“SINI!”
Arkadin’s voice echoed down the pink crystal corridor, to no response.
“SINI, I NEED YOU.”
Still nothing. The Death God clutched his side, leaning against the wall. Pouring along the ground behind him was shimmering black blood, speckled with small points of light.
“SINI!”
Arkadin pressed his hand against the wall. As he did so, small cracks formed in the crystal. Nearby vines withered away, and the ground began to shudder. This finally garnered a response from the Life Goddess.
“Little Arkay, you do not need to be so destructive, I was busy… Oh my, what happened to you?” Sini looked down at her fellow deity, analysing the mess he had left all over her floor.
“I was thinking maybe you could tell me!” Arkay snapped, pointing a clawed finger at Sini. “I’ve been bleeding for goodness knows how many days and can’t seem to close the damn wound! I’ve stitched it, cauterized it, glued it, nothing is working! There’s something inside it and I can’t get it out!”
Sini tutted, then turned around, heading back down the corridor. Arkay grunted, then followed. Sini’s palaces were always complex mazes, designed to keep her test subjects in and her fellow gods out. After about seven right hand turns and a dozen twists, she finally led Arkay into a rather basic and overly white doctor’s room, with a bed in the centre and a mess of robotic arms and blades hovering above it.
“Lay down, please.”
Arkay hesitated, then did as he was told. On the plus side, finding his way out would have been easy, considering how much blood he had left on the floor. As he lowered himself down, Sini placed her hand near the obvious wound. It was located just underneath where Arkay’s skin met his chest armour, digging in at an awkward angle directly into Arkay’s abdomen.
“You know, you’re supposed to remove the foreign object.”
“I’ve been trying to. Whatever it is that’s stabbed me, it’s covered in barbs and I can’t just pull it out.”
Sini snapped her fingers, summoning a knife. Immediately, she started cutting around the wound, completely oblivious to Arkay’s grunts of pain, not even offering him a sedative or pain killer. They both knew he wouldn’t have accepted any sort of pain relief, but it would have been nice to ask. As Sini cut deeper, she exposed more of the foreign object, enough for her to be able to start pulling on it.
“That fucking hurts.”
“You don’t like anaesthetic.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t complain that it hurts.”
Sini kept on pulling. To her dismay, the object was… nonsensically long. Once she had finished pulling it out, she grabbed a nearby ruler and measured it. Over a metre long, silver and covered in tiny hooks. Which made no sense since Arkay was only about two metres tall himself.
“I feel better already…” Arkay muttered, sitting up to examine the mess Sini had made of his body. Now the object had been removed, Arkay could heal properly. The blood loss was still concerning, especially as it was acidic and somewhat eating away at the table, but with a wave of his hand, the skin and armour plating began to regrow. Within a minute, all that was left was a dark grey scar where the object had initially entered his body. A scar to join the many others on his skin.
“What were you doing when this happened?” Sini asked, looking somewhat concerned. Normally, she kept away from the Death God, he could look after himself. But the state she’d just seen him in left her a little shaken.
“I was just doing my normal perimeter patrols, checking the universal boundaries, when I noticed a lump on the southernmost boundary. I thought it was just a standard bit of xenoric corruption and went to incinerate it, but as I was about to finish it off, it fired that… thing into me. And then… I… I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t remember. All I know is that I spent all that time trying to fix myself before coming to you in desperation.”
“Hm…” Sini frowned. “I am going to examine this… object, see where it came from.”
“Do you need any help?”
“No. In fact, Arkay, I need you to go and rest. Take a few days off. Recover from your blood loss. Go watch some arena battles or something.”
“Oh…” Arkay blinked. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Alright then…” Arkay got up off the bed. “Thank you for the help, Sini.”
“No problem, little Thantophor…”