body, from the too-cool skin beneath her fingers to the smooth stone beneath her knees and toes faded away to nothing. She felt only the water, the fading energy around Bernard, and the nebulous presence of the furies in the water with her.
Rill's presence pressed close to her, something like concern pressing against Isana's awareness. She touched Rill with her thoughts, giving the fury an image, a task. In response, Rill glided closer, into the same space Isana's awareness occupied. The sensation of the fury's presence overlapped with her own until she could no longer readily distinguish the two. Isana felt a brief surge of disorientation as she and the fury joined one another. Then, as always, Rill's perceptions began to flow into her in a slow rush of sounds, murky vision, and in surges of tangible, tactile emotion.
She looked up at the vague, pale shape of Bernard's body, at the even more blurred shape of her own, standing over him. Roth and Otto's furies hovered anxiously before her in the water, each visible to her, now, faint colors in a pair of cloudy forms.
She did not speak, but from here, it was a simple matter to send the words to Roth and Otto, through their furies. "Gather him up and seal closed the wound. I'll handle the rest."
The other two furies swirled off at once, gathering together the scarlet droplets of blood that had begun spreading into the bathwater, and shepherding them back to the gaping rent in Bernard's thigh.
Isana didn't wait for the furies to complete their task. She instead slipped closer to the fading aura around her brother, focusing upon it, and upon the much stronger thrum of life in the body touching Bernard-her own.
She knew that what she was to attempt was dangerous. The anima of life was never simple to touch or easy to manipulate. It was a force as potent and unpredictable as life itself-and as fragile. But dangerous or not, it had to be done. She had to try.
Isana reached out and made contact with that faint, fading quiver of life around Bernard. And then, touching upon that of her own body, above him, she gathered both together and melded them, blended them, drew upon the energy of her body to surround both of them, to an immediate, violent response.
Bernard's body convulsed in the water, a sudden thrash of motion that moved every muscle in him at once. His back contorted, and Isana felt more than saw his eyes fly wide open and unseeing. His heart contracted with a heavy, unsteady thumping sound, followed by another, and another. Isana felt a thrill of exhilaration fly through her and, with Rill, poured into Bernard through the wound in his leg, a rush of sudden confinement, a sense of herself stretching down hundreds of blood vessels, spreading through him, her awareness fracturing into a multitude of layers. She felt his weary heart, the bone-deep ache of his limbs, the terrifying cold of oncoming death. She felt his confusion, his frustration, his fear, the emotions pressing like a knife against her heart. She felt his body struggling against the injuries. Failing. Dying.
What she did next was not a process of logical thought, of stimulus and response, of procedure and reason. Her thoughts were too far divided, too many, too much to direct so clearly. Everything relied on her instinct, on her ability to release conscious will and to reach through him, sensing every part of the whole and then acting to restore it.
She felt it as a pressure building up against her, as steely chains of tension that closed in upon her myriad thoughts with a slow and steady inevitability, shutting them down, crushing them into stillness. She fought against that stillness, fought to keep her awareness, her life, sparkling in every part of Bernard's wounded body. She threw herself into the struggle, straining against death, while around her, through her, within her, she felt every wavering, uncertain beat of his too-labored heart.
She held on to his life, as she felt Roth and Otto's furies send blood back into his battered body. She held on to him as the two watercrafters went to work upon the injury itself, closing the ragged wound and crafting the very fabric of his flesh together again. She held on, with all of her strength and in a horrible space between one heartbeat and the next realized that she could hold on no longer. She was losing him.