ARCHIE

I received a memo from the healing council at the break of dawn summoning me for questioning. Another patient of mine was found dead in his room. His family claimed he died shortly after taking his medicines. This is the fifth death in the last two weeks, it’s getting worrisome. I have always prided myself with been a pretty good healer, so what in the world was going on now?

    At the council, I was informed that a panel will be set up to investigate the cause of death of my most recent diseased client. He was a royal from a very prominent family, and someone needed to be held accountable for his demise. After five deaths in a row, they needed to confirm the deaths weren’t as a result of negligence on my path.

    I was ordered me to submit all prescriptions and drug samples used during the treatment of my patients to the 1st healer for examination, as well as answer the questions that would be asked by the panel when it was set up. I wasn’t the only suspect, just the prime suspect.

    This was two Royals and 3 Electrics dying on my watch. After this mess, would a Royal ever be assigned to me again?

    For the past couple of days, Eve has been trying to make me feel better, but I just couldn’t stop worrying. It’s been about 2 weeks since she started treating Prince Luke, and there were already great signs of improvement. I was at his residence yesterday after Lady Vivian called saying her son was gaining consciousness and I had to see the good news for myself. Surprisingly, she had been right. My apprentice was doing a good job. I knew she was special right after the very first time I read her source. She was like nothing I had ever seen before. Even she didn’t seem to realise how gifted she was, probably because there were no other fellow apprentices in my household she could compare her gifts with. But I had worked with young healers before and could recognize great potential when I saw one.

    The Royals were watching her like a hawk ever since I assigned her a Royal patient, so were the Healers. With everything that had been going on with her, she already has enough on her plate.

    Not that being gifted was bad, I just didn’t want Megan justifying her reading of the girl. When Eve turns out to be the amazing healer which I know she would, Megan would beat her chest boasting about how she had been right about her source reading. 

    Yes, she has amazing healing abilities, but there are also royal traits in the kid. I have been watching her closely for the past three years, deliberately not administering any drugs to her, especially the Zeluxe pill, but she has shown no signs of decay. Even I couldn’t stay so long without the pill without a spike in my readings. I could do two years, but that was it. Her decay process should have started two years ago but it still hasn’t. The most surprising is that, she has stopped physically aging.

    She reminded me so much of my wife, Lily. Those were the times love had made me feel like nothing else mattered, but I have since woken up from that dream after Lily was taken away from me.

    I would never be able to forgive Megan f she played in all of these. I respected her as 1^st healer, but that was all there was to it. Lily was everything to me. When she died, there were no words to describe the emptiness I felt.

    I wished she had died at childbirth as I had been told. I mourn her death and the death of my unborn child but it would have been way easier to move on if I had never found out that I had been lied to about the circumstances surrounding her death.

    I lost Lily and my parents within the same year. My parents died much earlier within the year while Lily died later within the year. Although I missed them dearly, I rose to the responsibility as the heir to the family title and served selflessly. I mourned their loss for 20 years before I discovered that my wife was still alive. They had kept her in the breeding hall and turned her into a breeder

    I still remember that day like it was yesterday. It all began when Tory ran to my office that evening, telling me that she had been to the breeding hall and had seen Lily. If anybody else had told me that, I would have demanded for their head. But this was Tori, Lily’s handmaid for over fifty years, she knew how much I loved Lily and wouldn’t joke about something like that.   Without thinking about the implication of what I was told, I ran to the breeding hall demanding that Lily be brought out. It took Megan three days to admit Lily was there and another two weeks before Lily was finally brought to me.

    I didn’t know what to feel at the time. Those people had used my wife as a breeder for the past twenty years against her will. I had no idea of how many children she had birthed as a breeder or how many men had been forced on her.

    She wasn’t coherent at the time we found her, she had lost her mind to her misery, becoming an empty shell. I took her home and tried my possible best to heal her, but she died shortly after.

    Megan insisted that she did what she did for the greater good. She defended her actions in the general council by saying that only a few females could conceive and that it was selfish of me to monopolise that ability. She also claimed that her intentions had only been to serve the Uranian citizens who were desperately seeking children and that with the help of women like my wife, they were children in the halls for adoption. Unfortunately for me, the council ruled in her favour.

    I was too weak at the time to demand justice for what was done to my wife. It was true that our women rarely conceived. Child birth was a very rare occasion, which was why we protected the babies until they came off age. But the real issue was that Lily wasn’t a slave or criminal who no longer had any rights, she was a healer from a very prestigious family, but against her will, and without the consent of her husband, she was subjected to an unfair treatment just because of her ability to bear children. Megan had no right to forcefully detain her, but I had been too much of a coward to insist on that.

    I took depressants for ten years after that to numb my mind. I chose not to deal with the situation. When I came to my senses, I applied again to the council, seeking their permission to reopen the case, but they rejected my plea. They said that her parent made no complaints to the council and had been aware of their daughter’s situation the entire time.

    I confronted my in-laws, but they sent me away saying that their daughter had died long ago and they didn’t want to revisit sad memories. I lost all trust in the government ever since.

    3 months into my wife’s pregnancy, my parents died. The coroner declared that their death was a suicide. The night before they were found dead in their chambers, we were planning our family vacation trip. Mom already had possible names for her unborn grandchild, so believing that they killed themselves was very difficult for me. Lily had the hardest time accepting it and kept insisting that the council hand over their bodies to us so we could perform another autopsy, but they refused. I was worried about her health and the health of our unborn child, so I convinced her to let it go. The council declared that their bodies would be used for research purposes. Painfully, we signed the agreement papers. Suicide was a taboo, and because of it, they would not be getting the traditional burial that they deserved.

Throughout this entire ordeal, I kept reminding myself that the council was fair. It had always been fair. That thought kept me sane.  But ever since I saw what was done to my wife, my life has been filled with regret. I loathed myself for not fighting for them. Sometimes, when I was alone, I entertained thoughts of killing myself, but never pulled if off mainly because of cowardice. I felt like a complete failure.

Each time I attended an outing ceremony all I could think of was, this might be Lily’s child. She was in that hall for 20 years. That thought hunted me until I stopped attending the events altogether.  

    I thought of adopting a child a couple of times. A lot of well to do families did, but I discouraged myself each time. I knew that the reason I wanted a child was because of my guilt and guilt was no reason to have a child.

    When I began investigating if similar things happened to other families, I realized that Lily wasn’t the only one with a similar end. There were a lot of other families who claimed that their daughters or wives never returned after being admitted to the birthing hall, not even their bodies were returned to them for a proper burial, a few said that they found out much later that they had been turned to breeders.

    This experience opened my eyes to a very painful truth, and it was that this system was built on falsehood. The council was a colossal fraud and no one was bold enough to do anything about it. In simple terms, we were all slaves to the council Parasite or not. The only difference between us and parasites is that we were not aware it.