The Priesthood

Again, he saw it—the same dream he had seen since the first day of the simulations. He was tied to a bed, and faceless men surrounded him. He tries to move but cannot; he tries to yell for help, but only screams come out. He pleads for mercy, but there is none to be had.

One of them approaches with a rapier and then slowly inserts it into Kanrel’s stomach; he screams in agony and his body trembles. The man pulls the sword away, and the others come flocking closer, inspecting the blood pouring out of the gaping wound.

They touch it; they put their fingers inside as he screams in agony; then again he is stabbed, and all happens over again.

Then he would wake up, his body drenched in sweat, panting, and gasping for air. Fear made his whole body tremble as he got up to walk around the room to try to forget the things he just saw again. When will these nightmares end?

The past week has been hell for all of them. Lack of sleep made them all make more mistakes, and when Kanrel would see another novice like him, he could see the exhaustion on their faces. One could probably smell their desolation.

When would they wholly break? Or would stubbornness take them through the pain and make them live through these days of agony? Kanrel wasn’t sure if he’d make it—not another day, nor another week.

Twenty-one times, he had laid on the bed in the simulation room. Most of those times, he had gone through pain that would leave him in shock for a while afterward. And seeing the others go through the same thing didn’t comfort him, as he could so easily see himself in them. Even Yirn had begun to break; even he screamed in pain now.

But now they had survived the first week, and it was time for the lecture that Professor Forsvarn had promised to give them.

Yet every early morning would be the same; at four in the morning, they were at the doors of the hospital, ready to get in. Then the doors would open, and the professor would welcome them back. Her face showed no tiredness—none of the things or feelings that the novices went through.

This made Kanrel wonder if she was more broken than all of them combined; he couldn’t imagine just how many times she had herself been on the bed or how many times she had performed on someone else.

In the simulation complex, the chairs were organized in such a manner that they’d face one direction—the door, which they all used to enter. Forsvarn would stay by the door and look as the novices took a seat; she then closed the door and began her lecture:

"I am most pleased that I’ve not had to experience even a scenario of being bothered by my colleagues. For this, I thank you. But…”

“Given the data that I’ve received, I’ve noticed a common theme among you all: Most of you would work on the patients alone, even when the patient had, let’s say, a sword wound in their stomach."

Kanrel couldn’t help but place his hand on his stomach. He felt a little sick remembering the pain he had gone through, and he wasn’t the only one who subconsciously placed their hand on their own stomach. The vast majority of them did so.

"Sure, in most cases you’ve managed to deal with this wound; but we have to remember that in a real situation, you wouldn't have that much time to deal with the wound a real human patient might have.”

“So I would advise you all to work in teams instead of working alone. Sure, you may choose one of you to perform the ‘surgery', but the rest of you should also have a job to do during the surgery."

"In a real situation, there would be someone who would keep their attention on the patient and how he or she is doing; then this person would inform the others if there is a change in the patient’s well-being.”

“There would also be someone who would make sure that there was visibility inside and around the wound—one who would keep the blood at bay and shine light at the wound. One who would help the ‘main surgeon’ with the surgery, perhaps working on minor things and then assisting when help is needed.”

“And lastly, someone who records everything down; during a real surgery, there is no magical bed to record everything that goes down, nor would there be my colleagues who would go through the data.”

“The collection of the data is something that, during a real surgery, you ought to have someone do.

We are priests after all, and even in a setting where we might perform life-saving surgeries, our primary job is still the collection of data."

She spoke as the novices wrote down notes on the things she had just said. She then conjured another one of their slightly diabolic smiles.

"This is just beginning. The last week was just the easy part; now begins the difficult one. The wounds, injuries, and diseases that you just had to deal with were mostly minor ones and more or less easy for a competent priest to deal with.”

“I won’t tell you what you might find in your simulations at this moment; at the end of the month, during the review of your time here, I will elaborate on what you might’ve found.”

“I’d like to say that I am sorry in advance, but I really am not."

She peered at her students, basking in the little changes in facial expressions she might see on their faces.

"Now, who of you might want to share with me how to fix a broken arm?"

The rest of the lecture they spent with her asking them questions about the different kinds of things they ran into during their simulations; she would ask them for the codes they might’ve used. Then she would give them ideas on how to improve those codes.

Then she moved one of the simulation beds into the room and commanded one of the patients to lay down on it. Alone, she cast the code, which then allowed her to begin the simulation. The novices came closer to observe as she placed her hand on the patient’s forehead.

A simulation had begun; it was a scenario where the patient had many of their bones fractured. Screams of agony filled the room, and then she began to work as she explained the things that she did.

With efficient and quick codes, she stopped bleeding in multiple places at once, then moved on to the fractures, fixing them as well, and then fixed the things that were left. Like scratched skin.

All this took only a few minutes, but she spent almost an hour reviewing her actions, codes, and decisions.

Most of the day was spent like this, and at the end of the lecture, she decided to show them mercy and allowed them to go rest. Even though Professor Forsvarn seemed callous toward her students and her patients, she was still fair and very professional.

Kanrel chose to spend the rest of the day locked in his own room, going through the things that he had learned just today, for they seemed far more substantial than the things they had learned in the past week.

Of course, the hands-on experience itself was important for the novices to quickly realize how they should treat their patients, as they would, in the end, have their lives in their hands.

It was, as Forsvarn had put it, just the beginning. And even then, he felt out of his depth. And if things were to get even more complicated with even more painful experiences, he didn’t know if he could handle any of it.

If he’d be able to even understand the things that he might learn; if he would be able to learn anything at all.

He chose to go to sleep much earlier. And the next morning would start the same way the previous one had: with a nightmare.

Getting more sleep didn’t really help as much as one would think. In fact, Kanrel felt more tired than the previous morning. Yet he again found himself at the simulation complex, sharing one of the rooms with his team.

Another grueling day of simulations would begin, and at the start of the first one, they could all see a noticeable difference in difficulty. They tried to work as a team, but it ended in failure, so they tried again with another patient, and even that ended in failure. The bed would first flash white, then yellow, then green, and in the end, it would flash red.

A whole day of failures with not much improvement, though one day they managed to get yellow, meaning that after a couple of failures during the simulation they had managed to succeed during their last try.

There was a lot they had to figure out, so they spent a considerable amount of time finding out the things that had gone wrong during the different simulations, and the most lacking thing was their teamwork, not to mention their knowledge about how to treat some of the more complicated injuries and wounds.

The notes taken during each simulation became essential for their improvement, and the next day there was already a significant improvement. More simulations ended in yellow, but most of the tries still ended in red.

On the fourth day, most were yellow, and they had a few greens. And a week after that, about half were yellow and half were green, not a single red one.

Their teamwork had improved a lot, and all of them knew more or less what to do in each role; of course, the patient would always suffer. And the pain from each simulation was greater than before.

Yirn had started screaming as loudly as everyone else while on the bed, and he no longer flashed his smile that often. Instead, he was as apathetic as everyone else; even he talked about the nightmares that he saw.

Uanna seemed the most tired; even when she would pray to the Angels for their mercy before each simulation, the pain they went through was the same; she would at times stare at Kanrel with hurt in her eyes as if she were accusing him of abandoning her.

Yvive no longer made crude jokes about the situation that they had found themselves in; her callousness during surgeries was gone, and she tried her best to not make any mistakes so that the patients wouldn’t have to go through much pain.

Wei had grown silent; she only spoke when they’d discuss the surgeries, though Kanrel would sometimes hear her mumbling to herself while fiddling with a necklace that she was always carrying.

For the two nobles, the pride was no longer there; it had been tortured out of them, but they were brave, as were the others. Kanrel hoped that they would persevere. They had to; if one of them broke, he thought that they all would break.

Perhaps this was compassion. Not a rational one, but one carved into each and every single one of them through pain and agony. Why would any one of them want to cause another the pain that they had just experienced? And would soon experience themselves...

When most of their simulations were successful, things got hard again. Their hope turned into ash again and again; they would have to learn what went wrong, think of better codes, and be even better at teamwork.

Just to realize that there was no more improvement. Or that the improvement was so slow that it was almost useless to discuss their failures and find things to improve upon.

Professor Forsvarn was successful in the things she wanted to teach them; now they were all cognizant of how little knowledge they really had. And she had succeeded in just two months.

This is how the rest of the month went by; now there was just one last month left. Would they survive or just break like the useless humans they were? Novices that didn’t know any better, that didn’t know enough, that didn’t know how little they truly knew. Would some of them learn to know even a little, or break before anything like that could happen…