Primal Love

He tried to listen for anyone talking or shouting but his own heavy breathing and feet pounding the forest floor proved too much. He flicked his gaze left and right every few moments, trying to see if some of the rare predators that ventured into the woods were around and seeking an easy meal. Nex thought he heard a shout from up ahead but couldn’t be sure if it was just his imagination. He pushed himself harder. He tried to keep in shape and he thought he did well for his circumstances, but the harsh reality was that he was never going to be as physically capable as most of the others in his tribe. He didn’t hunt or perform much in the way of labor intensive work because he needed to keep from exhausting himself for exactly this reason. Someone might need a lifesaving amount of magic applied to their broken bodies and if he didn’t have enough ready to go at any one time, he wouldn’t be able to save them. Nex burst through a dense collection of bushes and skidded to a halt as he came to the edge of the ravine. He looked around frantically and saw another figure standing a little ways away. Their gazes caught and she gestured frantically to him. He hurried over, careful of the edge, and felt a great relief when he saw that she had already secured a rope to a sturdy tree and tossed it over the edge. “How bad it is?” Nex asked as he came to a halt and caught his breath. The huntress, Kir, began to respond, but a hoarse moan of agony drifted up from out of the ravine to them. “It’s hard to see from up here. He ended up beneath an overhang, but he says it’s very broken,” she replied. “You can do this, right?” For a moment he felt an old, immediate response coming out. The response that he had been forced to start saying over and over again when he took on the role of healer because no one thought he could handle it. But then he realized she meant the climbing part. Oh. Well, that was a more reasonable concern. He looked at the rope. It was a vine of a decent thickness, blackened, meaning it had been carefully reinforced and toughened so it wouldn’t snap. “I can do it,” he said, readjusting his satchel. Nex grabbed the rope and walked carefully to the edge. He looked very cautiously over. It was about as deep down as that unique tree had been tall. He could see the small overhang Kir had mentioned. It was on this side and all he could see was his shoulder. “I’m here, Rok!” Nex called down as he grasped the vine with both hands now and kept preparing himself for what was to come. “How bad is it!?” “It’s bad!” Rok cried, a manic edge to his voice. “I’m going to die! You have to hurry!” “You aren’t going to die, Rok. I’m coming down now,” he replied. Nex glanced reflexively at Kir, who stood nearby with a worried grimace on her face. He knew they were close and well on their way to becoming mated. By now, she might even be pregnant. He sighed softly and looked back down. Definitely no pressure or anything. “Please hurry,” Kir murmured. “I’ll save him,” Nex replied, and then forced himself to go over the ledge. He had never done well with heights. When he had been young, he’d loved to climb trees. Absolutely loved it. Until he’d lost his grip when a weak branch snapped and then he’d plunged right down half the length of the tree and broken his arm. He’d been alone and hadn’t known magic well enough to heal himself, to even stop the pain, so he’d been forced to march a good distance by himself back to the village. After that, heights lost their appeal. But that didn’t matter right now. Because right now, someone was bleeding out. Nex tightened his grip on the rope and began lowering himself. He pushed away everything else, stopped thinking about it. The wind blowing. The bad smell of what was almost certainly a dead deer or wolf that had fallen down into the ravine and died some suns ago. Rok’s cries of pain. He certainly didn’t look down. Slowly, bit by bit, Nex got himself down the sheer rock wall. He started muttering to himself at some point, something he’d worked hard to stop doing and now only did when he needed truly all of his concentration. He was so focused on not falling that when his feet suddenly touched ground he almost shouted in surprise. “Hurry up!” Rok groaned. “Coming,” Nex replied, dropping off the rope and hurrying over. As he got closer, he saw the blood soaking into the dirt, the divots that marked the point where he had landed when he’d fallen. He must have found some way of breaking or slowing his fall, Nex surmised as he dropped into a crouch beside Rok. There was the break. Nex frowned as he saw the pale, red-stained shine of his shin bone sticking out through his skin. “This is going to hurt,” he said, and shoved the bone back into his leg. Rok screamed and then went slack. That was definitely a mercy, but some colder part of Nex was thinking that perhaps Rok should be awake for all of this so that perhaps he would finally learn to pay attention to what he was doing. Ignoring that, he placed both hands against the poor man’s shin and concentrated. The magic came, then, as it always did. It came when he called it, slipping into his skin, traveling along it, flowing like warm, pure water down his arms, to his hands, and out. He directed it, manipulated it in some way that he could never adequately describe to anyone. He siphoned it out of the air and manipulated it, pushed it towards a specific possibility. Magic could be almost anything, it was just a matter of learning how to take it and guide it towards becoming what you wanted it to become. It was an intuition as much as it was a developed skill, and if you didn’t have that spark, it was impossible to learn. And he, evidently, very much had that spark. There was a white shimmer that briefly illuminated the underside of the overhang. Most of it stayed centered around Rok’s leg, but some of it spread out farther, seeking out his other injuries. Cuts and scrapes and bruises, mostly. They wouldn’t all heal up, but most of them would be gone in a few days if he rested and ate properly. Nex could literally feel his energy leaving him. His vision was unfocused and his muscles were protesting, almost like he was holding a rigid position and tensing every last part of his body. He held his breath, holding on for the last few seconds necessary. He didn’t know how he knew when a wound was fully healed when he couldn’t actually see it, but he did know. Something in the magic told him. His head swimming, ears buzzing slightly, he exhaled sharply and sat back. For a few moments, he simply sat there, resting on his palms, eyes closed, getting his breath back, waiting for the worst of the dizziness to pass. “Is he alive!?” Kir shouted down, making him jump in shock. “Yes! He’s fine! He’s asleep right now! He will wake very soon!” he called back. “You’re sure?” “Yes! Now I need to rest!” She didn’t say anything else, which was fine by him. Someday, when he had practiced enough, he was going to be able to do this without feeling like he was going to pass out. Part of him knew that he had come a long way. Even two winters ago he would have knocked himself unconscious doing this task. It was why he was always supposed to have someone uninjured with him when he went out. Their feelings aside, the tribe knew that they simply could not afford to lose him. Although sometimes he did wonder. Tarnis was the secondary healer in the village and while she was perhaps only half as strong as he was, she was showing promise. There were times when Nex thought