Chapter 612: That Was Enough
Anaya had her ribs bound and had been told to remain still, which she was not entirely doing. She was sitting but the stillness was not the stillness of someone at rest. It was the stillness of someone monitoring everything in their vicinity with the attention of someone who was responsible for the people in that vicinity.
She was especially watching Damon,her lover and partner, who kept watching Daveon’s unconscious body.
When Damon had first arrived at their spot, he’d come to her to check on her and only after making sure that she was in good condition did he move towards Daveon. "I’m so glad you didn’t pass out too. It would’ve been too heavy a blow for me." Was the statement he made as he hugged her fiercely, refusing to let go.
After he left, and up till now, he refused to move away from the unconscious Daveon despite being told he was in a relatively safe state.
While Anaya watched her partially restless Damon who in turn watched the unconscious teammate, Daveon, Celeste was watching the field.
When the last demon fell, Celeste registered it and released a breath that she had been managing for longer than she had realized. She looked at Anaya. Anaya looked back at her. The look communicated what both of them were thinking about and were not going to name directly right now.
Damon was still sitting with Daveon.
He had been sitting with Daveon since the healer’s speech and had not moved from the position in any meaningful sense, present in his body but not particularly in his surroundings.
When the field went quiet he looked up and took in what the quiet meant and then looked back at Daveon. "If it wasn’t for you, the casualties could’ve been far worse. Thank you for protecting Anaya and Celeste."
His eyes then turned to the field in search of Elias. He wanted to thank his senior as well. Elias’s barrier had saved them all after all. There probably wouldn’t be ashes of his teammates to even bury if the commander of this battlefield hasn’t personally stepped in at such a very crucial moment to render his help.
Even though he had almost died too, Elias didn’t hesitate to step in when needed. Knowing fully well that they could very much die and still stepping in was an act very few could do.
Damon was one of them. Seeing another like him made him respect Elias even more.
Just then, Leana reached them.
She looked at her three conscious students first, the assessment automatic and complete, reading each of them against the baseline she maintained for each of them individually. Then she looked at Daveon.
She crouched beside him.
The healer gave her the summary. Fractured ribs. Internal. Stabilized. Prognosis positive given time and treatment.
Leana listened. Did not ask questions. When the healer finished she was quiet for a moment.
Then she put her hand on Daveon’s arm briefly.
She stood.
She looked at Damon.
He was looking at her.
She held the look for a moment. Not saying anything. Not doing anything with the look except holding it, the specific quality of a teacher who had something to say and was choosing to say it with presence rather than with words right now.
Then she moved on.
The field was clearing.
Students who had sustained injuries during the main engagement were being collected and treated, the healers working through triage with the efficiency of people who had done this before and knew how to prioritize. Most of the injuries were in the range of the serious but recoverable. Broken bones. Impact damage. Essence depletion severe enough that several students had passed out from it in the engagement’s final phase and were being moved to stable positions.
The Grade Three engagement had produced worse.
Corryn was receiving treatment for the shoulder. The healer working on it had a focused expression that communicated the injury’s complexity without making it seem urgent, the kind of face that meant the work would take time and attention but would produce a full outcome.
Hansel was assisting with the field clearing, his size making him useful for moving things that required moving. He had declined treatment for the minor cuts and impacts from his engagement with a brevity that the healer had accepted without pressing.
Gretel was sitting near the medical position, her left arm in proper binding now, watching the field with the calm attention that she brought to everything.
Baret had found a place to sit and was sitting in it with the specific quality of someone who had decided that sitting was the appropriate activity and was going to commit to it properly.
Aurog was still on the ground.
The healer who had reached him had covered him. The specific, practical acknowledgment of a field that was ongoing and still needed managing, the covering a way of marking the position and the person simultaneously.
Several of the students had looked at the covered position and looked away and looked again and were in the process of working out what to do with the looking.
Some of the older students had seen instructors lost before. Not many. Not like this. But the concept was not new to everyone.
For the Year Threes it was entirely new.
Damon had looked at the covered position when the field cleared enough for it to be visible from the medical point and had held the look for a long moment. The healer’s words from earlier were still in him, the specific instruction about capability and the path toward not repeating the feeling.
He filed them alongside everything else the night had produced.
The sky above the field was changing.
The night had been long and the night was ending, the darkness above the cleared battlefield shifting toward the quality of darkness that preceded light rather than the quality of darkness that followed it. The stars were still present but the eastern edge of the sky had the faint, barely-there quality of something that was beginning rather than ending.
Dawn was coming.
Not yet. But coming.
One of the Year Three students, sitting near the field’s edge with a bandaged arm and the expression of someone who had been through something significant and was still in the middle of processing it, looked up at the sky and registered the change.
She looked at the student beside her.
The student beside her looked up too.
Neither of them said anything.
Around them, the field continued its transition from the aftermath of a fight to something that would, eventually, be the memory of a fight. The healers moved between patients. The instructors managed the clearing. The students helped where they could or stayed where they were when staying was what they had left.
Leana moved through it all.
She checked on Corryn and spoke briefly with the healer and then continued. She stopped where Aurog was and stood there for a moment without moving, not doing anything visible, just standing. Then she continued.
She found Elias on the far edge of the medical area, sitting with the healer who had been managing his recovery, his essence still low enough that standing was not being encouraged. He was awake and present, which the healer had noted was better than expected given the extent of what he had spent.
Leana looked at him.
"You held them," she said.
He looked up at her.
"Until you could get there." She paused. "That was enough."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Instructor Aurog," he said.
"Yes," she said.
That was all she said about it.
She moved on.
The field was quieter now than it had been twenty minutes ago. The immediate urgency of triage was giving way to the longer, slower work of treatment and the beginning of the logistical process of moving everyone back toward the academy.
Transportation was being organized. The students who could walk were being grouped. The ones who couldn’t were being prepared for movement in the ways available.
It was practical work.
The kind that occurred after every field engagement and existed to keep the people still living in the condition of still living for the duration between the field and somewhere more appropriate for the rest of what they needed.
Damon had not left Daveon’s side.
Anaya had stopped monitoring him and was simply with him, both of them in the vicinity of their unconscious teammate while the field’s activity continued around them.
Celeste had started helping where she could, moving between students with minor injuries that needed assistance rather than full healer attention, doing the small practical things that were available to someone with broken bones who refused to be characterized as entirely unavailable.
The sky continued its shift.
The students continued their processing.
The night moved toward morning the way nights did, indifferent to what had happened in it and what had been changed by it and who had been lost and who had survived and what any of it meant to the people who would carry it forward.
Morning came anyway.
It always did.