Chapter 174: Receiving Treatment
Chapter 174: Receiving Treatment
The ash-house stood near the centre of Veyrhold.
At first, Rohan thought it was a temple.
It was broader than the surrounding buildings, built from dark stone fused with old metal panels whose edges had been hammered flat and bolted into place. The roof curved downward like a shell, with several chimneys rising from it at different heights. Thin smoke drifted from them, not grey like the ash outside, but white and clean. Over the entrance hung a circular sign made from black glass. Etched into it was the image of an open hand beneath falling ash.
The building smelled of heat, bitter herbs, and mineral dust.
Inside, the air changed.
Rohan noticed it immediately.
It was still dry, but less hostile. Less abrasive. The first breath he took did not scrape across his throat as badly as the outside air had. Warmth pressed against his face, carrying the scent of steam and heated stone.
The entrance chamber was divided by hanging strips of thick dark fabric. Maerin stopped before them and pointed to a shallow basin set into the floor.
"Stand there."
Rohan looked at the basin.
It was filled with black sand.
Or no, not sand.
Ash.
Cleaner ash. Finer. Almost silvery in places.
"That feels ominous."
"Stand there," Maerin repeated.
Rohan stepped into the basin.
The ash shifted around his boots with a soft hiss. Several attendants emerged from behind the fabric screens. They wore long grey wraps and masks of layered cloth, leaving only their eyes visible. None of them looked surprised to see him, though one paused noticeably when she saw his forearms.
Maerin spoke to them in a clipped tone.
"He’s a western stranger. Covered in Skarn blood. Wounds all over his body. Keep him watched."
The attendants moved at once.
One took Hestia’s spear.
Rohan’s grip tightened automatically.
Maerin’s bow rose half an inch.
The attendant froze.
Rohan inhaled slowly, then forced his fingers to loosen.
"I want that back."
"If it survives cleansing, you will have it back," Maerin said.
"If it survives?"
The attendant looked at the spear, then at him, as if he had said something very strange.
Maerin’s expression did not change.
"Wild ash eats poorly made things."
Rohan looked at the spear again.
It had survived being thrown through skarn, used as a lever under a collapsed cart, heated in a monster’s mouth, and dragged through half a hellscape. If Hestia had made it, he suspected some local ash was not going to ruin it.
Still, he watched carefully as the attendant carried it to a stone rack near the wall.
The cleansing was unpleasant.
Not painful, exactly. Just invasive. Being scrubbed by strangers while surrounded by armed suspicion tended to be invasive.
They brushed the ash from his clothes with stiff tools, collecting every grain that fell. They poured warm mineral water over his hands and arms, then rubbed his skin with a gritty paste that smelled like salt and burnt herbs. When the paste touched the wounds on his forearm, Rohan hissed through his teeth.
The attendant cleaning the bite wound paused.
"Poison?" Rohan asked.
"No."
"Then why does it feel like my arm is being insulted by fire?"
Her eyes flicked up.
"The paste kills skarn rot."
"Rot sounds worse than poison."
"It is."
"...Fantastic."
She kept scrubbing.
Rohan endured it with as much dignity as a person could while covered in paste and regret.
The ash layer from Molten Assimilation resisted at first. That interested the attendants. It interested them far too much for his comfort. Two of them leaned closer when the grey-black coating clung to his skin instead of washing away normally. One whispered something to Maerin, who watched in silence from near the doorway.
Rohan did not activate the skill again.
He wanted to. The sting in his arm practically begged him to draw on the ash, to thicken the coating and dull the pain. But Maerin had told him not to use ash-working inside the walls, and he was currently surrounded by people who had every reason to panic if he ignored that warning.
So he sat still.
Eventually, the false skin broke apart under the paste and water. It came away in dark flakes, revealing his own skin beneath: scratched, bruised, and reddened, but mostly intact.
The bite was the worst injury. The skarn’s mouth had left a ragged crescent of punctures along his forearm, not deep enough to threaten the limb but ugly enough to make the healer click her tongue. She packed the wound with a dark green salve, wrapped it in clean cloth, then bound his hands where the spear’s heat had burned his palms.
His back was checked next. The cinder blast had left small burns across his shoulders and upper spine, but his coat had taken most of it. Hestia’s borrowed clothing, like the spear, was apparently better than it looked.
When they were finally done, Rohan felt cleaner, weaker, and far more aware of how tired he was.
His spear was returned to him.
It looked untouched.
The attendant who handed it over seemed annoyed by that.
Rohan decided not to smile.
Maerin led him through another set of fabric screens into a warmer inner chamber.
This room was not a clinic.
It was part office, part archive, part war room. A broad table occupied the centre, its surface made from a single slab of dark metal polished by age. Shelves lined the walls, packed with rolled hides, bound ledgers, jars of labelled ash, old tools, and fragments of machinery whose purpose Rohan could not guess. A stove glowed in one corner, feeding heat into pipes that ran beneath the floor.
On the far wall hung a map.
Rohan stopped breathing for a second.
It was the first map he had seen since arriving.
Not a perfect one. Not even close. It was hand-drawn on stitched panels of tough cloth, patched in places where pieces had worn thin. But it showed land. Coastlines, maybe. Mountain ranges. Scarred plains. Marked routes. Symbols he could not read until the translation effect settled over them.