Raising a Hero

Chapter 40

The moment my magic pushed past the barrier of his skin I instantly understood what he meant by bone. Jagged webs, branches, and sticks of wayward bone growths lined the surface of his bones, stabbing and crowding into the surrounding tissues, even taking up the place of some in the less mobile sections of his body, such as his rib cage. There were connections of bones invading into his joints, but they were smaller than the majority of the growths, and I concluded that these were where the other healers had chosen to trim down the bone with their limited magic.

The pain he must be feeling currently aside, this man must have dealt with all the pain of these extra bone growths being broken away as well. There were even nubs threatening to invade his organs.

Thankfully, his cranial cavity was completely smooth, so his brain was intact. However, the bone around his optical nerves had webbed and spiked outward, cutting into the delicate nerves. It was a miracle he could see at all.

My insides ached the more I saw. I expected with the pain it must cause to move, his muscles would be atrophied. But instead I found them relatively in shape, telling me that he had endured the pain of being stabbed with bone, or even bone breaking from the movement, to exercise, or at the very least not being stopped from regular day to day movement.

The next problem was his kidneys. They were damaged and weakened. It only toke me a moment to figure out why. When the healers had broken off the extra bone, they couldn't just take the extra bone material out of the body. The skin served as a natural barrier against the transference of material, which meant they would have had to broken down the bone into dust. The excess calcium had created deposits in the kidneys, which would have filtered the calcium rich blood. If I broke off too many bones at once it would clog his kidneys and kill him. Even if done moderately, too many years of overloading his system with calcium was going to kill him anyways.

"Oh dear," I murmured, not fully aware of my mouth moving. "You're a right mess, sir."

He chuckled, and his breath tickled just barely across my hand. It amazed me he could have any measure of humor in this situation.

"That I am."

"Has anyone tried to heal your kidneys?"

"Kidneys?"

"The organs that filter the blood."

"I know what they are, but no one has said anything yet. The healer the king sent only did anything about my bones."

"They were incompetent. Breaking off bone and dissolving it into the blood has damaged your kidneys."

I continued to explain to him what I had found, opening my eyes to give my head a break before I dove in for the next examination.

As I talked, his green eyes watched my mouth, not really focused, probably because all he saw was a darkened, moving shape upon the pale circle of my face.

"I think if I cut your skin I can move the excess calcium out that way," I said, my insides shivering from the anxiety that I was suggesting surgery even as I thought it on the spot. "Though it won't fix the root of the problem. I think what you have is a genetic disease that deprives your body of the ability to make the...the proteins or chemicals that tell your bones to stop growing."

"Then why have I not grown like a giant?" he asked.

"Because that kind of growth is controlled by growth hormones. It has to do with the growth plates, which solidify after those growth hormones aren't in play anymore. Your bones are growing without order or meaning. They've essentially gone wild. Hormones aren't the problem."

He licked his lips. "I'm afraid I don't understand all the words you are using, but I think I have the gist. There is something vital missing from my blood."