Chapter 41 : The Time of All Living Beings – To Be an Human 3

The man who followed Rovan was named Thomas, and he had wanted to become a healer since the age of nine.

When a fever swept through his village, his younger brother had been among the first to fall ill. The local physician arrived too late, carrying a leather bag that smelled of herbs and old wine. Thomas remembered standing beside the bed while the physician prepared his instruments, watching his brother's lips turn pale and his mother's hands twist the edge of her apron.

His brother survived.

The physician did not perform a miracle. He gave the boy medicine, forced him to drink water, and stayed through the night to monitor his breathing. Thomas remembered the moment his brother opened his eyes the next morning and asked for food. His mother began to cry, and the physician sat down beside the stove with the weary expression of a man who had done something ordinary and was grateful that it had worked.

Thomas never forgot him.

Years later, he became a physician himself. He studied in a city where the streets were crowded and the hospitals were filled with people who had traveled hundreds of miles in search of treatment. He learned to recognize the signs of infection, to set broken bones, and to perform difficult procedures while exhausted patients screamed beneath his hands. He learned how much could be accomplished with patience and knowledge, and how often both were insufficient.

He was a good physician.

He did not charge poor patients when they could not afford treatment. He stayed late when a child's fever refused to break. He remembered the names of people he had treated, and he sometimes returned to their homes weeks later to make sure they were recovering. His colleagues trusted his judgment, and his patients spoke of him with a gratitude that embarrassed him.

At first, that gratitude embarrassed him because he did not know what to do with it. Then he began to look forward to it.

He liked the moment when a patient who had been told there was no hope sat up in bed and asked when they could go home. He liked seeing families gather around a recovered child, touching the child's face as though they had to confirm that the life before them was real. He liked the way people looked at him afterward, their relief turning into admiration, their fear giving way to the conviction that he had arrived at precisely the moment he was needed.

He told himself that their gratitude was unimportant.

He remembered it anyway.

Thomas married a woman named Clara, who ran a small school and had little patience for the way he neglected his meals. She kept a jar of honey beside the stove because he refused to drink bitter medicine without it, and she began packing food for him whenever he was called away in the middle of the night. He often returned home to find her asleep at the table, a book open beside her and a candle burned down to a puddle of wax.

He loved her. He loved the ordinary evenings they spent together, the way she read aloud while he cleaned his instruments, and the way she tapped the table with her finger whenever she was trying to remember a name. When he was home, he tried to be the husband she deserved.

But he was often away.

Whenever an epidemic struck, whenever a flood brought injured villagers into the city, or whenever a wealthy patron requested his presence, Thomas left without hesitation. Clara rarely complained, and he interpreted her silence as understanding. He did not notice that she had stopped telling him about the small events of her day until he came home one evening and found that she had begun telling them to a neighbor instead.

He promised to make more time for her.

He meant it.

Then a fever broke out in the eastern district, and Thomas spent the next three weeks sleeping in the hospital.

The fever was unlike the illnesses he had treated before. It spread quickly, killed the weak first, and left even healthy adults struggling to breathe. The hospital filled within days. The physicians argued over the cause, the city officials argued over whether to close the markets, and families crowded outside the gates, begging for someone to examine their children.

Thomas worked until his hands shook.

He went from bed to bed, measuring doses, cleaning wounds, and explaining to terrified relatives why there was no room for another patient. Some people recovered. Others died despite everything he could do. He learned to recognize the particular silence that followed a d

eath, the way a room seemed to lose its purpose once the patient inside it stopped breathing.

He hated that silence.

He hated it so much that he began to treat every death as a personal failure. If a patient died, he reviewed the treatment in his mind, searching for the decision he should have made differently. If no mistake could be found, he searched for a possibility he had overlooked. If the illness had simply progressed too far, he imagined what might have happened had the patient arrived a day earlier.

At first, the habit made him a better physician. He studied harder, questioned his assumptions, and refused to accept a diagnosis merely because it was convenient. He found small improvements in treatment and saved people who might otherwise have died.

But there were never enough victories to satisfy him.

Every patient he saved became evidence that more could be saved. Every patient he lost became a debt he believed he had failed to pay. When other physicians admitted that a case was hopeless, Thomas heard surrender. When nurses urged him to rest, he heard indifference. When families thanked him for doing everything he could, he wondered whether they would still thank him if they knew how many people he had been unable to save.

He began to speak of his work as a duty that no one else could fulfill.

He did not say this arrogantly. He said it with the weary sincerity of a man who had convinced himself that his exhaustion was proof of his devotion. He stayed at the hospital long after his shift ended, taking over cases from physicians who had gone home. He refused to delegate difficult decisions, convinced that if he allowed someone else to make a mistake, the patient would be the one to suffer.

His colleagues admired his dedication until they began to fear it.

A young physician named Elias once advised him to stop treating every death as a failure. Elias was capable, patient, and honest about his limitations. He had lost patients of his own and learned to grieve without letting grief dictate every decision that followed.

Thomas disliked the advice.

"You speak as though accepting a death makes it easier," he said.

"No," Elias replied. "I speak as though refusing to accept it makes you dangerous."

Thomas remembered the words for years, mostly because he believed they were unfair.

He was not dangerous. He was the man who stayed when others left, who gave away his money, who worked through the night, who knew the names of patients nobody else remembered. If he sometimes became angry when people refused his treatment, it was because he had seen what happened when people made foolish choices. If he sometimes ignored his wife's requests, it was because there were lives at stake. If he occasionally dismissed another physician's judgment, it was because he could not bear to watch a preventable death occur before his eyes.

He could justify every decision separately.

The trouble was that his decisions began to form a pattern.

One evening, a young woman arrived at the hospital with a severe infection. Thomas examined her and concluded that she needed an operation. The procedure carried considerable risk, but without it she would almost certainly die. The woman refused. She had a small child at home, and the thought of dying on an operating table frightened her more than the illness itself.

Thomas explained the risks. He called for another physician to speak with her. He asked whether she understood that refusing treatment might leave her child without a mother. The woman began to cry, but she continued to refuse.

Thomas saw her fear as an obstacle to be overcome.

He told himself that he was not asking her to trust him for his own sake. He was asking her to trust the knowledge he had spent his life acquiring. He had watched people refuse treatment and die. He had seen families torn apart by decisions made in panic. He could not allow a frightened woman to destroy her own life because she did not understand what was happening to her.

When she still refused, he arranged for the operation to proceed without her consent.

The procedure was difficult. She survived, though the recovery was painful, and her child was brought to the hospital to see her. When the woman learned what Thomas had done, she would not look at him. She thanked the nurses who cared for her, accepted food from Elias, and turned away whenever Thomas entered the room.

He told himself that her anger was understandable.

He also told himself that she was alive.

For a time, that was enough.

Then his wife became ill.

Clara had been coughing for weeks, but she had hidden the worst of it from him. By the time Thomas noticed how much weight she had lost, the illness had advanced. He brought her to the hospital, examined her himself, and called in every specialist he knew. He changed her treatment repeatedly, chasing each new possibility with the desperate intensity of a man trying to solve a problem that had no solution.

Clara endured

the examinations and the medicines. She let him sit beside her bed, and she held his hand when his fingers trembled. She never blamed him for being unable to cure her.

That made him feel worse.

One night, after a long and painful treatment, she asked him to stop.

Thomas stared at her.

"The medicine is helping," he said, although he no longer knew whether it was true.

"I am tired."

"We can try something else tomorrow."

"I know." She paused to catch her breath. "But I don't want tomorrow to be another day in which you try to save me."

He began explaining the possible treatments, the complications they might prevent, and the small chance that her condition could improve. He spoke as he had spoken to hundreds of frightened patients, laying out the facts and guiding them toward the decision he believed was best.

Clara listened until he finished.

Then she asked him to sit with her.

Not examine her. Not consult another physician. Not find a new medicine or search for an answer in a book.

Just sit with her.

Thomas pulled a chair beside the bed. For several minutes, he held her hand while the candle flickered on the table. She told him that she missed the evenings when he came home early enough to eat with her. She told him that she had begun leaving the lamp burning because she liked imagining that he might walk through the door before it went out. She told him about a student who had learned to read and a neighbor who had brought her a basket of apples.

Thomas listened.

He wanted to tell her that he would make everything right. He wanted to promise that she would recover, that they would return home together, and that he would never again spend so many nights away from her. He wanted to offer her a future because he did not know how to offer her anything else.

Instead, he sat beside her until she fell asleep.

Clara died three days later.

Thomas continued working after the funeral. He returned to the hospital because the patients were still there, because the city still needed physicians, and because he did not know what to do with the hours that had once belonged to his wife. He became even more devoted to his work, and people praised him for refusing to surrender to grief.

He accepted their praise.

Years later, when he was old enough that his hands sometimes shook while he worked, Thomas was called to treat a child who had been injured in an accident. The boy's father stood beside the bed, pale and trembling, asking whether his son would survive. Thomas examined the child and recognized that the injuries were too severe.

He could attempt a dangerous procedure, but the boy would probably die regardless.

For a moment, Thomas felt the familiar urge to begin. There were instruments to prepare, assistants to summon, possibilities to consider. His mind was already constructing a plan, searching for a narrow path through a situation that might not have one.

Then he saw the father's face.

He remembered Clara asking him to sit beside her.

Thomas explained the child's condition honestly. He told the father what could be done to ease the boy's pain, what signs they should expect, and how long they might have together. The father began to cry. Thomas remained beside him, answering his questions until there were no more questions to ask.

The boy died before dawn.

Thomas did not leave the room immediately. He sat with the father while the morning light crept through the windows, and for once he did not search the events of the night for a decision that might have changed the ending. He did not tell himself that the boy's death was acceptable, nor did he pretend that there was nothing more he could have done. He simply remained with the man who had lost his son.

When he finally returned home, he found a jar of honey in the cupboard.

It had been there for years, untouched since Clara's death. Thomas stood with the jar in his hand, remembering how she used to set it beside the stove whenever he returned late from the hospital. He had always taken a spoonful before going to bed, sometimes thanking her, sometimes too tired to speak.

He sat at the kitchen table until the room grew dark.

Thomas died many years later, still practicing medicine, still respected by his colleagues and remembered with gratitude by countless patients. Some called him a saint. Others remembered the physician who had ignored their wishes because he believed he knew what was best for them. Both groups had met the same man.

Elden left the life with the taste of honey on his tongue.

He had known kindness before. He had inhabited creatures that protected their young, shared food, and risked their lives for others. But Thomas had shown him something different: how a virtue could grow until it consumed the person who possessed it, not because the virtue was false, but because the person could no longer bear to let it exist without him.

Thomas had wanted to save lives.

Eventually, he had needed to be the one who saved them.

And even then, he had remained a good man in many ways. He had comforted the dying, fed the poor, and spent his strength on strangers. His goodness had never been entirely an illusion. That was why its shadow had been so difficult for him to see.

By this time, he had stopped expecting human beings to become comprehensible once he discovered what they wanted.

The human lives continued.

Some were long enough for Elden to forget the sensation of entering them. Others ended before he had learned the names of the people around him.

The more Elden experienced, the less useful it became to divide them into categories.

A person could be brave in battle and cowardly at home. A man could love his family and still ruin their lives. Someone could perform an act of extraordinary kindness and spend the next ten years resenting the person they had helped.

The same person could be generous in the morning and selfish in the evening, honest when honesty cost nothing and deceitful when the truth threatened something they cherished. Their actions did not always reveal a hidden essence waiting to be uncovered. Sometimes they revealed what the person had feared that day, what they had been taught, what they had lost, what they hoped to gain, or what they could no longer bear to face.

They learned, then forgot. They changed, then clung to the habits of their former selves. They recognized their mistakes and repeated them under different names. They could understand the suffering of another person perfectly well and still choose to cause it, provided that the suffering remained distant enough from the thing they wanted.

The world was never simple.

Human life was never simple.

And the more lifetimes Elden experienced, the less certain he became that he had ever truly... understood either of them.

At some point, Elden stopped thinking of the experience as a trial.

The word implied a challenge with a beginning and an end, an obstacle that could be overcome with enough effort.

But what he was experiencing was no obstacle.

It was an entire world of existence, compressed into a single consciousness.

And the harder he tried to understand, the less he understood himself.

Little by little,Elden had become part of the world known as Elden.