Awbil was already on the bed when he entered the room. The disease had progressed so much that she couldn’t control her hover-chair anymore, even with a neural link, and so a nurse was in charge of bringing her to her appointments, which meant that she was always on time now. Ivol briefly glanced at the info-server, but instead of reading the information like he usually did at the start of each session, he turned towards Awbil and started massaging her body, starting with her hands. As he worked, her bright pink eyes followed his every move. They were the only part of her body that could still move. From the tip of her toes to the top of her head, bald except for patches of her blue hair, everything had turned dull yellow and was unyielding as hard rubber. Of course, all her limin were dead now, and for an orlian, there could be no greater punishment. Her mouth was forced open as several pieces of equipment helped her breathe and take in nutrients, all in an attempt to keep her brain alive. 

With his acute senses, Ivol could tell that the petrification was growing each second. She would die today, probably within the hour. He kept uselessly massaging her unyielding limbs. It was a futile effort. Nothing he did now would help her or make the petrification process less uncomfortable. He stopped and floated back a step. He met her gaze and held it. If she could still move her mouth, she would probably have smiled. She always smiled for no reason, and the smiles were hardly ever real. Each one felt like an attempt at joy or a prayer for hope. Each time she was late, and he was forced to go find her, it was all an attempt at something, a reach for levity she could no longer truly feel but couldn’t give up on. 

Ivol watched as her left eye, bloodshot from being forced open by petrified eyelids, also began to yellow and harden. In a matter of seconds, there was no longer any white of the sclera or pink of pupils. Just hard, yellow, hilon. He could immediately see the panic she was feeling in her other eye. It seemed he would have to watch her die. She had no living relatives. Her one sister had passed a local month before Ivol arrived on the planet. 

Ivol tilted his head at a slight tingle at the base of his skull. It was so minuscule that he might have missed it if he had not been so still and in tune with his mind. He was going to ignore it, but then he felt it again. He glanced back at Awbil, and the desperation in her eye was unmistakable. Even as she stared hard at him, the edges of the whites of her remaining eye were already yellowing.

“What is it, Sof. Awbil?” He asked, establishing a mind link. The tingling he’d felt was her attempting to use her ridiculously weak orlian telepathic abilities to try to talk to him. He wanted to ignore it, as he wasn’t sure what good it would do him to hear her dying words. But knowing her, she wouldn’t stop until she got a reaction out of him, or… died trying.

“I can’t speak anymore.” She sent back. Her unskilled and untrained mind could not control what was shared. 

All her emotions poured into Ivol. The immensity of her pain overwhelmed him. It was deeply emotional, filled with sadness, fear, and regrets. He could also feel the facade of lightheartedness she was hoping to portray, as well as the deeply buried resentment she had towards him. He quickly cut the link.

Ivol shook his head several times and tried to reassert his mental balance. His body trembled, and green sparks bounced between his limbs. After a few moments, his mind reasserted itself, and Awbil’s feelings, along with his own, settled beneath the surface as they were supposed to. He shook himself out one more time, then reestablished the mind link, this time carefully moderating what he received from Awbil to surface thoughts.

“Are you ok?” She asked, and the concern she felt transferred to his mind with nothing more. “I’ve never seen you react like that before.”

“I’m fine. I made a mistake with the initial link. It was pulling too deeply from your mind.” He made sure only his words and no emotion were transmitted.

“Oh, sorry. This was the only way I could think to speak with you. I have all these tubes shoved down my mouth.” An attempt at levity

“Yes, your vocal cords are also petrified.” An unnecessary statement.

“Right.” A wave of despair. “I just wanted to thank you. You know I’ve been deliberately making things hard for you. I guess I needed something to rebel against or a way to express my frustration.”

Ivol remained silent and allowed her to speak. He didn’t even know how he would respond if he wanted to. 

“I worked at a flower shop. I liked the feel of petals on my limin… For my sister and I, flowers and grass created the most wonderful sensations. I wanted to feel a limin-aura one more time.”

Her mental voice was weakening, and Ivol watched her pupil turn yellow.

“I was mostly happy, but I guess I didn’t know what I was missing, so I couldn’t really compare… I admit I’ve been a bit envious of you, so I teased more than necessary… I… Sorr… Thn… you.”

The mental connection cut like the snapping of a cord. Ivol turned to the info-server and logged her time of death. He also began documenting her final moments. Information about the final body parts petrified and the speed of petrification could be helpful for future cases. He had all the data in his head and only needed to input it. Yet, his fingers did not move. His eye remained stuck at the time of death. The numbers, lit in a subtle blue glow, seemed to stare back at him. Death. He turned back to Awbil’s body. Death. He stared at the corpse and could not look away. Death. A lump of hilon, the shape of Awbil. Strands of blue hair still falling. Tubes forced into the mouth. 

He, too, would die one day, but it would not look like this. He knew that with certainty. Unless he was met by some freak accident, his death would be forecasted for at least a year by signals from his brain. He would have enough time to get his final account in order. Enough time to do anything he’d put off. When the moment came, he would report to a raigol, where his peers and offspring, if he had any, would visit him to say their final goodbyes. He would lay his body in a prepared casket, then fade away as the krynor within his body lost power. His body would be melted down, made into a sculpture and plank honoring his greatest achievements, and placed among others in the spiraling gallery of the raigol. It would be a natural thing that most sophonts were bound to experience. It would not be the horrid fight against one’s own body. It would not be to disease. It would never be so ugly and unbridled.

The shaking started in his hands, then worked its way to the rest of his body. His gaze was fixed on the corpse as the moments he’d spent with the woman flashed through his mind with perfect recollection. The way she had laughed so heartily and smiled when they’d first met. The petrification had only been on her toe then, and she had full confidence she would recover. As time passed, the smiles became more forced, her voice raised to an unnatural pitch of feigned joy. The lateness to appointments, the lapses when her true feelings showed. Each moment highlighted her fragility.

He recalled when she compared his metal body to the stiffness which the disease forced on her. She used to joke that she was becoming more like an Iclaxian: cold and unfeeling. But in that, she was wrong. Ivol felt. All iclaxians’ felt, but feelings could be kept at bay until a more appropriate time to digest them was available. He had done just that. His priority was her treatment. The healing of her body. He’d made all the best choices available for him to do that. He rigorously vetted and studied any potential cures brought to him. He checked and re-checked all information to ensure that he missed nothing in her treatment. He’d wanted her to live. Her death was not his fault, but irrational guilt hammered at his mind. What could he have done differently? He had seen many patients die. Some genetic weaknesses could not be overcome. There was no reason to feel so strongly about the death. It was not his fault. Rationality should have asserted itself, but it did not. Still, his mind reeled. 

“Awbil.” His voice was filled with static. His body trembled so much, he could no longer keep himself afloat, and for the first time in thousands of years, he fell to the ground, body parts piled atop each other like a heap of scrap metal.

He stopped fighting, stopped trying to rationalize his emotions back to their proper place, and let himself feel. Sadness and guilt were the primary emotions. He sat with each of them. He may not have been able to stop the course of the disease, but perhaps he could have indulged her flights of fancy more. Made her more comfortable mentally and emotionally. He hadn’t even tried. The next emotion was a different type of guilt, which disconcerted him more than any other because of the sheer irrationality of it. For the first time, he questioned why he would live over a thousand times the life span of Obil’s even at her healthiest. What sort of power and coincidence stacked the cards so unfairly.

His body shuddered on the ground. His mind became too overwhelmed and forcefully shut down. As Ivol faded into forced sleep, his eyes lingered on Awbil.