By the time they'd reached the far shore, Alex was breathlessly realizing that he might be outmatched by this girl. He had to have seen her around - Sure, Alex mostly kept to himself and a select few friends, but there was no way someone younger than him could be this magically skilled, and if she was one of the Paired, she wouldn’t be in that uniform. By process of elimination, she had to be in Alex’s year, and considering that there were only eighty students each year, it’d take a lot of coincidences for him to have never seen her around.
He wracked his brain, and watching her bountiful hair, riding the line between crimson and auburn, sway back and forth in front of him as they skated, he found something. He couldn’t remember her name - his head was too full of trivia and magical theory and academics to be good at remember the names of unimportant people - but he knew he’d seen her hanging out with Francesca. He’d have to ask Chess about her when - if - he saw her next. This girl was strange enough to be one of her targets, but strong enough to be someone Chess respected. It could go either way.
Keeping up with her had pushed him to his limits. She'd push ahead, he'd amplify the force multipliers on his legs, and he'd pull up within ten or twenty meters of her – hard to tell with the concealment spell working on the edges of his mind – and she'd fly ahead again. He'd redouble his efforts to make his impromptu ice skates more efficient, and eventually, he'd catch up again, and she'd pull some more performance out of somewhere, so would he, and the cycle repeated, until the flakes of snow stung like the bites of a summer fly on his face. Considering that he was moving at about the speed of a train, without the aid of rails, he allowed his feet to dig in, kicking up shaved ice in a plume of pseudo-snow, stopping right at the shore. Meanwhile, the girl just… kept going. Her skating transitioned into an impossibly-fast run, which slowed into a jog among the trees – a mixture of sad, leafless deciduous trees and thriving pines. As she faded into their ranks, she let down the concealment spell, just enough to let Alex see that she was watching him. He couldn't read her face- desperate and pleading, haughty and judgmental, fearful and superior – it didn't make much sense, and Alex wasn't talented at understanding these things. What was important was that he was here, and because of that, whatever was troubling her, he could steer her back onto the righteous path.
He followed her, ducking between the trees. The forest was familiar – With the right amount of principled argument and earnest pleading, he, Maxwell, and sometimes Gabriel and others managed to persuade the Sisters to bring them into the wilderness. The campus was safe, protected, but you could explore the whole thing in a matter of months. Sure, it'd take years upon years to really see everything on campus, but how could a kid not want to see the world beyond what they knew? So, Alex had had quite a bit of fun, exploring amongst the pines, and he was glad to see things trending in this direction. Maybe this girl had gone out on a midnight expedition – not allowed, but not awful, and something to be expected of one or two students in times of high stress, like the end of the academic year – and found an injured animal – maybe a squirrel, or a deer that had spooked itself and run into a tree. Compassion was a virtue that was drilled into them, after all, and it wasn't unheard of for that to get students into a compromising situation or two.
All in all, things were starting to seem pretty reasonable, right up until the girl sprinted towards the crumpled remnants of a man in a smoldering, shallow crater no more than ten meters away. She slid to the ground, cradling the man's head in the crook of her elbow, whispering to him.
Alex couldn't process all of it. There were shards of crystal embedded in the ground, in the trees around them, and a stubby mass of it sprouting from the man's shoulderblades, catching the moonlight and twisting it into rainbows in the spaces not covered in his blood. He was an adult, breathing quickly and lightly, eyes unfocused but open, and he muttered a slurred response to the girl's words that was even less intelligible than her own.
Shattered crystal and divots in the dirt formed the shape of wings around him.
Alex's mind finally snapped to attention. This was an unsanctioned user of High Magic - a maleficus. This was a criminal. A heretic. And, most importantly this moment, by being severely injured, he was at extreme risk of becoming a demon.
“GET AWAY FROM HIM!” he yelled.
The girl, and for that matter, the man, didn't respond in the slightest.
“He's a maleficus!” Alex clarified.
This got the girl's attention. She looked up at Alex, still holding the maleficus, eyes flashing with anger. “And? He needs our help!”
Alex, against his better judgment, veins pulsing with adrenaline, ran up to the girl, and knelt beside her. “Please, this is bad, I don't know what you're thinking, but-”
She put up an open palm to shut him up, and it worked. After a second of thinking, she spoke. “Look at him. He's still mostly human.”
Alex looked him over. His clothing, simple trousers and a roughspun shirt, were torn and bloodstained, but besides the remains of wings, she was right. He nodded, wanting her to get to the end of her argument as fast as possible, so they could get out of there.
“He can still fall further. If he starts to die, he could turn demonic to keep himself alive.” That was exactly what Alex was afraid of, and, he thought, a very good argument as to why they shouldn’t be here. The clarity of her statement didn't match her tone at all. The words were clear, but choked out. She'd been thinking about this for a while.
But Alex knew she was right. Magic was powerful, and malefici, pushed to their limits, were prone to becoming even worse than they already were. And…
A man is bleeding out in front of you.
A maleficus, Alex corrected himself.
A man.
The girl's pleading eyes, the man's ragged breaths, Alex's warring definitions, it all was too much. None of it mattered. There was a simple problem in front of him to be solved, and then any other problems could come after it in due time. A living thing, something made of God's will, was dying in front of him, and he could help that gift stay in the world.
“Okay,” he said.
The girl's face twitched in what might have been a smile, before the mix of dread and fear took back over. “Do you feel those gashes?” she said. Alex concentrated, and extended his soul outwards. Normally, if you tried to overlap your soul with someone else's body, you'd encounter nigh-insurmountable resistance, but this was more like walking through chest-high grass. Within moments, Alex could feel the man's body as if it were his own. His consciousness had to be barely attached at this point, if Alex could do that. It wasn't so much that the man had wounds, exactly. It was more like he'd been thrown at extreme speed into the ground. His bones were so damaged that if he so much as twitched the wrong way, his muscles would throw everything permanently out of alignment. Arteries and veins were severed, nerves damaged and throwing out erroneous signals, and the man's mind had retreated. Alex could only feel him in his spinal cord, brain, and micromanaging his heart and lungs. It was becoming very clear why the man's barriers were down. He was using every bit of consciousness he had left keeping blood and oxygen flowing in the few places that would keep his brain alive, but what remained of his physical body most certainly wasn't up to the task.
He was more dead than alive.
“Yes.” Alex didn't have it in him to lie. “We can't fix him. The second he loses focus, he dies, and I don't have the power to repair all of” – he gestured vaguely at the man's body, more held together by the crater he was in than anything biological – “that.”
The girl was frozen solid, except for tears rolling down her cheeks. But her voice was steady. “Can you see how he's supposed to be?”
A strange question, since understanding the problem and solving it were two different things entirely, but Alex nodded. “Yeah, he-”
“Okay,” the girl said. “Please trust me. Please. Please.” She repeated the word, on and on, until Alex felt it.
Magic was a funny thing. While the working of miracles in the domain of the True Church, the duty of Angels and Demetrian Priests, was a thing that required immense training and effort, every single human and beast on the face of the earth used magic, simply by existing. The conscious link between soul and mind, between will and body, was magic. And that link formed a boundary. Not only did that boundary impede any attempts to manipulate someone else's body, but even further beyond that, it presented a wall between souls. Between minds. It was difficult to express – While the True Church had figured out the mechanics of it long ago, the language of men had not yet adapted fully to it.
But the long and short of it was that this girl's barrier, the passive sense of self that Alex could feel without effort, the sense that another human being was there next to him, dropped. He wasn't entirely sure how that was possible – she was still there, but the walls were down – Puzzling over it, he formed an image. The soul was like a dammed lake, and she had just removed the structure. The will was ready to flow.
Alex understood.
He didn't have the power to fix the man, but he could understand what the man needed to be to be fixed. And the girl… Well, he didn't know if she had the power, but he could see what she was doing, and the best he could do would be to play along.
He'd studied the human body. It was a trivial exercise to take that knowledge and transpose it onto the scale and position of the maleficus, and see what he should be, were he human, and were he whole. He took that image into his mind, and held it, not just as something that could be, not just as something that should be, but as something that was. And at that moment, he fought every natural instinct, and let down the barriers of his own soul.
The dam broke.
She flooded into him.
Her will formed into the shape that he had defined. He was stealing her power, and she was stealing his shape. Both of their minds were violated, neither of them fully in control of what was happening. He was laying out the tasks, and she was carrying them out. In the torrential flow of magic, he could barely feel his body. Her power was astounding – Alex, even in the best of circumstances, couldn't have equaled the speed and force with which she was reassembling bone and knitting flesh, taking the gap between what Alex knew should be and what was and closing it, less like shoving overfluffed socks into a trunk and more like slamming shut the iron gates of an ancient fortress, a certainty and finality that Alex had never felt in his life.
And yet, Alex was directing it. With every moment, every change in the man's physiology, he was adapting, reacting, creating a more complete image of how his body should function. While Alex knew the generalities of a human body, any individual human varied immensely, at least when you were looking at it that closely, and the only way to understand it was through feeling it. And he felt more and more with each moment.
He wasn't in control, and neither was she.
Like a burning fuse, the fire followed the course causality directed, quickly and without fail, until it burnt itself out.
Some time later – seconds, minutes, hours, neither of them could tell, they fell back on the dirt, inches apart, panting. Reassuringly, Alex could feel himself, the girl, and the man, all existing in their bodies, in the right places, in the right amounts. He couldn't help but laugh.
And so did she.
It was a joyous laugh, one of reality conflicting with disbelief. None of that should have worked. And yet, it did.
When their laughter died out, she asked him a question, and he could swear he felt it before he heard it.
“What now?”
Their patient was stable, but they couldn't leave him out in the winter cold.
“I know a place,” Alex said. Together, they ducked under the man's arms, lifting his unconscious body.