About a short while ago, Areo Quinta returned with his soldiers.

  Dark, tall men, their physiques still well kept beneath their gear; dirty and foul smelling, the heavy fabric of their uniforms torn with scratches and holes.

  Bleeding and covered in bruises, their eyes weary, the eyes of men who hadn’t slept for days.

  “Na masnà de pegore stracàe.” (A flock of exhausted sheep.)

  The faces of men and women twisted with pain and exhaustion fill my stomach with ache.

  Sciarra has helped them maintain a good physique, but mental stress doesn’t disappear. Well, theoretically it does, but that’s not the point.

  …

  A touch of surprise hits me a moment later.

  What was that comment?

  Why am I making a joke in this situation?

  I move towards my tent ready to take on my new patients, as I walk past the soldiers tent I catch some particular dialogue coming from two men and a woman.

  “A jerk stole my food!” The woman was roughly the same age as me , tall, brown haired and pale.

  “Mine too!” Practically the opposite of the woman, blonde, small and blue eyes. At least ten years older than me.

  “Must have been lady Miserva.” The last man said, clearly in his mid-life crisis, it’s impossible to add more as his whole skin was completely burned.

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  I step into my tent and begin preparing my tools, spreading them out with manic precision across my desk, perfectly aligned and arranged one after the other in order of size.

  I switch on the lamps on two of the three wooden columns inside the tent, while removing the one on the third to use during my inspections. Near the folding door, there is a small cord that rings a tiny bell to signal that the doctor is accepting patients. I take a deep breath and pull the thin fiber—now, it really begins.

  Five minutes after ringing the bell, the first client knocks at my door, and without making him wait, I open the panel.

  “Good morning, doctor,” he says with difficulty, his mouth not closing properly, letting drops of blood and saliva fall onto my face.

  “Please,” I reply, wiping my face clean of the fluids while motioning toward the table in the center of the room.

  Inside my tent a man sits on the table, about six feet two, brown hair and around twenty-five or twenty-six years old, judging by the cheekbones and features on the right side of his face. Instinctively, I move my right hand toward my desk, reaching for the instrument at the end of my measuring setup but without losing eye contact with the patient, a long black rod that allows me to add forty centimeters of possible distance.

  I use my rod to properly touch the subject face softly, the wooden staff lets me raise the man head by the chin with the tip, then I move it to his ‘left cheek’ to explore the cut over the man's face.

  “I hope you do know that none of my tools will fix your face completely, after full healing you are still going to be disfigured.”

  The man's left side was completely torn open, teeth visible . What was left of the cheek was peeling off like loosening strings of a guitar.

  I grab a piece of artificial skin from my desk, prepared for situations like this. I take a quick look, eyeball the measurements, and roughly decide how much tissue I will need. Then I pick up a few other tools and, applying them on pre-fabricated electronic and mechanical components right next to them, I carefully use my small instruments to create the necessary circuits.

  What emerges is a small circular piece of metal, which I attach to the artificial skin. I approach the man, and with a steady, calm hand, I attempt to apply the replacement cheek.

  The application of the tissue involves placing the artificial skin against the inner part of the cheek, but first removing any remaining skin that was hanging, possibly cutting it away with scissors.

  The man squirmed like a pig, probably from the pain, and his moans only made me feel even more sorrow for him.

  Once finished I take a few steps back looking at the man's face.

  “Feeling better?”

  He puts a hand over his cheek caressing it as the white tissue takes a colour more similar to that of his skin.

  “Thanks…It’s…much better.” He looks at me with amazed eyes plain wide like I'm some kind of king.

  He jumps off the table and leaves quickly, but as he steps out of the tent he starts screaming out of happiness and pure joy pointing at me. “He fixed my cheek! This guy is a magician!”