Before:

     Agony slammed into Trevor, waking him up.

     The pain from his right leg came and went, but now...yeow!

     Trevor opened the robe he wore. 

     He tried for another look at his leg.

​     He didn't dare move his leg, lift it or anything like that, because he didn't want it to throb any more than it already did. 

     He raised his head up without making any sudden movements, nothing that could jar, a half inch off the pillow. That's all he needed, though, to get that first look at his leg.

     And with that single, first look, Trevor's attitude reset.

     Trevor had been jailed and chained before, accused of a murder he really did commit, even though it was self-defense.

     As a trainee and agent of the Azure, he'd been nearly killed three times and thrown into a dimension where every entity he encountered wanted to kill him.

​     In all those situations, as horrible and desperate as they sometimes got, he never lost at least a flicker of hope...

     but now despair smacked into him like a truck hitting roadkill.

     In battle, someone had snapped the largest bone in his upper body, his femur, with a club...

     and he knew the ladies did the best they could to make things right, but...

     No wonder he was in constant pain.

     They'd wrapped bandages around where the break occurred.

     Still, Trevor saw that the bottom half of his upper right leg stuck out at an angle from the top half.

     Like maybe only half a degree.

    Just enough for the nerve endings to not quite mesh but mash instead. 

     The upper half of his leg throbbed like a smashed thumb...

     but most of the pain came from where the two halves of the bone didn't join properly. 

     His leg below the break looked frail as a twig and like it never got blood. He'd have to use a cane if he wanted to get around, and even then...

     Tears welled up in Trevor until his eyes watered...

     yet he did not cry.

     He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried, if he'd ever cried, and he'd been in some situations after he'd turned sixteen where tears would not at all been out of place.

     But, boy, he sure felt like it right then.

     He sought within himself for any glimmer of hope that he could possibly find.

     I'm not dead, he thought, and, as long as that's true, there's still a chance for a way out, although out of where into what he had no idea. 

     So lost was in his internal struggle, he didn't notice he wasn't alone until someone grazed his shoulder with a nightgown.

​     He looked up, startled.

     It was the eldest daughter, Roveth.

     He looked into her eyes, and the profound grief and sadness he saw there matched his own.

     Trevor pointed to the bandages on his leg as if to say, that

is the reason I am sad. 

     She nodded.

     She removed the bandages.

     Trevor got his first look at the wound itself.

     Damn.

     It looked like someone had sawed his leg in half, then sewed and superglued it back together.

     To even look at his leg made it throb.

     Roveth removed a rag from a bucket, rinsed it out, then swabbed the wound as tenderly as she would the wings of a butterfly. 

     Soothing.

     More than that, though.

     Roveth rinsed out the rag, then used it to swab the wound a second time, and it occurred to Trevor that the pain in his leg, in those few moments she'd swabbed it, had lessened.

​      She rinsed the rag out a third time, and, by then, Trevor thought, oh yeah, no doubt about it.

     The pain is going away.

     By the time she'd rinsed the rag out for the sixth time, the pain had all but dissipated. 

     There has to be some sort of pain killer in the water, Trevor figured. That's the only possible explanation.

     He wanted to touch her as tenderly as she'd touched him, but he knew none of the members of her family appreciated physical contact. So, instead,

     "Thank you," he said.

     "Thank you," she repeated.

     They'd only begun to learn each other's languages.

     Tears flooded from Roveth's eyes like they always had and always would.

CONTINUE