The night she pushed her magic into the Camelia, Eirian dreamed of a world she didn't recognize and siblings she didn't have.
It was a world cast in shadow, dark but somehow luminous, hidden behind glittering veils of magic. It was a barren place where nothing grew, but magic ran wild and grew in place of life. There was no air to have a breeze, no water to have rain, no spark to have fire, but all those could be seen through the veil.
The dead world looking out at the living one. Eirian saw herself there, in a different form and a different time, but her magic was the same. It still felt like a boiling ocean just under her skin, desperate to escape.
In her dream, Eirian didn't bother trying to control it. She just let it flow in and out of her in response to the magic ingrained in that world.
And there were others there. Other magics that felt similar enough to Eirian's that they felt related, but she didn't recognize them. Or the people they belonged to.
Other figures that had the same bright, bright eyes that Eirian saw in the mirror every day and who stared out through the veil with the same longing that nearly brought Eirian to tears.
She woke with puffy eyes and wet cheeks and a ravenous hunger that had her almost zombie-like until she was at the breakfast table and stuffing her face.
Both Chenzhou and Marian looked horrified when they first saw her and Chenzhou had even stood and tried to help her to her seat.
Eirian had snapped, too hungry to be polite. "I'm fine." And thrown herself in her seat.
"You look like you're dying!" Chenzhou argued as Marian fussed, and the kitchen maids hurriedly brought out breakfast.
She must have looked worse than she realized, Eirian had thought. When she'd looked in the mirror that morning her cheeks and eyes were sunken, her skin pale and drawn. She looked like she'd lost twenty pounds over night and her ribs and collarbones were sticking out.
She was used to seeing the drain from using her magic, but she'd forgotten that they weren't. "I'm alright. I just need to eat."
Neither of them looks convinced and Finn nearly has a heart attack when he rushes in late, a few minutes later.
In contrast, Yuze, who didn't normally join them for breakfast, swung by just to see how bad she looked and poked at her for ten minutes while she ignored him and chewed through an entire pig's worth of bacon.
"This is just from one night?" Yuze asked, a calculating look in his eyes.
"Not even a full night," Eirian admitted and Chenzhou sputtered. "It has nothing to do with time and everything to do with the amount of magic I use."
"How much did you use?" Chenzhou demanded. He was worried and he didn't hide it well in private, compared to how well he hid his emotions in public.
Eirian shrugged. Truthfully, she hadn't been paying that close attention. She'd pushed and pushed until the miasma had reacted. It hadn't occurred to her until she woke up that she might have gone a bit overboard. She should have had a snack before falling asleep. It would have helped offset the hunger and how bad she looked this morning.
But she could see results. Small results. It would have gone unnoticed if she wasn't looking for it. The miasma was just a bit lighter, a bit more withdrawn and hidden away then it had been before. The miasma coming from Chenzhou was responding in kind and that was even more noticeable. There was no sign of the seizers, but the miasma was pouring out of him at an even greater rate. Desperate to recover from the damage Eirian's magic had managed to deal it.
She ate twice as much as she usually did, Finn watching with wide eyes the entire time, but by the time she'd finished her color had come back and her cheeks and eyes were back to nearly back to normal. It would take an hour or two for her body to catch up and the fog in her mind to clear completely. She'd probably need to wait a day or two before she used her magic again, but it would provide her time to watch the miasma and how it reacted to such a blow.
Chenzhou himself was steadily looking worse as the days went on. There was a marked difference between his sickly aura from the day she arrived and now.
Now he didn't look ill, he looked diseased. If he was fueling the miasma, it made sense that he was steadily looking worse, at a certain point his body could no longer heal fast enough. And after last night, if she did that a few more times and really destroyed a significant chunk of the miasma, there wouldn't be enough fuel for it to grow fast enough to catch back up.
When she finally finished eating, she wandered down to Chenzhou's end of the table. He tried to stay until she finished usually, but there were always things to rush off to handle. This morning, she stopped him by dropping into the empty chair next to him and checking his pulse.
Weak. Thready, but somehow steady.
He still wasn't eating much, she noticed. His plate mostly full.
"Does it upset your stomach?" She asked.
Chenzhou shook his head. "I am not hungry."
"But it's not painful?" She pressed.
"No, it is uncomfortable if I eat too much. It makes me sleepy, lethargic."
Normal responses to overeating, Eirian noted. "But you're never hungry?" Was the miasma somehow tricking his body and his mind into thinking it was full? But then what was fueling all of it?
"No." Chenzhou's expression was bleak.
Eirian drummed her fingers on the table as she thought. "How much can you eat without feeling sick?"
Chenzhou glanced at his still-full plate. "Perhaps one plate."
Which shouldn't be enough to fill a warrior as strong as Chenzhou looked to be. Or someone who was as busy as he was. "One full plate. Every meal from now on. Even if you're not hungry."
She nudged his fork towards him.
He looked depressingly hopeful. "I have tried forced diets before. They didn't-"
"This is not a diet. I don't care what you eat, as long as you eat something. Solid food. Not liquids. Preferably healthy." She glanced at Marian. "Speak to the kitchens." The older woman nodded enthusiastically.
~ tbc