The Doctor - Julian Devorak The Arcana

The Doctor

He hovered over his desk, his head in his hands and sweat dripping down his face. Dr. Devorak, plague doctor and retired thespian, had contracted the plague, and now, the only way to find a cure was to die and somehow come back to life. His eyes scanned over the sporadically placed notes across his desk, the illegible handwriting messily scrawled. It was hastily scribbled down with diagrams and doodles of a raven-headed man from his dreams. Or hallucinations, he couldn't tell the difference anymore with the delerium.

With quick, clumsy movements, he walked the few steps to his bed, hands quaking. In his left hand, he held a note for his sister and for his adopted mother that had all his last thoughts and emotions written down on it in case this was all his brain going insane and he was truly going to just die. In his right hand, he held a bottle of cyanide which would stop his heart minutes after drinking. With shaky hands, he brought the poison up to his chapped lips, his gray eyes squeezed shut as he tipped the bottle back, drinking the contents in one quick gulp. It was revolting, which was to be expected of a deadly poison.

He laid back on his bed, closing his eyes as the cyanide worked its way through his body. He felt the effects of it almost instantaneously, his stomach twisting and churning. It was not long after that his body began convulsing and white, foamy bodily fluids spilled out of his mouth. His heartbeat picked up to rapid speeds until it finally stopped beating. He was dead, but his consciousness was not as it slipped into limbo.

The world around him was not of the stories told of the afterlife or of limbo, nor was it anything he had initially imagined. It was dark, the ground mush under his feet. It had a distinct odor that he could not place, but reminded him of the underground dungeon in which Valdemar dissected and cut open the bodies of plague victims, giving the scraps to the red beetles that would swarm like piranhas. Was Julian in hell, perhaps?

Nobody could answer that question for him. Reluctantly he took a step forward, his boots sloshing in the mud under him until, in the distance, he saw a single, grassy piece of land that had a vine-ridden lantern, the vines moving in an eerie fashion, almost as if they were snakes.

With a soft grunt, Julian moved closer to the small island, the thick mud making it harder than it should have been in the first place. The trees groaned and croaked, the wind a terrible cacophony of sound in his ears. It was a sensory overload, and the eerie, blood red sky did nothing to calm his nerves. His hair danced in his eyes and his coat billowed behind him. He was almost pushed over by the sudden gale of wind that seemed to focus most of its strength on him. He made a quick, instinctual decision to grab the thorn ridden, vine covered lantern, or he would fall back into the quicksand-like swamp of mud. He winced in pain as blood trickled down his arm.

But just like that, everything stopped, all at once. The wind had stopped howling in his ear and the creaking of the trees ceased. Though it felt like this should scare him, as the realms last attempt to instill fear into the doctor, it didn't. A calm sensation washed over him, prompting him to close his eyes and sighs, letting go of the lantern.

An air of magical aura suddenly loomed over him, and the moment he opened his eye, it was like a million different thoughts raced through his mind in an instant, but the clearest one was, this was the creature that appeared in his sickly hallucinations and dreams. It was the Raven-headed man. The head of a raven, body of a man, but still covered in feathers head to toe. He wore a red rope tied around his torso.

He was the hanged man, the tarot card. Julians eyes fell upon him, who's eyes downcast on the still relatively tall, six foot four doctor, but the creature still looked down to the redhead. When he spoke, Julian half expected the surrounding area to shake in a wondrous fashion, or at least maybe the squawking of a raven, but instead, the creature's voice was deeper, and softer than one may expect to hear from him.