Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

this bad in my life. Even hurts to breathe. If I didn’t know better… I’d swear I was dying…”
    Her voice trailed away. Random couldn’t even hear her breathing anymore. “Ruby? Ruby? Can you hear me?”
    “Don’t shout! My head hurts enough without you yelling in my ear. Let me sleep.
    Maybe when I wake up, everything’ll be fixed again.” “No! I don’t think we can trust our bodies to do this much work on their own. We have to do it ourselves. Go inside, concentrate, and control the healing process. Otherwise, we might just drift off and never wake up.” “You’re just full of words of comfort, aren’t you? All right, I hurt too much to argue. How do you want to do this?”
    “Try to find your healing power, the same way you found the compass. And once you’ve found it, work it for all it’s worth.”
    Ruby nodded and closed her eyes. Random closed his and focused his thoughts inward, searching for something he’d know when he found it. He pushed the pains of his broken body from his thoughts, refusing to let them distract him. He shut down all his senses, sinking deeper and deeper into his own mind. He refused to die here when there was still so much work to be done. And he was damned if he’d die such a useless, pointless, stupid death. His anger burned fiercely through him, and something stirred in the back brain, the undermind, that secret part of him he couldn’t see, where his power lived. And a new fire ignited there, bursting out through all the rest of him, burning away all pains and weaknesses in its purifying flames. He was remade and reborn, and Random howled in sheer exhilaration at being so alive.
    His eyes flew open as he crashed back, already forgetting that hidden part of himself he’d so briefly touched. He raised his hands before him and flexed them, and they were fine. He surged to his feet, grinning like a fool. All his injuries had healed, all his pains were gone, and he didn’t even have a scar left to show for it. He realized Ruby was standing beside him, stamping her foot on the ground to test that her leg wasn’t broken anymore. She looked at him and laughed incredulously, and then they hugged each other fiercely. “Damn,” said Ruby when they finally did release each other. “I feel good! I feel like I could take on a whole damned army!”
    “No pain anywhere?” said Random. “No weaknesses?”
    “Hell, no! You?”
    “I feel like I am twenty again. I feel like I could go one on one with a Grendel and dismantle it with my bare hands.” He broke off and looked at Ruby thoughtfully. “And just a few moments ago we were both knocking on death’s door. I’m amazed we even survived the crash, let along managed to drag ourselves here.
    Just the shock of so many major injuries should have killed us outright.” Ruby shrugged. “This isn’t the first time something should have killed us, and we survived. It’s part of being who and what we are.”
    “But we just did in a few seconds what a regeneration machine would have taken weeks to do. And I have no idea how.”
    “Random, will you for once in your life look on the bright side? We are no longer dying, we are back in shape again, and the pinnace didn’t explode, after all. Count your damned blessings. Now let’s get some sleep, so we can set off for Vidar at First light.”
    “Yes,” said Random. “Sleep does sound good. But this is something we need to talk about in the future, Ruby. We don’t know nearly enough about our powers. About what we might be able to do if we put our minds to it.” “We’re doing all right,” said Ruby. “The Madness Maze didn’t exactly come with an instruction manual. So we learn by doing.”
    “There’s still the question of how we do what we do. Where does the energy come from that powers our abilities? What did we just tap into to heal ourselves, to bring ourselves back from the brink of death? I’m already forgetting most of it, but what I can remember scares the hell out of me. It felt like tapping into God…” “I think you’re getting delusions of grandeur,” said Ruby sternly. “Now shut up, lie down, and get some sleep. We’ve got a long walk ahead of us in the morning.” She turned away from him, lay down on the cave floor, and closed her eyes to indicate that as far as she was concerned, the conversation was over. Random looked down at her for a while and then lay down beside her. He knew questions didn’t go away just because you