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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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"If you wish to live," the voice said, "wear me."
Elias's head was getting heavy. The stomach pain had spread up into his chest, slow and hot. His vision kept going grainy at the edges before coming back. He wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting in the alley. Long enough that the cold from the stones had come up through his clothes.
He looked at the white shape in the drain shadow.
"Can you save my mother?" he said.
A pause.
"I can," the voice said. "But I need something in return."
Elias stared at the ground. The tears started. He thought about the priest who'd taken every coin they had, then made his mother choose. He thought about Harlen's open hand. He thought about his father, somewhere out in the world, selling people like furniture, sleeping fine afterward.
He didn't know who was in charge of things. If there were gods deciding how it all went, they had never once looked at him or his mother. Whatever ran the world had given Sera syphilis, a man who sold her, a child too small to help her. Six years of that. Six years of everything going wrong in a row and nothing ever turning around.
"I'll give you everything," Elias said. His voice cracked. "Whatever you want. Even my soul. Just please save her. Please."
"I will," the voice said. "You have my word. Now wear me."
Elias didn't say anything else.
He reached out and picked up the white mask.
It was lighter than he expected. Smooth, cracked down the center, warm in a way stone shouldn't be. He looked at it for one second, at the blank oval face, the fracture running through it. Then he put it on.
.
.
.
It started as pressure.
Both palms pressing flat against his face from inside, pushing outward, finding the edges of him. He felt the mask settle against his skin. The warmth moved, spreading from the porcelain into his cheeks, into his jaw, up behind his eyes.
Who are you.
It wasn't a question. It arrived somewhere behind his ears, in the space between thought and hearing.
He was Elias. He was six years old. His mother's name was Sera and she was sick and she was all he had.
Yes. I know.
The warmth kept spreading. His hands felt distant, then his feet. He could still see the grey strip of sky above him, the wet stones, the drain channel where the mask had been sitting. The edges of things were going soft, the way things go soft at the edges of sleep. When he tried to move his fingers they moved too slowly, like something had settled between the thought and the action and taken up the space there.
He tried to hold onto something. His name. His mother's face. The way she touched the side of his jaw with the back of her hand that morning when he left. He held those things and felt them getting harder to hold, not disappearing exactly, just moving further back, like sounds in a room where the walls are getting thicker.
Is this the price, he thought. Is this what I'm paying.
Yes. The price is your being.
Elias closed his eyes.
He'd thought about what that meant before he put it on. He knew it wasn't good. He knew what your being probably meant for someone who had just put a demon on his face. He'd known all of that. He'd done it anyway because his mother was a quarter mile away in a rented bed, hadn't eaten in two days, the stomach pain was getting worse, he was six years old, there was nothing else left to try.
He thought about every person who had ever promised him something.
The priest. The delivery merchant who paid two coppers then shorted him a half. The landlady who said she'd hold the room another week. His father, though Elias had no real memory of his father, just the shape of someone who was supposed to be there and had chosen not to be.
They'd all lied. Taken what they needed, then left.
The voice in the shadow had asked him first. It had made a bargain. It had said you have my word, and something in Elias, tired, hurt, running out of time, believed it. He didn't know why. Maybe because it was the first thing in his life that had asked before taking. Maybe that was enough.
I'll keep it, the voice said, quieter now, coming from somewhere very close. You can rest now. I'll keep it.
"Okay," Elias said, or thought, or both.
Thank you.
Something let go, deep in the middle of him. Like a muscle he'd been holding tight for a very long time, finally giving up. Not painful. Just finished. He felt grateful, which surprised him a little, that the last thing he felt was something like that.
He stopped fighting.
.
.
.
The mask sank.
Porcelain pressing through skin the way water presses into cloth, finding the grain of it, the fibers, becoming part of the structure. Elias's face held still while it happened. Then the white ceramic was beneath the skin rather than on top of it, a presence underneath the surface, visible the way bone is visible.
The ten red tentacles came out of his back a second later. Sudden, certain, completely at home in a body that was now a different person's problem.
Ren straightened up.
The first thing he noticed was the pain. His lower abdomen felt like something had burst in there, hot and spreading. The body's honest report on what Harlen's hit had actually done. Liver damage, probably. Significant internal bleeding. The body was six years old, small, built for neither abuse nor neglect, and something had been seriously wrong in there before he even arrived.
He looked down at the hands. Small fingers. The knuckles scraped from hitting the street stones.
He looked away.
He reached into inventory, pulled out the surgical kit.
Oh this is going to be unpleasant.
No anesthesia. Never had it in the field. He pressed two tentacles flat against the alley floor to brace himself, took a breath, went in.
It was exactly as bad as expected. The body being small didn't make the process easier, it just made everything more compressed, less room, tighter margins. He didn't let himself think about that. He thought about the liver, lacerated in two places. The bleeding vessel below it. Getting both closed before the blood loss crossed a line he couldn't walk back.
He'd sat through the Ritual of the Skin Apostle. Burned for twelve hours straight while something rewrote what he was at the level of the soul. This was pain with a shape, a clear end, a task he knew how to finish.
Fourteen minutes. Done.
He let the tentacles retract. Sat against the alley wall. Waited for his hands to stop shaking. The body healed without scars, the way all his bodies healed, skin closing after him like it was grateful for the repair. When he pressed his palm against the abdomen, nothing. Clean. No indication anything had been wrong.
He stood up slowly.
There was a puddle near the drain channel, maybe a centimeter deep, rain-grey and still. He walked over and looked down.
Elias Vane looked back. Brown hair, gap in the front teeth, a face that was six years old, that had already learned to hold itself carefully in the way that children learn when careful is what keeps them fed. A face that had spent its whole short life in a border town nobody visited twice, in a rented room with a sick mother and an empty pot.
Ren stood there for a while.
I killed a child. He let that sit. I actually did it. A six-year-old.
He'd known what Face Assimilation did before he deployed it. He'd done it before, to adults, to people already at the edge of something, filed it under necessary and moved forward. Same process. Same outcome. Same math.
It didn't feel the same. He wasn't sure it was supposed to.
"Hah." He said it quietly, to nobody. "What a screwed up ability. What a screwed up world."
He had all of Elias's memories sitting in him now, the way he always had the host's memories after. Two years of lying awake listening to Sera breathe in the dark, counting the pauses, waiting for the next one. The priest and the afternoon light and his mother's voice saying my son without hesitation, without a single second of weighing it up. The empty pot on the cold hearth this morning. The decision to go steal bread anyway because what else was there.
A six-year-old had trusted him because there was nobody else left to trust. And the kid had been right to, which was the part Ren was going to have to live with.
He looked at his reflection one more time.
"Your mother first," he said. "Then your father."
He turned and walked out of the alley.