The Good Doctor

The following is from a pre-story arc I have planned for my four main characters and takes place some years before the release of Guild Wars 2. I hope it's enjoyable to you!


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“Today was a morning like any other,” she writes, perched in the confining solitude of her shop, surrounded by the sloppy gurgling of the alchemical equipment around her and the unsettling scent of chemicals and rotting flesh. After a tiresome day of mixing for deliveries and delivering mixtures, she finally found the time to lock herself away from the evening sky, pour herself a glass of apple cider and conclude the day like she did all others.

The pace of her mechanical pen is cut short by a spasm in her thought process; had this morning been like any other? She puts the pen to her lips and tastes the red ink while she gathers her thoughts. It had been quite the contrary!
She forgot to tend to her mother’s corpse. If left without proper embalmment it would wither away, and then who would keep her company? Her mind twitches like a lute’s string struck too softly, with the appropriate sound as well, hitting home her worries and insecurity.

The old ritualist had been her life. Her teachings and her business- with all its concoctions and regular customers- was all she knew. For no longer than a week, the old woman had been lying on her deathbed, very much passed over and mostly untouched, save for the process of lathering the skin with the oil that made it more resemble leather hide than human tissue.
One would wonder how a young woman as squeamish and timid as she was could stomach the sudden passing of her mother without even her eyes welling up, but one would also be a fool to draw the assumption that Mei Linchen was either squeamish or timid.

Unlike her mother’s expertise with the journey from life to death, Mei had inherited a little extra from her other half.
Astor Corvail was his name; a balding old man with pale skin and rings under his eyes that only indicated the neglecting of his own body. A man so sickly and disgusting that people would be staring, wondering if the robed man that just passed them was still among the living. He smelled of rot and pus, with the bitter after-stench of drying blood. This sick design of a man had found the Canthan ritualist in Lion’s Arch many years back, and after the horizontal tango that pained Mei’s throat to think of, she inherited his studies and journals after a prudent disappearance of his.

This was Mei’s dark gift. Corvail’s blood magic and Linchen’s spirit rituals. Death followed her at every turn, pleading for advocacy and she answered negatively each time. Taking lives was not something that interested her too much. Of course, she understood its importance and value, but she would find that she could study the living just as easily as she could the dead. Even dissection and autopsy could be performed on someone who simply slept; or didn’t, why would she care? Who is going to tell her off now? The world is outside, begging to be discovered on the inside and out!
Her head tosses back in a fit of maniacal laughter and her diary slams shut. The doors to her shop rumble, being knocked upon with frantic desperation.

“Now, who could that be?” She rises from the stool and pulls the doors open. It is a young lady decked in black and purple leathers, with auburn hair and an adolescent girl whose eye is impaled on a sword – cradled in her arms – unconscious at best.

“Lady Ashen?” The good doctor asks, puzzled, before shaking her head and pointing to a nearby bench. “Get her inside. I will handle this.”

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“When one’s spirit finds the mists,” The good doctor begins patiently, almost instructively as she finds a set of spectacles from one of the many shelves in her shop. The spectacles come down when she turns to the girl but before she proceeds with her instruction she pauses, putting a hand to her lips as if hiding a gasp.

Before her lies a small girl whose magic is a bright light which stems from the root of her heart. Her magic is courage, strength and chivalry, but above all it is fleeting. Mei’s specs have such properties; through them she can behold the ebb and flow of magic, of spirits and of the subconscious.
As much as she picks up from the first glance of the girl, there is a disturbance in the other corner of the room. A woman in her own business suit – black coat and steel, swords, daggers, pistols and a bow – with a killing intent that ripples through reality like fog creeping over an empty road, coming through as energy that disturbed the doctor’s spectacles.

“Lady Ashen?” She looks at the dame, feeling the predator aura magnify as she grasps the foreign object in the patient’s eye.

-“Ah… Yes?”

-“Would you kindly get out? Your presence is interfering.”

The lady stands and draws a sword, insulted by the good doctor’s demands. It is only when the sword’s point is aimed for Mei’s neck that the dame comes to realise that her sword-arm is in throbbing pain, and within it – quite literally – the blood boils.
Mei was done with being patient.

“Get. The. Fuck. Out.” She hisses at the dame who flees in fear of permanent damage to her extremities. A shake of Mei’s head marks her displeasure.

The disturbing aura vanishes with the broken lady, but is replaced with the audible disturbance of her patient coming to. The blood-gurgling screams of a dying girl would haunt the doctor for the rest of her days. Every moment of silence she enjoyed from this moment would be overtaken by the abhorrent noise. Where most healers are disheartened by such a grim display, Mei finds a driving factor in between the screams.

The song of the girl’s anguish is embraced by the music of Mei’s menacing laughter. They howl their separate songs until they reach beautiful harmony. A hand to the girl’s temple and her face goes numb and cold, left without the precious haemoglobin. A separate hand again holds the foreign object – a bandit’s rusty blade – and yanks it straight out of the wound which, as was planned, does not bleed.

For the time that takes for Mei to draw blood away from the patient’s head, death is already embracing her small form. The wound would have to be sealed quickly, or no blood would reach her brain. With neither time nor resources to give the patient a proper mending, Mei finds a small silver orb to place into the wound she regenerates with a twirl of her hand.
Towards the end, the patient’s supraorbital arch is renewed with loud cracks, effectively replacing a deep void in her skull with the silver orb.

The flesh is mended when Mei comes to realise that the patient has been under for much too long. Her spirit is departing and the light of her magic is reduced to a small spark. A quarter of a million solutions flash through the doctor’s head, her brain storming through many possible ways to postpone the patient’s death further. With a harking yell she calls the girl’s caretaker:

“Lady Ashen! Get in here!”
The doors are flung open and in comes the broken dame, taking her place besides the whole but dead patient.

“Her eye… What did you—“

-“Doesn’t matter! Just PERSUADE her into staying the hell alive!”

The lady is shocked, and so is Mei. Out of all the possible outcomes she thought of, this is the one she decided to go with? How… Delicious. She lifts her spectacles onto her forehead and picks a notebook from her drawer. After a click of her pen she observes as the dame whispers into the girl’s ear.
She hears poetry, words of love and lust, wedding vows unused and cries of desperation, none of which have any effect.

Before the renegade noblewoman breaks down in tears, a final scream echoes through the room, causing Mei – who knows how thin the walls are – some displeasure.

“TIA, WAKE UP! YOU HAVE DINNER TO COOK!”

A flinch of the brain-dead girl’s limbs make the good doctor prod her spectacles onto her nose again to see a light like no other blazing before her. Her eyes open, one a reflective silver disc and the other a glowing blue fire. A smirk spreads over the doctor’s lips as she writes the following line:
“A servant’s will is greater than that of a lover. I must investigate this further.”