>>5822772Your mind was awash with possibilities. You had before you not just the means to heal Hershy but to revolutionize the healing arsy as a whole—and then some! To extend healing from a physical dimension to a SPIRITUAL one, perhaps! The idea of delving into such in-depth research, though, died in your throat before you could give it voice, when you burst into Zith-Zi’s room (something you only did when it was EXTREMELY since the… Ahem… INCIDENT a couple months ago) and caught her with the elderly drake in her lap. She was gently stroking his feathers while he dozed. Even asleep, at rest, his breathing was slow, uneven. The goblin’s expression was a mix of happiness and something else—something beyond sadness, closer to resignation…
But when she looked up at you, it turned to a desperate sort of hope.
“So?” she asked. “Did Queen Bitch give up the goods, or what?”
Your intellectual ambitions could wait, you decided. This… This was more important.
With summer’s one-week break nearly here—though, as a sort of de facto Junior Mage Apprentice, you supposed you were entitled to a longer one this year—you decided to hurry. The real ticking closer was not the season or the calendar, of course… it was Hershy himself. His health has deteriorated nearly as swiftly as your own horizons expanded, and the decline was not slowing. You devoted yourself to understanding the latticework of flesh, blood, and magic which composed the ancient organs of the dead Dragon King. It was a tempting idea to clone them—it could exponentially increase the material you had to work with, after all!—but in the end you opted to take a more traditional approach. ‘Soulless’ organs, rendered magically inert by the unexplored side-effects of the <Cloning> process, were an unknown variable… And Hershy was no experimental subject, but a companion.
>15Your investigation had settled upon a few primary issues with Hershy: degeneration of the respiratory tract and of a similar-but-different mana-rich organ near to the more traditional lungs, and the development of clotting and cancerous lumps throughout his body, as well as the general vagaries of age. While you had no skin or bone marrow to work with, there was ample blood, and much left of the supplementary organs which helped to provide a healthy body with new blood cells: the spleen and liver. There was also, among the jars in the vault below, an organ easily ten times the size of Hershy’s entire body, yet similar to that lung-like sack, which inspection and deduction led you to believe was sued in the production of the legendary lizard sovereign’s deadly breath-weapon: a sort of ‘fire-lung’.