10 Jul 4705 - Excerpt From Nowhere

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Upon showing the bare patch of skin on the lower side of his left forearm to the head of class, everything began to happen very quickly, and Mercy could only recall the complete sequence later after staying in his dormitory for two days, and even then after trying very hard to remember all of it.
Margot, the head of class, had asked Mercy about his itch, simply striking up casual conversation as one of the ten-score or more of unwritten duties that the head of class performs. Mercy thought to give her the shortest and simplest explanation so she could go on flitting about her other duties, and this, as it turned out, would be the harder and more elaborate road for Margot herself. For Mercy, he thought to himself later, there could have been no avoiding it all.
He showed Margot where he was itching, and at a short glance, she paid no mind, but something in her wizardly brain registered a hint, a mere shadow of a trace of magic, and she quickly grabbed his wrist like she was snatching a fetching robe from a bargain bin for a closer look.
The price was wrong.
Margot pulled Mercy by the wrist across the great hall and down the elder corridor. Mercy had never known her to be as severe, and felt a cold creeper rush from his stomach up his spine and back down as his mind whipped around trying to imagine why Margot was dragging him with such vigor. She kept a tight grip as well, and Mercy stumbled to keep up as he uttered mixed sounds and words of protest and query. He wondered at her strength (she was still a shade shorter than he and had never shown a slight inclination to be athletic, even for a student wizardess), and arrived at one reason for it;
But what had her afraid?
They came in short order to Professor Messor's office, who was the elder-on-duty for the hour. Margot explained to him in her rarely-heard piercing howl of an incensed tone that she had found Mercy complaining of an itch, and determined that he had a lingering spell upon his skin, and please look at it at once.
Messor took a closer look, inspecting a cut of beef or ham, and gave a short squint when he saw what Margot had.
"Young Lady Th'Wizardess, it is time you left at once."

Mercy knew just as well as Margot did that a wizard's magic turned to his own flesh would surely fail. Among wizards, it is the doctors who are esteemed most highly and most mysteriously guarded, their secrets too dangerous to be let forth, their minds too insane to be plumbed. And even among them, none turns his magic on his own flesh, but has the help of a peer. Mercy and Margot both knew this. Every student knew it, but Mercy had erred, and more grievously than he thought.
Messor waited with a librarian's look, bored and superior, for Margot to leave the room and shut the door. He sealed the door with a spell and flick, and with the other hand, seemingly at the same time, ripped Mercy's robe at the sleeve to expose his entire arm. Messor took another look at the arm, which he had planted hard on the tall desk, and Mercy marveled for a split second that Messor had found any room whatsoever on the cluttered elder's desk to put anything else at all. It was only a split-second, though, because in the next, he too saw the reason Margot and Messor had reacted. His skin was growing and stretching at hundreds of times the normal rate, making tiny cells and larger cell regions pop-up and divide as fast as bubbling pasta.
Mercy could feel his legs give way and his gut clench. Messor told him to stay still as he procured an implement from one of the many cabinets and caches behind the desk. Messor then sat him down on the wooden chair-bench and looked him square in the eye, with a grave look to him.
"Young Mssr Th'Wizard Mercy Mood, you have to stay sat here for another minute. I need another elder for this treatment, and you need a moment to catch your breath. When I get back you had best have stayed sat."

Mercy wondered why he had been so precise, but then imagined Messor was taking a small precaution. Indeed, after a little testing, Mercy found it difficult to move at all, and decided to go along with the binding spell for the minute that it had to last. He watched as his left arm began to tremble. It stung more than it itched now. How had he turned his own magic against his own flesh. Someone else must have pranked him. He couldn't think of any rivals who would do something so grave, but then he also hadn't known until right now that what was happening to him was grave at all. The stinging sensation worsened, and insisted he consider carefully any future where he found himself forming a similar prank idea. Filed away for later, and quickly too, as the insistent sting began simply to demand the attention of his faculties. Tight. Must move. Can't move.

Messor's arrival was a small relief, like a breath out after a dive in the pool. Messor had another elder in tow, the honorable Professor Meigot, dressed in her light green summer robes, apparently having run from the pools or the bath halls or the lakes, from the still-soaked state of her feet and summer shoes. She was holding the device now, a large circular annulus of brass like the clock in the great hall. It was about an inch thick, and had masterfully worked details all on the inside, bordered on the inner and outer diameters by rings of solid brass. Meigot stuck Mercy's left arm through the hole and with a word, the hole closed to fit his arm just below the elbow. It was cold and uncomfortable.
Then there was another metallic scraping sound as the annulus changed shape again, this time thrusting invisible spikes deep into his arm. Mercy howled and wailed. The pain was like nothing he had ever felt, and it made the insistent stinging in his arm all but disappear by comparison. Mercy was but a lad, and new to the pain of the weapons of war and the tools of healing. He let nothing back.
Mercy let Messor and Meigot share his distaste for the implement he bore. Tears fell from his eyes with abandon. He stopped wailing just long enough to take quick, offbeat breaths to refill on life enough to scream it out once more.
In another second, Messor stooped over and tilted his head sideways and upward to try and get his eyes to meet Mercy's wince. He kept saying "Mercy" to get his attention, and finally put his palm on the lad's forehead and pushed back and shifted his hairline and scalp and all backward on his skull, opening his eyes and raising his brows. Tears kept coming from Mercy's reddened eyes, but the effect Messor had wanted had occurred. For that moment, Mercy could keep himself from wailing for the pain.
Messor kept the calm for long enough to raise his other arm in front of him, as a man check's his watch if he pleases, and then shuffled back his long sleeve to bear his own forearm to Mercy's inspection. Mercy could see four distinct dots on it. About half a penny's size, scars from a device similar to the one now biting from four directions into his own arm.
Mercy breathed heavily and quickly, and now released from the bind and the palm, turned his head as he sat to regard the operation on his left arm. He could no longer feel anything past the elbow, and he saw the blood from the lances flowing and dripping from the front inner circle of the annulus. Meigot had been chanting and casting, and finally his entire arm went numb, the annulus snapped back into its original shape, and Mercy blacked out as he watched life spill quickly out of the holes in his arm.
Margot sat back against the wall just outside the door and cried, her hands on her knees. She looked distantly outward, seeing only unimaginable pain, the imaginings of what was happening to poor Mercy to make him scream like that. She had heard it all, each terrifying moment of anticipation and abject horror at the shrill that the boy could make if impelled by sufficient suffering. She had also heard the annulus snap back to shape, and heard his form collapse to the floor, from where he began to make barking noises of labored breathing. They faded to the sound of a baby with the croup, and then only a wheeze with a bit of a weak groan every few seconds. He sounded to her like he wished to still be wailing, but was too busy dying on the floor and powerless to muster it.
Margot sat and cried and missed her next lecture for the day. Too full of empathic pain to move. Too terrified of the events within that she could only hear.

Mercy awoke a day later, so he had been told. His left arm was wrapped in a sparkling green bandage, which he hesitated to move but found workable to movement when he finally dared enough to try. He concentrated on the sequence of events that had brought him there, his focus only broken by his cough. When he had it puzzled out, a visitor knocked and he gave his best try at bidding entry, only to find the roar of his voice reduced to a squawk. Margot entered and sat beside his bed on a stool he now noticed someone had put there. Perhaps to a purpose, a whole day under the ether could have hidden much from his sight, and he didn't feel like figuring it all out right now. Margot spoke calmly,
"I didn't know the treatment was so...I listened at the door and...Mercy...I," Mercy hadn't heard her quiet voice before.
"It's fine now." Mercy scratched, "A little dispelling of whatever it was and a little greentape and I'll be fine for the weeken—"
Margot had cut him off. She moved in to fold her arms around his chest and shoulders gently and bury her face. Mercy could hear her say "just shush...just...just shussh" again and again, forcing back tears at the memory of the horrors she had heard.

Mercy was quizzical then, and only found out years later what she had heard, and how she had feared for his very life.

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