The Scratch Beneath My Ribs

The moon knows I am awake. That is the first thing.

The healers know it too. Nuwash knows it, though she keeps her back to me and her charcoal moving. The old man in the cot beside mine knows it, though he hasn't opened his eyes in three days and probably won't again. My body knows it best of all. Every nerve is a wire pulled too tight, and somewhere beneath my ribs something small and feral is scratching to get out.

I lie still and let the scratching happen.

The Healing Towers of Aurelium are quiet at this hour. No footsteps in the corridor. No clatter of cups or murmured instructions. Just the breathing of forty-seven patients scattered across three floors, and the distant hiss of the salt-lamps that never go dark. I have counted every sound for thirty-two nights. I have named them. The creak of Nuwash's stool when she shifts her weight. The whisper of her sleeves against the doorframe. The soft click of her moon-journal closing when she thinks I am asleep.

She thinks I am asleep now.

I watch her through half-closed eyes. She sits by the window with her back to me, charcoal moving across paper in short, certain strokes. The moon is fat and white through the glass, and it paints silver lines along her hair and shoulders. She is drawing something. Probably the old man's hands. She draws everyone's hands. She says hands tell the truth faster than faces.

My hands are shaking again.

Not badly. A fine tremor, like the last vibration of a struck bell. I can still grip a cup, still hold a knife, still perform the small dignities of a man who is not falling apart. But they shake. They have shaken for weeks. The healers say the shaking may never stop. The body remembers what the mind has decided to release.

I release my grip on the blanket and press my palms flat against the mattress.

The Saltwick Tar is gone. I threw the last of it into the sea three mornings ago, watched the amber cloud dissolve in the grey water, and felt nothing but a cold, hollow certainty that I had just made a mistake. The Verdigris Bloomroot went with it. Two years of dependency, two years of stolen weeks and missing hours, two years of telling myself I was in control while my memory dissolved like sugar in rain.

I remember fragments. A woman's face in a market I cannot name. A conversation about venom extraction in a language I barely spoke. The taste of something bitter and floral on my tongue. And then nothing. Hours. Days. A week, once. I found myself standing in a field with no memory of how I got there, my hands covered in soil, a dead rabbit at my feet.

I asked for help the next day.

That was four months ago. The Order sent me here. The Order, which I had spent a year impressing with my knowledge, my discipline, my hunger for secrets. I had saved a Master's life. I had been the first outsider welcomed into the Verdigris Circle's hidden sanctuaries. I had walked among the libraries of House of Bone and the gardens of House of Root, and I had believed, with the arrogance of a man who has never truly lost anything, that I was immune to the things that broke lesser minds.

The Circle did not punish me for my arrogance. They did not lecture me or shame me. They simply sent me to Aurelium, and I understood that this was worse than punishment. This was mercy. This was the recognition that I had become a problem to be solved, not a person to be trusted.

The scratching beneath my ribs grows sharper.

I breathe through it. Slow and deliberate, the way I learned from a Cael bone-setter in a mountain village whose name I have forgotten. In through the nose for four counts. Hold for four. Out through the mouth for four. The rhythm is older than any philosophy I have studied, older than any poison I have brewed or antidote I have mixed. It is the rhythm of bodies that refuse to stop living.

The scratching fades.

Not because I have won. Because I have learned that fighting it directly only makes it stronger. I acknowledge it. I let it exist. And then I choose something else.

I choose tomorrow.

That is what I said to Nuwash when she asked me, three mornings ago, what I hoped for. I stood at the edge of the sea with empty hands and salt drying on my skin, and I told her that I choose tomorrow. It sounded brave in the moment. It sounded like a line from a story, the kind of thing a man says before he rides off to do something heroic.

Now, in the dark, with my hands shaking and my nerves screaming and the ghost of two years clawing at my ribs, it sounds like what it is. A decision I will have to make again. And again. And again.

Nuwash turns.

She does it without sound, without the rustle of fabric or the shift of floorboards. One moment her back is to me. The next, her eyes are on mine, and I realize she has known I was awake the whole time.

"You're counting your breaths," she says.

"Counting is the only thing keeping me sane."

"Counting is a cage," she says. "You're going to need more than a cage."

She says things like this. Direct and quiet and devastating, as if she has spent years learning exactly which words will land and which will glance off. I do not know how old she is. Young enough that her face still holds softness. Old enough that her eyes have learned to hold sorrow without drowning in it. She has been a healer's assistant for six years. She has watched people die, people recover, people choose to stop choosing. She has watched me.

"What do you suggest?" I ask.

"Tomorrow." She says it simply, as if the word itself is an instruction. "You chose it. Now you have to live it. One hour at a time. One meal. One conversation. One breath."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It is." She stands and crosses to my bedside. Her hands are stained with charcoal. I can smell the ink and the faint herbal scent of the salves she prepares. "But you don't have to do it alone."

I want to tell her that I have spent twelve years learning to do everything alone. That independence is the only virtue I have never betrayed. That asking for help feels like admitting that every mile I traveled, every secret I uncovered, every discipline I mastered was built on a foundation that was never strong enough.

Instead, I say nothing. And she does not press.

She sits on the edge of my cot, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her, and she does not speak. She simply stays. The old man breathes his slow, rattling breaths. The salt-lamps hiss. The moon climbs higher, and I feel the scratching beneath my ribs quiet, not because I have won, but because I am not alone in the dark.

I do not know what this is. Friendship. Care. Something I have no name for because I have spent my whole life naming things instead of feeling them. But I know that when she finally leaves, when the grey light of dawn begins to seep through the window, I am still awake. And I am still choosing tomorrow.

The old man's breathing stops.

It happens between one exhale and the next inhale. A silence that does not resolve. I know it before I look. I know it from the way the air in the room changes, the way the salt-lamps seem to dim, the way Nuwash's hand finds my wrist and squeezes once, hard.

She stands. She crosses to his cot. She presses two fingers to his throat and waits, and I watch her face in the grey light, and I see the moment she confirms what we both already know.

"He's gone," she says.

I do not feel grief. I barely knew him. But I feel something else. A cold thread of fear winding through my chest, because the old man was supposed to be my guide. The healers said he would teach me the final steps. The steps I need to take before I can leave Aurelium and return to the Order.

He is gone.

And I do not know who will teach me now.