Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Adventurer who won't take a life. But also knows which bodyparts most beings "can live without"
"What are you gonna do?" the sellsword sneers. His ankles are tied together, and his wrists likewise fastened — behind him, in a loop around one of the vertical beams supporting the stable's roof. "You're a healer. What, are you going to cry on me, tell me I can be better?"
"No," Lara says. "Not that."
"Oho." The sneer turns nastier. "Feminine wiles, is it?"
"Not that, either." She puts her knapsack down, a little distance away where it's safe from any attempt to kick at it, and methodically unpacks: a copper wand, jars of catalysts and reagents, a stack of auspicious talismans in the form of inscribed metal discs, each with a hole punched through it; her robes have special fasteners scattered across them, collar and cuffs and across the body's meridians, to which the talismans can be fastened in constellations to suit the task at hand. "Consider the owlbear."
"You don't look like any owlbear I ever saw."
"The owlbear," Lara says patiently, "is one of the clearest and most familiar examples of a creature about which we can say a wizard did it. There is no naturally occurring combination of bird and bear, no other point of comparison for it. A wizard originally made the owlbear, and its kind escaped and prospered in the world."
She sets out her little slate portable altar, puts candles at its corners, and lights each with a touch and a muttered word.
"It's delicate, specialist work, to fasten the head of an owl onto the body of a bear, and have it live," she says, contemplative. "Not to mention that first you need to compensate for the fact that, naturally, the necks of a bear and an owl are of rather different thickness. Genius work, really. Utterly bereft of discernible purpose, but brilliant."
The sellsword stirs restlessly, sullenly, knowing this is leading somewhere. Surely nowhere good, but at the same time, surely, she's a healer....
"To remove the living heads, however," she says, "is a trick astonishingly easy and well-known. There is a spell called Nolicar's Messless Vivisection, and it allows the separation of arbitrary parts of the body, without pain or injury, as though cleaved with the sharpest imaginable knife; and when the spell is ended, the nearest cleaved surfaces spring back together as though never parted."
She picks up the wand, and taps it lightly against the slate, carefully feels the weight and resonance of it in her hand.
"Nearest, but not necessarily correctly matched. Hence the need for the special work of connecting mismatched bones and nerves and veins and so forth. And if the parts are held too far apart, the reconnection will simply fail, which becomes...messy. But a man can live reasonably well with a buttock on top of his head, or his hands switched around with his feet, nipples for thumbs and thumbs for nipples. Or, to take the example of the owlbear: what if one were to take a man and a goose, and give the goose a penis instead of a head, on the end of its neck? Oh, the merriment a wizardly student can have!"
She pauses. "Of course," she adds, quieter, "as a sworn healer, I cannot countenance such injurious behaviour to geese. Nonetheless, sir—" She gestures precisely with the wand, then reaches out and gently plucks, meeting the sellsword's dread-stricken eyes— "I've got your nose."