A Holistic Approach

Dramatis Personae

Bethana Taranicna

Blodaiweth

A Holistic Approach

Every morning, before Heul rose, Bethana took a walk along the River Orgetos. When she breathed in, she felt the sting of hot air before her mask cooled it so she could gulp the breath down. She wouldn't die if the mask came off, at least not for several years, but it would be a cruel imprisonment of her soul to continue to breathe in fire, radiation, parasitic spores. Recently, bodies had started floating down, caught on the obsidian rocks beneath the wine-coloured water. Sometimes, she waited for others to find them, but ever so often, she collected and reported the death herself.

She would stare at the air that bubbled from the face-down beings. They still breathed even in that state- they wouldn't die from drowning nor from their skin rotting. It was a cruel imprisonment, and although she hated to entertain the notion, this carnage was mostly her fault.

One morning, bathed in the humid sunrise, one of those bodies made its way to her; and worse for her, she knew who'd put it there. He was the most difficult villager in Threatening Valley to deal with. Blodaiweth, a strange but wealthy foreigner who was always chasing hearses and hanging around gravesites. 

Still wearing her damp and dirty mining uniform, the body had laid prostrate before the communal altar space for their God, Yan Kube Maur. Most horrifying was the strange buds growing from the corpse's rotted nose and mouth- and from almost every other orifice. That meant Blodaiweth had involved himself, because plants just didn’t grow out of people without some outside interference.

So Bethana brought the body to his doorstep, with little regard for a proper greeting. And he, somehow, heartily and generously received her into his house, which was dank, crowded, and full of plants.

"I was given this to sign yesterday," he produced a resin tablet, a petition for arbitration, addressed to the Oak Knowers. She’d certainly heard of these unity lawsuits, but those were concepts for giant city states far from here. ““I haven’t yet, but it’ll go through regardless of what I do.” 

“That girl from this morning,” he continued, “she was a Lagona- one of their half idiotic distant cousins, but a Lagona nonetheless. Dear me, even in that redweed net you’ve wrapped her in, I can hear her complaining about the working conditions. Her hands melted off. Her teeth are falling out. And like with the rest of the dregs, you did nothing for her.”

His reddish, owl-like eyes were hard to read because they moved like an unnatural predator. Bethana was panicking. The Halfwings creating unionized complaints were bad enough- getting the Lagona and the Oak Knowers involved would ruin her. There was no way she would survive the arbitration.

“So you thought to draw attention, like the pest that you are,” Bethana said. “Instead of placing her in the blight grave as I have been, respectfully so.”

"Bethana, I am not predisposed to malice like you," Blodaiweth said in a monotonous voice. "I found her floating by the base of my house and put it there to see who would notice. But as you are the woman holding the rod that pushes the flock, I enjoy the fact it was you who showed up."

Bethana stared at the warm mug of tonic she’d been handed but didn’t trust to drink. Blodaiweth’s attendants were all Gwraig Verth like him - created by magicians when lightning struck an artificial womb made from flowers. Blodaiweth's atmosphere felt more like a harem, and it reminded Bethana that Blodaiweth was one of them too, he was simply created with different intentions.

“With the dreadful states they’re in when washed ashore,” Blodaiweth said, “I would question if you were an idiot. But you’re always wearing a mask and a church shawl for protection. “So I think you know very well what is in that spoil heap you’ve bought.”

Bethana stared defiantly, but she was almost at the point of folding and begging for help. She stayed silent a little longer, because she didn’t want to even say the word - Nuivre. There was no proof that its presence in the spoils was injurious - at least not yet. Not now. Not when the Catu Samonii was so close-

“Did you just summon me for gossip, or what?” She snapped, her voice sounding hollow through the bronze mask.

Blodaiweth’s shoulders relaxed and he took a sip from the mug of tonic he’d been handed by his maidens.They were dressed in black trousers and tunics, with only their hands and face exposed. Some had accessories- sparkling obsidian and bronze rings, earrings, decorated shoes. But even their hair was covered by a white veil. Their clothes did not smell clean. They smelled like dried soil and a sharp, pungent bile. “No, but because I thought to help with the crux of the issue.”

“The deaths?”

“The complaining. They’ll investigate her body because she complained about her health deteriorating for weeks. But she had simply gone missing, a half cousin… or whatever she was.” Blodaiweth held up his hands innocently. “Then where is the need for outrage? It’s not your fault she didn’t show up for work, especially when you pay so well. It sounds like a colony problem to me.”

Bethana thought over what Blodaiweth was saying and found that she had to admit he was right. She had been going about this the wrong way. Every morning she got up extra early to look for any suspicious bodies - so she could report them first, put them to rest first.

“Here is what I propose…” he said, taking the hand of one of his maidens, which looked rather like the bony, wrinkled hand of a male Halfwing. The ring on his finger was visible to Bethana now- the engraving and the stone, the ring of an obsidian miner. One of hers.

“I thought I buried them all securely,” Bethana blurted out suddenly, her eyes widening in fright as she found herself pinned in Blodaiweth’s primal gaze. “I tied their feet together, I cut off their heads..."

“Here,” Blodaiweth said louder, over her rambling. “Is what I propose. The next time one of your dregs begins to complain about feeling ill. About skin problems, or headaches. Try being a little nicer - tell them their symptoms aren’t normal for the working conditions, which of course, are as safe as can be, right, Bethana? Because you take their safety with much concern.”

He let the maiden’s wrinkling hand drift away, but beneath the cuff of their sleeve, a sliver of skin was exposed, and even Bethana could smell the sticky pus and rotted flesh through her mask. Her head was spinning.

“And if it’s worth your while, send them my way for a more holistic approach,” Blodaiweth reached over and took her untouched mug, shrugging as he dumped it out into a pot of soil and Bethana swore the plant growing from it literally shuddered. “My consultations are free, though for businesses such as yourself… well, there’s always a cost to progress."