57 (718) - I Give Up

Dear Papin and Mamin,

You were right, I quit.  I can’t work here, the world is right and Arkans are just awful! Even if I liked Tanifas and Akminchaer is an excellent teacher, I can’t bear it anymore. I realize that the Arkan Governor, during the occupation, ordered his entire force and hangers on to stop eating meat while they were there, but I thought I could get used to the smell.  Cooking meat, everywhere, the smell of alcohol flames and unburnt alcohol. It's on everyone's breath. It's in their clothes. Its in the bedding and no amount of incense covers it.

I’m supposed to be checking the catalogue on this room of horrors.  It’s a museum room of preserved, dissected human beings.  It wouldn’t be so horrid if I didn’t know that it was done by hundreds of Imperial Pharmacists who could just buy their specimens, or have them snatched from countries that Arko was conquering! Hideous. Horrid, Ugly.

I flipped through their own catalogue and it was almost all right because of the number of Mahid who had ‘died of x condition, body donated’ listings but it’s not like the classes in Haiu Menshir, not at all.  I tried to sleep last night and had nightmares that this room was screaming.

The High Priestess and her deacons have set up a Temple altar on the ‘Female’ side of this horrid room and the High Priest and his deacons have done the same on the 'Male' side.  Right now they’re consulting with engineers to somehow run a sun-tunnel down here, back here, into the dark and bring some of what they consider holy light in here.

The First of the Mahid, Amitzas is a creepy, scary old man who I cannot forget has tortured and murdered hundreds of people, if not thousands, in his lifetime.  It doesn’t matter that he was commanded.  He did it.  It’s like all that... that... I’m sorry.  I had to go weep.  I start shaking when I’m with any of them – all the old Mahid who were alive during Kurkas’s time.

I’m coming home.  The whole city smells of beef tallow and meat-eater’s sweat. What kind of healer can I be if I can’t bring myself to get near my poor, suffering patients, much less lay hands on them.

I’ll come home and scrub bed-pans in the hospitals. I can still do that.  This city has ruined me. I’m struggling to keep my gorge down, just sitting outside that room.

I realize the enormous wealth of medical knowledge that Amitzas Mahid (after requesting permission from his grandson of course!) had just given Haiu Menshir access to!  He’s got his menageries of fantastic animals that have given us so many more remedies... and his daughter has the gardens.  All that, once devoted to harming people, now turned to saving lives... I feel as though my head is whipping around.

Oh, Papin, Mamin, I feel sick and shaking.  Akminchaer is writing the Head of the Research Departments at Haiu Roru and then going to check the Imperatrix.  Ninumaen is sitting with Arkan Medics for these so called Bodyguard Challenges so that no one hurt themselves flinging themselves through that horribly dangerous maze, being FIRED UPON by their fellow man, with true darts, though none are envenomed! These people are mad. Mad in a way that makes me too ill to move.

I'm sitting in a stone corridor outside something worse than any plague morgue, shaking, weeping, trying not to just fling my pen down and run away.

 

I’m sending this letter off and then I’ll find my teacher and resign my apprenticeship.  I’ll find a ship of some kind travelling, even risking the winter storms. I want to come home.

Your loving and horrified to his guts son,

Fionaer