The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 123 - Rules // Consequences

Lugging Arnell back to his forge using the half-sedated man’s shitty directions the entire way was a whole journey in and of itself, but frankly, Gael would rather not remind himself of it. The most important part was that they got Arnell back to his forge. End of story.

Even with half its smithing machines shoved to the edges of the hall to make space, Arnell’s forge that was tucked deep inside a cluster of confusing metal buildings still felt like the ribcage of some giant. Dark beams arched overhead, towering presses hunched like slumbering beasts everywhere, and cooling vats off to the side glinted with reflected furnace embers. The air swirled with metallic heat, tasting faintly of smoke, oil, and something older. Something that clung to the lungs. Gael couldn’t tell what. He hadn’t been in too many forges before.

He’d also never performed surgery on another man’s cluttered workbench before, but there was a first for everything.

Arnell lay on the workbench in the center of the forge, half-sedated and slipping further out of consciousness with each slow breath. His forge tools—massive hammers, pliers the size of Gael’s forearm, and chisels warped by years of fire—had been pushed aside to make room for surgical tools that absolutely didn’t belong here.

Maeve stood at his left, tightening her gloves, while Gael rummaged through a scattered line of bottles and metal drawers around the forge with grim purpose. There were no trays for him to put down his tools as far as he could tell, but… well, he could make do without.

“Final checks,” Gael muttered, lighting his Gloam Lantern and hanging it from an improvised hook above the workbench. “Suture threads, hemostats, clamps, cutters, stabilizing cloth… aight. Let’s go.”

He paused, hand hovering over a squat bottle Arnell had left uncorked on a shelf close by. The liquid inside glowed faintly amber, so without hesitation—and without any sense of decorum—he snatched the bottle and downed a long, greedy pull.

Maeve barely had time to scowl before he grimaced so violently it certainly looked like his soul wanted to leave his body.

“This isn’t right,” he croaked, coughing and hacking and tossing the bottle away. It shattered somewhere behind a different shelf.

“What is it?”

“This alcohol’s shit,” he grumbled. “It’s making me sober.”

She smacked the back of his head with Mistrender’s handle. “Stop being absurd and start the damn surgery.”

Muttering under his breath, he leaned over the half-conscious Arnell and adjusted the lanternlight once more. His passive mutation, Umbral Eyes, allowed him to see the man’s clear weakspots—that being the heart for humans, of course, but right now, there were two bright red hearts pulsing inside the man’s body. One was at its usual spot, on the left side of his chest, but the other was deeper and pulsing more erratically, fluttering low in his abdomen.

“There you are,” he murmured. “Evil little stowaway.”

Maeve held out a clamp. “Lower stomach?”

“Mm. Burrowed deep, too. We gotta cut him.”

With a motion both swift and practiced, Maeve removed Arnell’s shirt while he opened the man’s abdomen. The scalpel slid through skin and muscle with a dark whisper, and warm blood followed. Maeve steadied the edges with metal spreaders, and together they pushed the incision open until the cavity yawned, exposing glistening wetness beneath the lantern’s pale glow.

Gael reached inside carefully, ignoring the blood that slicked over his gloves. For a few seconds he felt around, mapping the intestines with the usual diagrams in his head, but it didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for: the fleshy, pinkish-purple Myrmur heart pulsing between Arnell’s small and large intestine.

Unlike usual Myrmur hearts, though, this spherical bulb was partly hardened, as though caught mid-transition between flesh and forged alloy. It pulsed like a heart, yes, but the beat was weak. Thin metal plates shimmered across parts of its fleshy membrane.

“... It’s just as you said,” Gael muttered. “There’s no attempt to manifest external from the Myrmur, but is it unwilling or unable?”

He probed further, searching the areas near the intestines for the telltale density of a physical bomb… but there was nothing. No hidden lump, no foreign mechanism.

“Nothing in here but an overgrown parasite,” he said. “The guy probably caught the Myrmur the normal way. It wasn’t artificially implanted in him, which means…”

Maeve exhaled in relief. “You don’t have to try the bomb-neutralizing method.”

“Tragic. I was looking forward to experimenting.” His voice dropped into a theatrical gloom. “I even prepared a little speech.”

“Gael.”

“Fine, fine.” He adjusted the lantern’s dial. “Get ready to close him up.”

The white light of the Gloam Lantern sharpened into a concentrated beam, bathing the Myrmur heart in stark luminescence. The parasite convulsed immediately. Its surface rippled like scorching oil, and the membranes shrieked in movements too small for human ears as a thin, wavering tremor shuddered up Arnell’s spine.

Gael didn’t flinch. He simply wrapped his fingers around the foreign organ, twisted once, and ripped it free.

It writhed in his fist until he crushed it swiftly.

The collapse of the heart was wet and abrupt, spilling black ichor across his glove and splattering onto the forge stone below. Arnell barely stirred. There was only a faint, pained tightening of his brows as the last of the killing-curse flickered out inside him, neatly smothered by the Gloam Lantern’s purifying glow.

“It really works,” Maeve breathed, leaning in close as she raised her stitching needles. “The light of the Gloam Lantern functions just like the symbiote elixir. “

“If it works once, it works the other ninety-nine times,” Gael muttered.

With that, they began the sealing procedure. Maeve pressed her sutures through the man’s skin without hesitation, and Gael cinched the knots tight. Within five minutes, they cleaned the blood, set aside their surgical tools, and sat back on rotating stools as they watched the steady rise and fall of Arnell’s chest.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

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“... So are we just going to wait until he wakes up?” Maeve asked.

“Can’t be bothered.” He dipped a hand into his coat and rummaged around until he found a syringe filled with a clear, sharp-smelling solution. “Waiting is for people with patience and a healthy respect for time.”

Then he jabbed it into Arnell’s thigh and pressed the plunger down. The reaction was immediate. Arnell convulsed with a sharp inhale, eyes flying open as his entire body jerked like a puppet whose strings had been yanked. His fingers clawed at the air once, twice, before his gaze unfocused and refocused on the ceiling.

“See?” Gael said cheerfully. “Adrenaline always works.”

Arnell made a small, strangled sound and tried to sit up. That was when his gaze dropped to his stomach. He saw the stitches. He saw the faint smear of dried blood. Then he turned his head, realized he was in his forge, and finally saw the Plagueplain Doctor sitting next to him.

Their eyes met.

“Now, I normally charge a small fee for doing house calls,” Gael began, “but seeing as this is my first operation outside of Blightmarch, I’m willing to—”

Unsurprisingly, Arnell chose fight over flight.

With a hoarse yell, he rolled off the workbench entirely—hit the floor with an undignified thud—and staggered toward a secondary workstation. His hands fumbled over tools until they found a hefty wrench, and then he snatched it up to hurl it at Gael’s head.

“Raven!”

Gael caught the wrench out of the air with one hand and threw it back. It smacked the man squarely in the forehead—not hard enough to break anything, he hoped, but hard enough to ring the man’s skull like a bell. Arnell let out a pained grunt and reeled back into a rack of tongs.

“You’re nowhere near as good a thrower as Cara is,” Gael said mildly. “And she doesn’t even have a system. What a travesty.”

Arnell slid down the rack and ended up half-sitting, half-slumped against the workstation, clutching his head and blinking in a daze. Maeve winced in sympathy, but didn’t grumble Gael’s name. She’d already scolded him too many times today.

Gael hopped back onto the central workbench, planting his cane across his knees. Maeve, with more grace, perched on a nearby table, legs together and hands folded over her dress.

“Introductions,” Gael said, clapping his hands once. “Let’s make this nice and official before anyone else tries to hit me with their own tools. I’m Gael Halloway, the Exorcist Doctor of the Heartcord Clinic in Blightmarch. You might’ve heard of me depending on how much gossip trickles this far east. And this—” He tipped his head at Maeve. “—is my soon-to-be-wife, Maeve Valcieran. She’s a Symbiote Exorcist.”

Maeve inclined her head politely. “Hello.”

“Now, despite how we look—sinister masks, ominous lantern, the usual—we just finished operating on you. We removed your Myrmur heart, neutralized the killing curse, and I’d say your internal bits are still mostly where they belong. In return, we won’t be asking you for any payment. We’d just like to ask you a few questions.”

Arnell blinked.

“…Really?”

“Really.”

“But… but anyone who tries to remove a Myrmur heart dies,” Arnell stammered, words tumbling out in a rush. “That’s what they say. That’s what they all say. The moment you even so much as try to yank it out, the killing curse—”

“Not with me,” Gael cut in. His tone stayed light, but his eyes sharpened. “Look, this is a stupid line of conversation. You’re not a kid. You can feel it’s gone, can’t you? The Myrmur. That gnawing inside you that you’ve gotten used to is missing… and yet you’re still alive. How could that possibly be?”

Arnell swallowed. A hand went unconsciously to his stomach, fingers hovering just above the stitches.

“I obviously did something to protect you from the killing curse, which means, logically, that it is possible,” Gael continued. “So, instead of asking me how I did the impossible, how about you stop with the stupid questions and start answering mine? Before we knocked you out, you were rambling something about ‘stabilizers’ and ‘following the rules’. The fuck are those?”

Arnell’s gaze flicked to the Raven mask, then darted away again. He looked very much like a man who’d spent his life being told to fear anyone in a mask like that, so his mouth opened, then shut, then opened, then shut—until his eyes met Maeve’s.

Her mask was off. Her face—young, tired, and a bit flushed from the stifling, lingering heat of the forge—was open and earnest. Her eyes were steady on him, not pitying, just… present.

“It’s alright,” she said quietly. “We’re not here to turn you in to the local Exorcists. We wouldn’t have taken the Myrmur out if we were.”

Arnell’s shoulders eased another notch, making Gael grin.

A pretty face really makes conversations easier.

Finally, Arnell inhaled slowly, pressing a hand to his stomach.

“Stabilizers are…” He groped for words and settled on the obvious. “Stabilizers. Syringes. You can buy them if you’re stuck with a Myrmur. I don’t… really understand the details, but they say that each dose injects some kind of biometallic compound inside you. It… metallizes the Myrmur heart.”

Gael’s brows inched up behind his mask. “Metallizes?” he echoed.

Arnell nodded. “It hardens the heart and makes it more… solid, they say. Less… whatever it is normally. That way, the Myrmur can’t manifest externally properly. And the symptoms, the pain, the moods, the… the nightmares… they all get weaker. Like pouring metal over a screaming thing until it can’t move anymore.”

Interesting, Gael thought, the word humming behind his teeth. A compound that partially calcified a Myrmur heart into something alloy-like, arresting its ability to send out its umbilical cord to manifest a deceptive form, as well as muting its signal with the Host’s nervous system…

“How long do the stabilizers last?” Gael asked, tilting his head.

Arnell scratched his arm, eyes sliding to the side as he thought. “The first one, when you’re freshly parasitized… it can last weeks. Maybe a month. You feel… almost normal. But every time you take another, it works less and less. You have to take them more often or the symptoms come back even worse. I’m at the point where I need one every few days just to keep the Myrmur… quiet.”

“So that’s why you were at the pit,” Maeve concluded.

“Yeah. I was running out of coin. I’ve been parasitized for almost two months now, so I can’t take on as many clients as usual with weak arms. If I don’t have enough money for the next set of stabilizers, the Myrmur will manifest, and if it doesn’t kill me right away for trapping it inside my body, the Exorcists will once they see red in their eyes. Either way, I was on a clock.” His fingers tightened on his own forearm. “Betting on fights is the quickest way to get enough coin.”

Maeve’s jaw clenched. “That’s what you meant by the ‘rule’, then?”

Arnell nodded, more shakily now.

“Yeah. The rule,” he muttered. “Here in Ironwych, the local Exorcists… they don’t exactly go hunting for Myrmur Hosts. They’re not like you, walking around with your eyes turned on all the time. They do their shifts, take their quotas, and as long as you take your stabilizers on schedule and keep their vision from flaring red when they look at you, they’ll pretend you’re not there. Don’t make their job harder, and they won’t bother you.”

Maeve’s hands curled into fists on her lap. Gael saw it, the way she held her tongue between her teeth to stop a cascade of opinions from spilling out. There were probably a hundred things she clearly wanted to say about duty and about what Exorcists were supposed to do, but he, personally, found Ironwych’s system of parasite control fascinating. It was nothing like Blightmarch’s, after all—and that was to say, Blightmarch was a ward the Symbiote Exorcists completely abandoned years ago for being too bothersome to clean up.

The fact that they only sent one Exorcist down to die two years ago—Maeve—was proof enough that they didn’t see Blightmarch as a ‘vital ward’ to protect, like they did Ironwych.

“So you’ve been buying stabilizers,” Gael said slowly, picking up the thread. “That implies someone’s been selling them. Someone’s been making them.”

Arnell looked at him, hesitant again. “You… really don’t know?”

Gael shrugged. “I’ve been busy in the south, so I can’t say I’ve been paying much attention to what the rest of the city’s been up to. Enlighten me. Who’s the one doing it?”

Arnell glanced between the two of them, then exhaled slowly and sagged against the workbench, resignation written in every line of his posture.

“The Steelborn,” he muttered. “You know about them at the very least, right?”