, and so he was quite unsure and self-aware.

  Hey!

  A roll of frisson was unleashed up his spinal column. He had no idea how easy emotion was conveyed in psionic communication.

  An awkward, meditative moment of silent sensory oblivion. But it relaxed the Knight Leader.

  It relaxed Vilithe too. They could feel comfortable together in silence.

  Vilithe blinked her eyes from the darkness for a quick second as she let Knight Leader chill for a bit.

  She was lying on her cot in her reaver, also trundling along and giving a nice gentle rumble that made it easy to fall asleep to, and she put her legs up in the air, looking at her toenails. She probably needed to cut them soon. She dropped her legs, closed her eyes again and delved back into psionic chitchat with the Knight Leader.

  What’s up?

  I - I forgot what I was going to think. I just drank some green dragon.

  He didn’t forget anything in truth, he had just failed to think of something charming to think. It is funny how elvans are often at a loss just when they are most compelled to impress.

  Yeah, I know. It tasted foul! Why on Aryss did you gargle it like that?

  Behind her closed eyes she giggled. She had tasted it as he had, and she could also sense his inebriation, although she blocked it out from destabilizing her own personal perceptions- but any perception she scryed of his would still be filtered through the haze of his simultaneous drunkenness and highness.

  He protested, nah it doesn’t! It- you get used to it. It was all he had, after all.

  She laughed out loud. She had just tasted wine not a fortnight ago.

  No, dude, there is way better stuff out there. And so, she sent him her remembered perception of that sweet, sweet sauv blanc.

  Goddess, you had wine?!

  He could taste her recollection of it?! Now he was giddy, feeling fine. The nasty aftertaste of the green dragon was replaced with the refreshing tartness of fermented Vyredian grapes.

  How did she get access to wine?

  Aren’t you a vassal? Like me?

  Vilithe restrained herself from recalling all the vassal torturing she had to do over the revs.

  She also restrained herself from mind-blurting the devious, though now unrealistic, plans she was concocting.

  So, she blatantly lied with her mind. Way harder than lying with the voice.

  Yes. But you know, Clan Amallark doesn’t always treat their vassals so bad.

  It was a half-truth, as she recalled her – ugh – night with Serun, which she made sure to keep mum to the Knight Leader on. Still, she felt a little dirty at the thought.

  He could sense her hesitation but was oblivious to the deception.

  It was up for debate. Well, I respectfully disagree, Conduit, but who am I to judge? He shrugged and the bacta rippled around him, I’m just a humble soldier.

  You’re more than that! It tumbled out of Vilithe, she couldn’t contain her admiration.

  She thought excitedly, you have psionic power beyond any soldier that I’ve ever scryed. She felt awkward on the last psi-beat.

  But he didn’t mind. Like she had been the only presence who has ever pried his mind.

  So, he thought back, I appreciate that, Conduit.

  His acceptance of the compliment was so earnest and genuine and simple-minded. He did not think of all the nefarious and sinister potencies of wielding power through psionics. The naivete stunned Vilithe.

  No, I mean, like – why did she think that word? What did ‘like’ mean? Like what? She realized she was stalling because she couldn’t quite build a frame of reference for his mind – you’re some sort of psionic warrior. You can break out of psionic control. Don’t you realize that makes you a powerful weapon?

  I mean, I know I’m a weapon. There was such shame in the way he thought that, that made Vilithe feel quite contrite. But it was the easiest concept for his experience to use as a vehicle for explanation.

  He sighed remnant bubbles from his lungs. I don’t really care how powerful I am. Job’s a job, right? Just get it done. And suddenly he felt closed off to her. His own presence felt a little cold, a little chilly. He tried to sink back into the bacta, and the booze, and cannabis, to warm himself up. Perhaps sink into a blissful, restful oblivion. But he had already slept too much. It was just healing now.

  It was a potion also known as ‘green dragon’ for its potency, aka ‘green dragon miruvor’, or ‘geeds’.

  But all Vilithe and Malevolent could do was rave about how cute of a matched couple they looked now, Vilithe and Knight Leader wearing the same thing, but obviously out of mindshot of Knight Leader.

  It would aid the dryness his eyes would feel that he felt every time he took the potion.

  Broken and reset too many times. If it had been undamaged, one could say that the Knight Leader’s nose looked exactly like the nose of a young Godlike, Takeshi Kaneshiro. But instead, it looked like the Godlike Owen Wilson’s now.

  It was the same way dragonriders could breathe while enveloped inside the protective amniotic fluid of a dragon.

  Like nostrils clogged from a bad case of covid.

  Not really, it was the alcohol burn, but then, the knight leader had never tasted anything remotely close to truly spicy in his life. Yet. For an elvan, his palate was truly that of a pasty white boi’s, more than most soldiers.

  Not weird. He had just tongued down a heroic dose of green dragon.

  It was pretty potent; it was the infatuation that was giving the assist. All psionics are easier upon a receptive mind.

  It was not him. It was Vilithe, suddenly beset by a bout of nervous energy, accidentally dragging the last psionic consonant of his greeting just a bit too long, as she dilated her perception of time to recover from the fumble.

  That’s when you know you’ve found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.

  Sometimes called ‘crunk’, or ‘cross-faded’.

  He didn’t know it but actually they were rogues now.

  The old platitude that every believable lie had to have a seed of the truth was doubly true for psionic lies.

  ‘Scryed’. It felt a tad stalkerish.