Case 02:
The Bereaved Lamia
SAPHENTITE NEIKES SAT QUIETLY at the Central Hospital, a sorrowful look on her face. She had been in the waiting room for a long time.
It was Sapphee, just home from a wedding planning session, who’d found Glenn. She’d taken him straight to the hospital and left him with Cthulhy. Sapphee had offered to help with his treatment, but Cthulhy turned her away. She said Sapphee was too emotionally involved, and Sapphee couldn’t protest, because her hands were shaking.
She looked down to see they were shaking again. She balled her hands into fists to stop it.
“It’ll be okay,” Arahnia said, putting her arm around Sapphee’s shoulders and pulling her close. “He ain’t always the most attentive, but the Doc’s got a strong heart. He’s tenacious, yeah? So you don’t gotta worry.”
“That’s right!” Tisalia said, puffing up her chest. “I was beside myself when the hospital contacted me…but it’s our Doctor! He seems sweet and pure, but he’s strong-willed. He even handled the giant and the water-poisoning incident without fear! So-so…I’m sure…”
Tisalia trailed off. Her ears were drooping, betraying her true feelings.
“Ah, don’t you go cryin’ too, Lady. How am I supposed to decide who to comfort?”
“But-buuut, a-aren’t you worried?!” cried Tisalia.
“Of course, I am, but it’ll be all right,” Arahnia answered, her face calm. “She’s makin’ us wait here, ain’t she? Dr. Cthulhy is hard at work, so doesn’t that mean the Doc is alive? I don’t want to think about it…but if the unthinkable happened, there would be no reason for her to make us wait like this…y’know?”
“I-I guess that’s true, but…”
That was when Sapphee noticed that Arahnia’s makeup was running. Even while reassuring Tisalia, Arahnia was not calm on the inside. And still, she put on a brave front to be there for Sapphee and Tisalia. Arahnia really did put others before herself, Sapphee thought.
But Sapphee knew the truth.
Acute heart failure… When I found him, there was no heartbeat or breath…
She tried with all her might to stop her hands from trembling.
I couldn’t even give him first aid… He was already dead.
Back when they were at the Academy, Glenn had once suffered an injury so severe that it was life-altering. It was so severe that the extremely special treatment they had given him had left Glenn with no recollection of said treatment. However, he’d still been breathing that time, albeit barely.
I knew when I saw him. This time, Glenn…
He couldn’t be saved. Despite knowing this because of her own medical training, Sapphee couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. Tisalia and Arahnia were both hanging onto the belief that Glenn would be fine.
In reality, Sapphee wanted to scream out loud. She wanted to just scream, cry, and wallow in her sorrow. The reason she couldn’t do that was just as Arahnia said—for some reason, she and the others were being made to wait.
What is Cthulhy doing? If she’s just going to confirm his death, it wouldn’t take this long—
Being made to wait this long meant Sapphee couldn’t give up hope. Lazy as she might seem, Cthulhy had studied a number of magic arts from various fields. Maybe—
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Cthulhy finally entered the waiting room and the other three women jumped up. They could see the exhaustion in her face.
“Dr. Cthulhy, how is he?” Tisalia asked.
“The Doc is fine, right?” Arahnia joined in.
Cthulhy didn’t answer. Instead, she kept glancing behind her, where there sat a mobile bed shaped like a bathtub. The bathtub was filled with a green, sticky substance—slime. Judging from the color, it was the hospital nurse, Lime. Glenn was floating in the bathtub—enveloped in the liquefied Lime, who was there to protect him.
“Umm…Dr. Cthulhy?”
“Please prepare yourselves, all of you,” Cthulhy had a somber expression on her face.
All three women took a deep breath.
Cthulhy sounded emotionless as she delivered her news. “When Glenn was brought here to the hospital, he had no heartbeat and wasn’t breathing. His heart was stopped due to heart failure, cause unknown. Medically, he was already completely dead.”
Tisalia covered her face, stifling a cry. Arahnia slouched down, biting her lips. And Sapphee…
Ahhh.
She knew this day would come. Glenn always worked as hard as he could, striving to accomplish his goals as a doctor. No matter how worried it made Sapphee, he just kept moving forward. Even though he was younger than her, Sapphee did all she could to support Glenn in his quest to become the ideal physician. She knew that the reason he wanted to become a great doctor was for her. But she’d always had the feeling that someday, he would leave her and go somewhere beyond her reach.
I just thought that if we got married, we could stay by each other’s sides and go through life together.
But that wasn’t the case. And for Glenn to go on without her like this…
Why can’t we ever move forward together, Glenn?
Listening to Tisalia’s sobs, Sapphee was surprised at her own lack of sadness. She probably hadn’t accepted the truth in her heart yet. She couldn’t imagine a world without Glenn. Maybe she would just live on and never accept this emptiness.
“Wait a second—”
It was at that moment that Sapphee realized something very pertinent. Cthulhy was being ambiguous on purpose.
“You said ‘medically’… Does that mean from another perspective, he’s not dead?”
Cthulhy narrowed her eyes. She was the authority on modern medicine. Sapphee wondered if a perspective other than “medically” was even an option for her when determining if someone was dead or alive.
“If it’s about that, I—” Sapphee started.
“She’s here,” Cthulhy interrupted.
Suddenly, a figure appeared at the end of the corridor—a small person with protruding horns that didn’t suit her size. At her side, as always, was her bodyguard.
Sapphee stopped short. “The Draconess…”
“Hello, Sapphee. You must be shocked at this sudden incident.”
“Well…putting that aside. What are you doing here?”
“It’s a good thing I went to Cthulhy. I informed her in advance that something might happen to Dr. Glenn…though I didn’t think it would turn out like this,” Skadi explained. She clearly hadn’t been expecting this to happen.
The fiancées looked at the council representative blankly. Skadi glanced over at her bodyguard, Kunai Zenow.
“Now then, Kunai, You’re up.”
“Right.” Kunai put her hand in the bathtub.
“Ahh!” Lime let out a cry when Kunai’s hand went in her. Kunai ignored this and put one knee on the lip of the bathtub. She extended her muscular arm over to touch Glenn.
She didn’t say a word, but closed her eyes, as if meditating. When she finally opened her eyes, she said, “There have been no changes, Draconess.”
“Yeah.”
“Umm, everyone? What are you doing? What is going on here?” Tisalia asked, her eyes puffy from crying. Despite the tears, she was resolute.
Kunai, a warrior, was unfazed. She looked straight into Tisalia’s eyes. “Dr. Glenn’s soul is no longer in his body,” she explained.
“What?”
“I can’t hear any ‘voice.’ The soul has completely and cleanly disappeared from this body,” she continued.
Tisalia and Arahnia looked at each other. They couldn’t quite decipher what that information meant.
“In other words…doesn’t that mean he is dead?” Sapphee asked the question everyone else was thinking.
But Skadi shook her head. “When someone dies, their soul remains in the body. Kunai is proof of that—she can hear souls speak to her. The attachment a soul can continue to have to the body after death is the reason there are undead in this world.”
“To put it another way, it is impossible for there to be no such attachment—for a soul to simply disappear. Dr. Glenn is dead, but the manner of his death is too clean. Such a phenomenon means something strange is probably going on,” Kunai offered.