The Chirurgeon's Burden

The Chirurgeon's Burden

Skooh Otaga - Seda, Leyline District

His metallic fingers, articulated with a precision no human hand could match, hovered over the merchant’s temples. He did not touch the skin, but rather the invisible, shimmering threads of consciousness.

His current patient was a man named Loris, a wealthy shipping merchant whose life was, by any human measure, a resounding success. Yet, his mind was a swamp of anxieties. Skooh, standing motionless behind him in the patient's chair, did not see a man; he saw a symphony of discord.

Regret over a youthful love affair was a low, droning cello note. Greed was a shrill, stabbing flute, playing a frantic arpeggio. The fear of his own mortality was a deep, guttural drumbeat.

But today's procedure was specific. He had to isolate the parasitic tune, a recurring nightmare of a shipwreck that was not memory, but a fear of the future. A spidery, invasive melody played on a discordant violin. He had to excise it without silencing the whole orchestra.

His own essence, the cool, quiet, perfect hum of Ether he housed, acted as the scalpel—a blade of absolute nullity that could sever a single thought. This was his true calling. Not the creation he saw in the beautiful, chaotic decay of Seda, but the unmaking. He was a weapon forced by the 'Prime' to appreciate the world he was bound to one day destroy.

This work, this "Chirurgeon's Guide" he meticulously documented, was not compassion. It was maintenance. He was a cosmic physician, suturing the micro-fractures in reality—the regrets, the guilts—to prevent the entire patient from bleeding out before its time.

He found the nightmare-melody, a tangled, venomous knot of psychic energy that pulsed with a sickly, jaundiced yellow. Carefully, he began to unwind it, thread by delicate, shimmering thread. He separated its tendrils from the low drone of regret, untangled its hooks from the frantic melody of greed. It was like defusing a bomb made of spun glass. One wrong move, one thread severed out of place, and the entire psychic structure could shatter, leaving Loris a mindless shell.

Then, the operating room trembled.

It was not a physical tremor that shook the stone of his workshop. It was a violent, fundamental ripple in the fabric of reality, a deep, resonant thrum of immense power being unleashed, a great bell being struck in some distant, hidden place.

For Skooh, a being whose entire existence was predicated on maintaining a fragile, cosmic balance, it was agony.

The feedback surged through his delicate connection to the merchant’s mind, a blast of pure psychic static. The golden patterns on his feline mask flared with a blinding, painful light. The merchant convulsed violently in his chair, a strangled cry escaping his lips. The orchestra of his mind shrieked into an earsplitting, chaotic wall of sound. The cello of regret snapped its strings. The flute of greed shattered.

Balance. The command was a silent, synthesized thought. He was a dam, and a tidal wave had just struck him. He forced his own chaotic, hungry essence into a state of rigid, crystalline order, a feat of will like trying to freeze a supernova.

He ignored the pain, the feeling of his own structure fraying. He located the primary thread of the nightmare-parasite amidst the chaos and, with a final, violent tug of will, severed it. He sealed the raw, bleeding wound in the merchant’s psyche with a wave of pure, cold tranquility.

The merchant slumped, his body going limp, his breathing deep and peaceful. The surgery, against all odds, was a success.

But Skooh swayed on his feet, the workshop tilting. The tremor had passed, but its psychic aftershock still echoed. He brought a polished, metallic hand to his mask, a mimicked human gesture of distress. When he pulled his hand away, he saw a single, shimmering bead of viscous, twilight-hued liquid clinging to the metal. It shimmered with the light of crushed stars.

His essence. Leaking.

The whispers of the Emptiness, his constant inner companion, grew louder, more insistent. The tremor had cracked his containment.

An unknown power was active in the world, a force of wild, untamed magic. A new note had been added to the cosmic symphony, one he had never heard before. And it was dangerously, beautifully, terrifyingly out of tune.

His time as a quiet observer was over. He had to find the source of that sound.