3. Disconnect (Patreon)

Author note: I feel like a warning is required for this chapter. If you made it this far, you should be more than aware, but I'll put it nonetheless. Read at your own discretion.

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Nothingness endured.

Aloe couldn’t help but feel drowned in herself. Her body ail even if it remained in stasis. The inhalation and exhalations were slow and arhythmical. Her legs jolted and her arms numbed. But above all else, her throat burned. She knew she couldn’t keep herself like that, her head banging like a drum in a scorching plain that extended forever.

At some point, she gave up.

Not of breathing, but of not doing anything. The feeling of asphyxiation grew stronger, she didn’t have much time left for inaction.

The scribe opened her eyes.

Sunlight reached her eyes, burning her retinas with the unmatched power of a thousand suns. She groaned in reaction to the light; she had grown used to darkness. But no matter how much she tried, her body would not respond to her. Her arms wouldn’t go up and her hands wouldn’t cover her eyes. The thing that occupied her thoughts was the dryness of her lips.

The desert was more humid than this.

“I would not recommend overexerting; your body is at its limit.” An unfamiliar masculine voice told next to her. It took Aloe a lot to even muster the strength to even turn her neck. “Or you could ignore me.”

The person who talked was a mature man, a growing bald patch overtaking her head, and a whitening beard defined him. His skin was fairer than most, but it seemed a byproduct of age rather than genetics. The clothes betrayed him as some sort of physician.

“...wha...at... hap...pened?” Aloe’s tongue was so dry that she almost mistook it for jerky.

“For starters, try not to talk, you are dehydrated.” The doctor explained. “I have refrained you from drinking as much as possible because people tend to choke on liquids often in states like yours. Not fully comatose, not fully waking. For starters, here.”

The man offered her a pristine glass of water, both the glass and the water were transparent as air. She didn’t know if it was on purpose or not, but the physician grabbed the glass in such a way that allowed her to see its entirety and check that there was nothing inside.

“Have a glass of water. Let me help you.” He put a hand under her head, very slightly moving it up, and approached the glass to her lips.

The movements were slow and curated, not allowing Aloe to drink more than a drop at a time. The water was far from cold, but the scribe appreciated the moisture, nonetheless. After what seemed to be an eternity, but it was likely closer to five minutes, Aloe finished the glass.

“Better?” The physician asked.

“...y-yes...” Her throat was still sore, and her head continued hammering her.

Aloe tried standing up, but as she buckled her hips, a jolt of pain shot through her spine, making her scream in agony and collapse into the pillow as her head spun too much for her to stop her fall on time.

“Take it easy, woman.” The physician reprimanded her. The voice was soothing and calming, but he looked at her with mild irritation. “You are going to hurt yourself if you keep doing sudden movements like that.”

The scribe blinked in confusion, she had heard the words spoken by the man, but it was hard to process them. Her head thumped like a heart and her body was ablaze in cold fire like nostrils on a frozen winter night. She coughed twice, but the second time moved her body a bit too much, making her recoil in pain once more. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes as she whimpered.

It took her a couple of minutes to calm down and reassess the situation. By reassess she meant to look around.

“Where... am I?” It was hard to talk, but complete words were finally doable.

“In an empty palace room, I cannot say much more than that.” The physician explained. “Do not misunderstand me,” he raised his hands defensively in typical Ydazi fashion, “I am not withholding information from you, I simply do not know. You arrived here just a few hours ago, they transported you by stretcher here from the Sultanah’s office.”

“The Sultanah’s... office?” Aloe’s pupils contracted and her voice grew weaker as she spoke.

“Yes, do you remember any of the recent events?”

Her first thought came out blank, pure white noise. But following one...

She did remember.

Aloe puked.

As she was lying on her back looking straight at the ceiling, the vomit had no way to go and it accumulated in her mouth. She began to choke on her own vomit.

“Oh heavens!” The old physician rushed to assist her and forcefully but with learned motions turned her on her side, letting the vomit flow free to the ground, just a few splotches hitting the bed.

The contents of her stomach left her body, but the memories flooded back in. Some were blurry, others crystal clear. The Grace’s Exaltation aphrodisiac had numbed her mind to unprecedented levels with the dose she had been forced to consume. Everything she saw and did was through pink-tainted glasses. Her body and mind were disconnected from one another. Her hands caressing valleys and peaks, crevasses formed from the many muscles, sweat merging with tender and violent palpitations.

The vomit continued flowing.

It was hard to identify herself with the images she saw through her very eyes. That wasn’t her, no matter what her mind showed her.

It wasn’t her.

It wasn’t her.

IT WASN’T HER.

Her hands became numb from the myriad of feelings – a thousand touches in one overwhelming her nerves – as if blood didn’t reach them. But it wasn’t only her hands that had been assaulted or had assaulted. The foul taste of the vomit receded for an instant as another metaphysical aftertaste took its place in her mouth.

Aloe wanted to cut her tongue and burn it.

She wanted to burn it all down.

Tears and vomit poured alike.

Her stomach was so empty by now that only bile came out.

The disconnect grew even bigger until it snapped. A memory, or more a recollection of all of them. The repeated battering of the Sultanah, her aggressions constant and relentless, so much so that her body slowly lost vitality, her vitality drained by the infusion in order to resist the damage. Aaliyah-al-Ydaz wasn’t called a force of nature for anything, and yest... that night she understood it. A caress with the strength of a punch, a slap with the viciousness of a strike on the gut, a sway of hips with the mortality of being run over by a wagon.

How was she still alive?

Then the pain called her as a remainder.

Her body wasn’t as broken as her heart, but she could tell it wasn’t whole. She had heard stories from her uncle Jafar, tales of soldiers that could fight after having had their arms separated from their bodies without feeling pain or that they had lost their extremities. Guards and soldiers called it battle rage, and it allowed people to go beyond their limits without even feeling they were at death’s door. And in a way, too close for her liking, Aloe had fought a lethal combat.

Even hours later, her body still felt numb from the battle rage. She had the feeling something was broken, but she couldn’t point out what.

Aloe blinked.

She noticed the physician looking at her and only then she realized she had been panting for a few minutes with her mouth still full of vile as she lay on her side. The scribe spat the last remaining contents of her stomach on the ground and recovered her lying position.

“Could I have some water?” Aloe said with painful lucidity.

She wished she didn’t have any of it.

She didn’t know what to hate more, that woman, or herself.

The physician broke her grim trail of thought with a nod and offered her another glass. The first gulps were the worse as she had gulped back the hints of bile lingering in her mouth, but the cringing taste of the bile wasn’t even comparable to the pain in her heart and mind.

She felt like her bladder was about to explode, somehow. Considering how much she puked, cried, and sweat, Aloe couldn’t even fathom how there were liquids still on her body. She silenced the cries of her kidneys and asked for another glass of water. Only then she was calmed enough to ask the question that had been looming over her like an apparition.

“Tell me, doctor,” Aloe spoke slowly, her tone tired and pessimistic. “What is wrong with my body?”

The previously neutral expression of the physician soured, and he avoided the scribe’s eyes. The man clicked his tongue silently and looked back at her.

“Lady, your hips are broken.” He explained with the tone neutrality and pronunciation of a storyteller. “I cannot tell how badly, but your pelvic region is fractured from your previous night. Depending on how deep the damage is, we might be facing the option that you will not be able to walk again.”

Aloe expected a slap, not a knife to the gut.

The eighteen-year-old girl let out a drowned sob.