Up to his elbows in blood and gore, Xyon blocked out the screams of the injured and dying around him. Thankfully, his patient, a captain, was blissfully unconscious. As an attaché to the Datharian army of General Vyren Vr’Detian, he wasn’t strictly being ordered to be here. Vyren was his friend, one of few. So when the feline fae unleashed his very best kitten eyes on him, Xyon caved and said yes. He wound up in a triage camp and had spent the last several hours operating on countless wounded soldiers. He wondered why he caved so easily.
As he finished working on his patient, he glanced up. The sight before him wiped his resentment and exhaustion away: the alien species. While he’d been busy with his patient, the medics had brought in a wounded enemy combatant. Xyon was nearly giddy at the opportunity to study and operate on a new species. While serving in the army wasn’t his idea of a good time, having access to the new species certainly was. The largest of them caught his eye.
He hummed, applying his magic to his skin and burned all the blood off of his hands.
A nurse was quick to move his patient out of the way.
“That one.” Xyon pointed at the new strange fae.
Xyon’s new patient followed the same basic template of all fae—two arms and legs, and a hairless body that was as standardized as they came.
Unlike his own graceful features: Straight nose, round almond eyes, high cheeks, and slightly pointed humanoid ears. While they shared the same basic structure, the alien was sharper in features, echoing that of a wolf, including a pair of fluffy golden-black furred ears on either side of his head. Turning his gaze downward made Xyon envious. His own torso was standard, even the humans were similar but the subject was obviously different. The chest structure was also different from usual: deeper than normal with an odd peak at the middle. He was also tall, coming in at nearly three metres. While not the tallest in the Empire, it was still a greater height than average. He was thickly muscled through his chest while drawing in slightly at his abdomen, only to thicken again at the hips. Xyon instantly wondered if that meant he had good spinal flexibility. He reached up and pushed the male’s thin upper lip up. Doing so revealed canine teeth—most definitely a carnivore, then.
While all that was interesting, the far more pressing problem was the species’ magic. His people’s magic was the manipulation and creation of fire and heat, while the xeno’s was metal weaving. The subject before him had his skin and a long, thick braid coated in metal. Xyon was quick to wonder how said skin didn’t suffocate, but there was no seam or blank area. Blood stuck to it from many shallow cuts. Xyon wrinkled his nose in distaste; they must have bled this one down. They had sealed the cuts with the ice magic of the Datharians, for the most part. However, a deep slice into the right side of his stomach, just above the hip bone, looked worse than the others.
Xyon set his hands around the wound and pressed down. All he felt was thick muscle. It was unlikely any organ was damaged. This new species reminded him of daemons, they had similar thicknesses of muscle that made hitting anything vital difficult. He hummed a little tune under his breath weaving his magic to create heat in his hands. The ice within the injury melted, and red blood slowly started to ooze from it. But Xyon had plenty of time to study the wound and quickly determined it wasn’t life-threatening. He pulled out a needle and thread from his pouch and started sewing flesh back together. He sang magic to cauterize the wound with his fingertips as needed.
The alien wouldn’t thaw at the temperature the Datharian army had made the climate-controlled bubble in which they resided. The Datharian’s were the opposite of the Solari, Xyon’s species. While he was a creature of heat with his native planet reflecting that. The Datharian’s planet was an ice ball and their people thrived in frigid temperatures. When they invaded other planets, at rift gate points they created climate control bubbles. This enabled them to muster and arrange themselves for invasion in comfort. This rift gate was located in a Spring Court world, hot and muggy. The jungle outside it was far too hot for the Winter Court species.
As he finished up Xyon checked the other cuts. They weren’t urgent but he wanted a chance to study him further, so he set about mending them. It was challenging to work around the metal skin, but he managed. Studying Xenos was his favourite thing to do, it was the reason he agreed to help invasion forces. If he was really lucky, he might get to play with a dead one.
A runner skittered over to him, waving his hands to regain his balance. Then rapidly said between huffs, “Chief Surgeon is asking for you.” He braced himself against his knees as he tried to catch his breath. “Some angel got winged,” he panted.
Xyon leapt to his feet. Despite his wish to stay with the new species, chances to work on angel wings were few and far between. Rarely did they leave their home planet and when they did, it was their finest warriors and rarely did they get hit by anyone. He raced through the camp; a pair of guards saw him coming and opened the sliding doors to the proper med bay. He changed into clean clothes and sterilized himself with a small blaze of fire over his skin before charging into the room.
The angel in question was nearly as large as the warrior he had been studying. Her wing was laid out on a collection of tables. A stool already awaited him. He marched over and jumped onto it. The chief surgeon didn’t waste time acknowledging Xyon as he joined in.
Xyon studied as he worked. The wound was strange, as if something had hooked into the thick muscle of the wing. It was ripped downwards, as though the angel had been torn from the sky. A quick glance at the rest of the angel saw more wounds that supported that theory.
They were just finishing up as the screams in the camp changed. What was once primarily out of fear and pain became abject terror. Given that the hard work was done on the angel, Xyon left the med bay and peered outside. His heart dropped into his stomach.
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The white rift gate was no longer white; instead, a wave of sharp metal was cascading through it. Everyone scattered to get out of the way. His gaze shot to the new alien subject, who was getting to his feet by some miracle of blood replenishment. That was something he’d have to study later, his own people didn’t bleed much. But that wasn’t the same as restoring what was lost so quickly. He watched the sizable male sway, then throw his head back and unleash a terrifying howl. Xyon fell back to land on a bench with a rough thud. He could see the muscles in the male's neck move to create the sound. He wrangled the instinctual fear, pushing it down so he didn’t do anything foolish. It took more effort than he’d ever admit, but he forced himself to listen to the howl. It took a moment but he picked out the sub-harmonic. All fae could purr, it was a denominator of the fae that helped them classify newly discovered species. Given the nature of magic use, it was an evolutionary advantage. A fae could sing to one intention of magic and purr a second, layering the effects together in a way humans, daemons, and angels could not.
The metal in the rift surged forward and enveloped the warrior, only to change again a moment later. It turned into a tight vortex, and as it lashed out in large, sharp arcs, Xyon saw two additional members within the maelstrom. Both were female. Both were smaller than the male and wore nothing, as did the male they were clearly there to rescue. Tendrils of metal licked over their bare skin as the three danced and howled together. The metal followed their movements to cut and dice at Xyon’s fellow invaders. Blood gushed and limbs were severed from their owners. Objectively, Xyon knew this was when he really ought to be running away. But this was beautiful to witness.
Xyon considered attempting to move the wounded out of the path of destruction. However, he quickly thought better of it. He was half the size of most of the soldiers, and moving them would only put him at risk and likely end in failure. The torrent was thankfully not coming this way. His relief was short-lived. Xyon felt Mayve before he saw her; this time, there was no controlling the terror. He pulled a flute out of his side pouch and started to play and applied his magic a meter before him. As he did, he added a purr to further layer the magic and fortify it. He made a solid wall of heat that shimmered into sight between the metal and the tent behind him to protect the surgery. Even with this protecting wall, he felt the cold that her presence created.
Mayve strode through the encampment. Second born princess of the Empire, nearly godlike in power. She wore nothing but gems adhered to her skin; she was rare among the fae. The only others like her were her two brothers, Mal and Mavis. They were the children of the Emperor of Solari and the Empress of Dathari. Her features were a meld of the two species. She had warm, tanned skin, with long, white, freely flowing hair down to her knees. Xyon didn’t attempt to study her further, she was a fickle mistress and well-known for toying with her victims and he’d rather not have her remember him staring at her. Instead, he shut his eyes and waited.
His shield wavered as Mayve unleashed a long croon. The temperature plummeted and ice flowed out to twist the ground below them killing everything around. He heard the pained yelps as the metal of the new fae froze on their skin. Xyon cautiously peered out with an eye. The metal torrent had crashed into the ground, and the three had crumpled into a heap. Frozen solid. Xyon watched intrigued as despite the lack of obvious noise the metal sluggishly crawled out to over the ground. Mayve strode toward them, her croon grower louder; from around her, a blizzard roared through the rift gate. He cringed, thinking how it would affect the other side’s metal fae.
One of the females moved, clearly using the purr to use magic, given that Xyon doubted she could sing in such frigid temperatures. Large flakes of metal fell off her skin. She reached back, and metal flowed off her hair, revealing it to be a golden-hued blonde. Instead of a howl, she sang a warm alto that defied the cold and that resonated in his bones. The metal from her hair flowed into thin shards and, with a flick of her hand, shot toward Mayve.
The elder fae spun, swatting several shards away, only for a pair to shoot up from the ground and into Mayve’s calves. Her shriek made Xyon wince. The blizzard turned into hail and ice which impacted with his shield, turned to water and quickly soaked him through it. Mayve reached down and shattered the metal holding her in place. She strode toward the female. The harsh strikes of her hands sent arcs of ice shaped like thin crescent moons through the air at her.
Metal sluggishly rose from the ground as the blonde frantically backpedalled. Her defence barely held together. Mayve snarled and charged the female. The princess made a rather satisfying thud when she hit the ground as the alien male that Xyon had healed tackled her pinning her to the ground and wrapping his large hands around her neck. The muscles in his arms burgled as he squeezed.
Xyon didn’t dare move. He couldn’t warn the male, and he was reasonably sure if he tried to help Mayve, she’d skin him later. That was just the sort of thing Mayve would do. He could only cringe away as Mayve drove her claws into the male’s guts. The steel-haired male roared in pain as she flung him away with a massive gust of frozen wind. He crashed into the ground but was cradled by the steel, so he didn’t go far. Mayve rolled to avoid the blonde’s attempt to stab her in the head. She lunged up and ripped the female’s throat open with long claws of ice. Blood gushed forth briefly before she fell gracelessly.
The male screamed and tried to stand, but his blood soaked the ground he shot at her with a punch. Mayve backhanded him, and he fell to the ground in a heap. She sneered at him before turning on her heel and striding through the rift gate. As soon as she was gone, a few other Solari came out of hiding be it tents or large stones and started to play flutes. The combined magic summoned up enough heat to drive the cold created by Mayve’s presence back toward the rift gate. The second female thawed and crawled to the male; she grabbed his shoulder and shook him gently. Then she started to shriek and cry in her own language.
Xyon didn’t understand a word of it, but he ceased playing his shield fell as he stashed his flute away. He ran over, putting a gentle hand on the wailing female’s shoulder, and attempted to push the male onto his back. The female quickly helped, only to whine and cry, her tears flowing down her cheeks as she pushed at the wounds on his stomach. With these, Xyon knew he couldn’t just patch them. He pressed down hard on one and yelled over his shoulder, “I need this one in the tent!”
“Xyon,” a Datharian nurse started to scold him.
The chief surgeon emerged from the tent. “We have our own to tend to.”
Xyon glared at the chief surgeon. He wanted to aid the aliens, thankfully, instead of having to argue the point. The General of this army, Vyren, came staggering through the rift gate. He looked at Xyon and then to the glowering chief surgeon. “Get the hostages’ aid,” he ordered and stormed toward Xyon, “I’ll help.”
They ended up dragging the female along with them. Xyon took command of the medical tent and set about putting the male back together again.
