Sulatant
The blood emerged like a red satin ribbon from the incision. She sliced into the body with an expertise far beyond her years. The heat of the living, breathing bodies circling her, observing her, wafted up her nape and over her ears. The hair bristled on her neck as she bent over the patient. Her skin cold to the touch despite feeling like a cauldron of inner heat.
The elixir warmed her innards, lit her loins, and stilled her to a deathly focus where all she experienced was the movement of her hands in perfect symphony with her mind. The darkness lurked beneath the skin, threatening to cascade out, but she harnessed it now, somehow, and its power seemed limitless.
Sulatant performed her first surgery.
High as a summer sky.
The intoxicant coursed through her veins and tugged at her nerves.
Surgery was a precise science, and Sulatant always extracted great comfort from that knowledge. The cuts and incisions had to be carefully timed, the sutures meticulously braided together, combining skill and craft, but now, she tested the limits of its scrupulous tenets. The Sapphire bathed her senses with a milky calm, dissolving the boundaries between the possible and impossible. Nothing seemed impossible.
Utterly helpless, Gabriel witnessed the procedure from the viewing chamber, tincture heightening his senses to the precarious position in which this young woman, barely formed, placed herself.
“Look at how she’s handling the blade,” whispered his fellow surgeon.
“Gabriel, are you sure this isn’t staged?” he only half jested. “Surely, this can’t be her first procedure?”
Gabriel let the whispers and voices foment around him. The darkness that took over Sulatant’s heart, born to his silent witness, a poisonous ivy wrapping around a tender sapling, threatening its collapse. He couldn’t breathe.
He must bring it up with her that evening, in his chambers. Her sweet perfume caressing his sensibilities and toying with his profoundly rooted notions of fairness and justice.
Barely an adult, her lissome, angular frame housed a fledgling heart. A heart taken by dark meanderings in its inchoate existence. Raven tresses framed an exquisitely sculpted face. With unbroken, brown skin and black vortices for eyes, she was a constellation of her own. Gabriel couldn’t file her away neatly into a comfortable space in his mind.
Sula excised the egregious tumour from the patient's neck with prodigious ease. Finally, she stitched the patient with silk fibre and dabbed the surgical area with tincture of iodine. The nausea started setting in and it was time for another fix.
She saved the patient.
Only numbness butted up against former emotions, reminding her at every turn she was broken. She registered nothing. Emotions reached a crescendo and collapsed, leaving only hollowness behind. Empty and exposed, to be filled with the elixir, inside out. Jealous of her gift, her fellow students admired her completely unaware of what was coursing beneath her pristine surface.
Time to go. Sula washed her hands, the blended red of the swirling water making its way down the drain. She looked up at the viewing chamber. Her eyes locked with the icy blue stare of Immortal Gabriel, the charade over. He would call her on this.
Her heart was breaking for a long while in the fantasy world she lived in, a place of unrequited love and guttural tragedy, but the tear in her psyche would never be able to be repaired. No romance in this. Nothing but ugliness. Intolerable panic.
Make it to the docks before sunset, she admonished as she went into the changing rooms to discard her bloody gloves and surgical sheaths. Her heart pounded in her ears. She observed herself, detached from her visceral being, the only way she could keep from disintegrating. One movement after the next. That’s all she was capable of, as life as she knew it imploded, one altered moment at a time.
Sapphire guided her motions, and she all but capitulated to its liquid clasp.
Through the glass, Vila gazed at her with affection. Her only friend of over three years. They shared their residential quarters and as but a handful of female medical students from Erath, they bonded in a way Sula never experienced as an only child. Like sisters. But even her friend wasere oblivious completely unaware of the undulating shadows moving beneath her skindire situation.
Sula pulled off a great deception. It was nothing personal. Or was it? How could an addled mind tell? For they were separate things.
Like all deceptions, it was time for the great exposure, denuding. For true colours to be shown. She didn’t have the stomach for this and would flee. But Sula wanted to be able to say goodbye to Vila. Talk to her one last time. Even about something trivial. A silent farewell. Time bent to her will under the influence of Sapphire and now, it beckoned to her, in her altered state, to use the window left to escape this self-inflicted predicament. No coming back from this. Tick tock. Run.
The raven haired prodigy had fallen.
