The Stitch in the Silence

“In Clivilius, trust isn’t something you give—it’s something you bandage together when no one else is left to do it.”

Finding the medical supplies was surprisingly easy—comforting, even. Glenda’s sense of order had held fast, even as everything else around us unravelled. The storage crate was precisely labelled, its contents neatly compartmentalised. Clean bandages, antiseptic solution, gauze, and hand-labelled vials sat in careful rows.

I ran my fingers over the edges of the bandage packets, momentarily stilled by the comfort of straight lines and predictable textures. Even now, even gone, Glenda’s presence lingered—in the methodical placement of tape rolls, in the absence of dust. She had left order behind in her wake, and I clung to it like driftwood in a rising tide.

Bandages in hand, I turned back toward the Portal.

The walk was short, but my feet felt heavier with each step, dragging through the soft sand as if the ground itself was reluctant to let me pass. The sunlight had grown harsher, casting long, angular shadows across the ridge. When I reached the crest of the dune, I saw him.

Kain hadn’t moved.

He was still slumped against the base of the hill, arms wrapped loosely around his middle, his back curved inwards. From a distance, he looked less like a person and more like an abandoned figure in a painting—still, solemn, and slowly fading into the canvas. The hope I’d glimpsed earlier, that stubborn glint of fire that had kept him upright, had dimmed further in my absence. What remained was something quieter. Something darker.

As I descended toward him, the sand shifted underfoot, drawing his attention. He tried to rise, his hands pushing against the ground in a valiant attempt to reclaim some measure of control, of dignity. But his leg betrayed him. A sharp grimace crossed his face as his strength faltered, and he dropped back down with a muffled exhale, more breath than sound.

“Where’s Glenda?” he asked. His voice was tight, scraped raw by both exertion and emotion. Beneath it, I heard the flicker of something else—hope, perhaps, straining to survive.

I knelt beside him slowly, careful not to spook him with sudden movement. “Kain,” I began, my voice soft. Too soft, maybe. I wanted to shield him from what I was about to say, but there was no way to pad the truth. It would land hard no matter how I phrased it. “Glenda, Charity, and Jamie have all left the camp. They've gone Portal Pirate hunting.”

The words had barely left my lips before I saw them strike. His breath caught, his shoulders tensed, and then sagged all at once—as if the structure of him was collapsing inward. What little colour remained in his face drained away, leaving his skin waxen and drawn. His eyes widened, unmoored by disbelief.

“Glenda’s gone with them?” The question quivered through him, laden with an emotion so raw it felt indecent to witness. Disbelief, yes—but threaded through it was something far more fragile. Abandonment. Vulnerability. A boy’s fear wrapped in a young man’s pride.

I exhaled slowly, the weight of it all bearing down on me. My fingers, restless, moved unconsciously over the folded bandages in my hands, smoothing their edges, refolding the corner of one.

“Paul didn’t seem like he had much say in the matter,” I said quietly, eyes fixed on the fine lines creasing Kain’s forehead. It was the truth. And yet, like so much else here, the truth didn’t seem to offer any comfort.

We were all being swept along by currents we couldn’t control. The best we could do now was try not to drown.

Kain’s expression fractured and reformed in a rapid, jarring cascade—shock crumpling into disbelief, disbelief flaring into anger, then collapsing into something heavier. His brows knitted, and his jaw tightened as if trying to hold the entire mess of emotion inside. I saw the moment it slipped through.

“You mean to tell me that I have a gaping hole in my leg and our only doctor has left us?” he snapped, the words spat out with a heat that singed the air between us. His voice cracked slightly under the weight of it—rage born not from blame, but from desperation. “Why would she do that?”

His disbelief wasn’t rhetorical. It was raw and human and utterly justified. The absurdity of it all—the fact that someone like Glenda, our one trained medic, had simply walked out of camp on what sounded dangerously like a half-formed hunch—rattled something in me too. I understood his reaction because I felt it too. None of this made sense anymore. Logic, once our companion, had slipped quietly into exile.

But I couldn’t meet his eyes.

He was looking for answers, and all I had were questions of my own. I stared down at the bandages in my hands. The clean white rolls were a stark contrast to everything else in this place—no blood, no dust, no chaos. Just potential. Care, in its purest, most practical form. They felt too clean for the moment. Too hopeful.

“I don’t know,” I murmured, the words barely audible. They tasted of guilt. Of inadequacy.

Silence lingered, thick and expectant, but I couldn’t let it swallow us.

I shifted my weight and knelt beside him, grounding myself in movement. My hands moved with quiet purpose, unrolling the bandages with care, preparing the antiseptic pad. The trembling uncertainty in my chest didn’t vanish, but I pushed it aside, tucked it beneath the firm cadence of action. There were things I could control. This was one of them.

“But here,” I said, my voice steadying as I opened the pack. “I’ve brought some fresh bandages. Let’s get your leg cleaned up.”

I surprised even myself with the resolve in my tone. No flinching, no deferral. Just the next step forward. A thread of certainty in a world that no longer offered guarantees.

Kain gave a slight nod, the fight bleeding out of him. His shoulders slumped, not in surrender, but in acceptance. Gratitude flickered across his face—muted, almost reluctant—but there all the same. There was also something else behind his eyes. A deeper exhaustion. A silent understanding that we were all simply trying not to fall apart.

I reached for the edge of the bandage, careful not to tug too sharply. The fabric peeled away with a faint sound, and I drew in a quiet breath at the sight beneath. The wound was worse than I’d feared—angry, swollen, the edge of the gash already discolouring. But I didn’t flinch. My hands moved swiftly, disinfecting, pressing gauze with a firm, even pressure.

And I made sure my touch stayed steady. Reassuring. The kind of touch that said, I’m here. I see you. You’re not alone.

Because in the end, that’s what we all needed most. Not certainty. Not even answers. Just to know someone would stay. That someone would show up and do the hard thing, even when everything else was falling away.

As I began unwrapping the old bandages, the fabric clinging stubbornly to dried blood and grit, a troubling thought surfaced—quiet at first, then insistent. Something about Glenda’s stitch work didn’t sit right. The sutures were uneven, hastily knotted, some already loosening despite the short time they'd been in place. It was far from the methodical precision I’d come to expect from her. She was exacting, always. Careful to a fault. But this… this looked rushed. Inconsistent.

It nagged at me, worming its way deeper into my thoughts even as I forced myself to stay focused. Why would she leave it like this? The question loomed like a shadow just outside the firelight.

My thoughts flicked, unbidden, to Joel—his so-called “miraculous recovery.” The boy who’d been nearly unconscious the last time I saw him, yet somehow had come through it with barely a scratch. It had struck me as strange then, but now, staring at Kain’s inflamed wound, it felt suspicious. Had Glenda treated him differently? Or was something else at play entirely?

I pressed a clean cloth gently to the raw, exposed gash, wincing inwardly at the angry colour of the surrounding skin. “It’s not looking so great,” I murmured, mostly to myself, the words falling flat in the dry air as I dabbed away the blood and residue. The wound was worse than I’d prepared for—a jagged, angry thing that sneered at my efforts.

A pit of unease began to settle in my stomach. This wasn’t just a scrape or a clean slice from a sharp object. It was torn, messy. The kind of injury that spoke of brute force and bad luck. And I was no surgeon. Just someone trying to hold things together with trembling hands and borrowed supplies.

Beside me, Kain shifted slightly, stifling a grimace. I saw the way his fingers dug into the sand, the tension in his jaw as he worked to swallow the pain. He gulped once, then managed to speak—his voice barely steady, but still trying to convince us both.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, the effort it cost him clear in every syllable. “Once I get crutches, I’ll be able to walk properly.”

I glanced at him, taking in the pallor of his skin and the faint sheen of sweat on his brow. He was trying to be brave. Trying to anchor himself in the idea of progress, of movement. But I wasn’t sure his optimism matched the reality. The leg looked awful—deep, red-rimmed, far from healing. Still, I didn’t contradict him.

What was hope, if not a kind of medicine in itself?

So I stayed quiet, focusing instead on the delicate task before me. My fingers moved with care, wrapping the clean bandage with slow deliberateness. Over-under, tighten, secure. A small rhythm. A ritual. Something I could control.

There was something deeply human in it, this quiet act of tending. Of bearing witness to someone’s pain without flinching.

Once I finished dressing the wound, I paused—hands hovering for a moment over the final fold of the bandage, reluctant to let go. Then I met Kain’s gaze. His eyes, usually sharp with sardonic wit or quietly probing thought, now held something more muted. A kind of weariness that belied his age. But beneath it, I searched for the ember I knew was still there—that quiet fire that had pushed him to keep going, even through pain, even when logic said to stop.

I wanted to say something reassuring. To tell him we’d get through this, that this moment—this exhaustion, this absurd fracture in everything we thought we understood—would pass. But when I opened my mouth, the words refused to come. They dissolved at the back of my throat, hollow and inadequate against the enormity of what we were facing.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said instead, patting his shoulder gently. My fingers lingered just a second longer than necessary—a silent attempt to tether him to something solid. “I have to get some things done back at camp. Are you sure you’ll be okay here by yourself?”

His nod was immediate. Too immediate. It carried the polish of performance—shoulders squared a little too fast, lips pressed just a bit too tightly. I saw through it, of course. The young man was trying to hold the world together with nothing but bravado and raw instinct. Still, I didn’t press. Sometimes, the illusion of control was the only thing keeping the cracks from widening.

I rose to my feet, brushing the sand from my palms. A low wind had picked up, skimming across the surface of the slope behind us, shifting the loose grit in tiny, swirling eddies. I looked down at him one last time, that flicker of hesitation catching in my chest like a thorn. He looked so small there—hunched against the curve of the dune.

But the camp needed me. Responsibilities had a way of asserting themselves, even when your heart resisted them.

I turned, beginning the climb back up the hill, my boots kicking up soft clouds of dust that clung to the folds of my trousers. The sky above Clivilius was washed in a dull, iron-hued light, neither day nor dusk—just that peculiar in-between that seemed to stretch on endlessly here.

As I moved, I tried to convince myself that help would come. That Luke or Beatrix would reappear with supplies, with some plan, some unexpected lifeline. That this place—so unforgiving, so strange—might still hold within it the potential for healing.

Hopefully, Kain would follow in Joel’s footsteps—defying logic, recovering swiftly. Miraculously. Because if Clivilius had taught us anything, it was that impossibility was a fluid concept here.

And perhaps, within the vast uncertainty, there was still space for hope. Not loud or triumphant, but quiet—like a seed buried deep beneath ash, waiting for the smallest spark of light.