My Patients Are All Mythical Monsters

0012 - The Load-Bearing Trauma

The foyer screamed.

It wasn't the dry snap of timber or the polite crumble of settling foundation. It was the wet, grinding noise of a major bone splintering inside a limb. The sound started as a subsonic vibration in the soles of Victor’s shoes, traveled up his shins, and settled deep in the roots of his teeth—a flavor of torque, tension, and agony.

Victor froze. He had reached out to steady her, but his hand stopped in mid-air, his "professional" reassurance dying in his throat. The air tasted metallic, like copper and old sawdust.

Above them, the ceiling rafters sang a high-pitched keen, a violin string pulled to its breaking point. Dust drifted down like snow, coating Victor’s dark hair in gray silt.

"Is... is that the wind?" the Gargoyle whispered.

Pink light stuttered across the peeling wallpaper. The Gargoyle was a mess of granite and garbage—wings tangled in severed neon tubing, neck choked with fiber-optics that sparked against her stone skin. She smelled of wet pavement and burning ozone.

She looked up, granite claws digging into the ruined floorboards. "It sounds like my knees. When I land wrong."

"Don't move," Victor said. His voice was barely a breath. "Nobody move. Not a muscle."

He looked at the floor. The hardwood planks beneath the Gargoyle’s massive stone feet were bowing. They weren’t just bending; they were sweating. Thick, amber sap wept from the joints, pooling around her claws like blood from a fresh wound. The wood was stressed to the point of hemorrhage.

The house was bleeding.

"Compound fracture," Victor said. The words tasted of ash. "If you move, you snap the main joist. We fall into the basement. If I move, the vibration kills the patient."

In the corner, the Slime—currently a flattened green puddle acting as a welcome mat—rippled with panic. Sensing the tension, it surged forward with a wet gurgle, stretching its translucent body across the cracking floorboards like living duct tape.

It was a noble effort. The wood groaned louder, ignoring the gelatinous bandage. The Slime vibrated, turning a darker shade of anxious green.

"Victor," the Gargoyle said, her voice trembling. "I think I’m too heavy. I should leave. I can jump..."

"If you take a step," Victor said, staring at the sap bubbling from the floor, "you go through the floor. Since you weigh half a ton, you punch through the basement ceiling. The house falls on you. And then I have to explain to the zoning board why my house ate a historical monument."

"Oh." She pulled her wings tight, making herself as small as a giant granite statue could be. "I don't like basements. It's dark down there. And it smells like old soup."

She tilted her head, listening for something that wasn't there. "And it's too quiet. Where are the drone swarms? Where are the holographic ads screaming about discount cyber-kidneys? The silence... it's heavy."

The ceiling gave a loud, wet c***k.

Victor flinched. He looked around for a beam, a jack, a support column. But this was a Victorian foyer. It was built for aesthetics, for grand entrances, not for parking heavy construction equipment indoors.

He needed a carpenter. No, he needed a miracle.

"Yggdrasil!" Victor shouted. The name tore out of his throat.

The wainscoting to his left dissolved. The oak paneling softened, warped, and parted like curtains. Yggdrasil stepped out of the wall itself.

The tree-man wasn't wearing his usual crisp butler’s tailcoat. He wore a heavy leather apron stained with dark, resinous fluids—sap, pitch, and something that looked suspiciously like chlorophyll-rich blood. He held a rusted trowel in one hand and a bone saw in the other.

He looked less like a servant and more like a field surgeon in a war zone.

"You called, sir?" Yggdrasil asked. His voice was calm, clinical, but his eyes—glowing green knots in the bark of his face—fixated on the floor.

"The floor is breaking," Victor said, pointing at the weeping wood. "We need supports. Lumber. Anything. The Gargoyle is too heavy. The joists are failing."

Yggdrasil walked forward. He didn't step on the floorboards; his roots seemed to distribute his weight across the entire room, moving with a fluid, rolling gait. He knelt beside the Gargoyle's foot, ignoring the Slime still trying to be structural tape.

He touched the sap. He rubbed it between wooden fingers, tasting the air.

"Tibia," Yggdrasil murmured. "Or rather, the main load-bearing joist. It has snapped cleanly. The periosteum is exposed."

"Can you fix it?" Victor asked. "Do we have spare lumber in the shed? I can go get the hammer."

Yggdrasil looked up with mild confusion, as if Victor had suggested treating a heart attack with a band-aid. "Lumber? Sir, one does not treat a broken leg by nailing a dead branch to it. One must encourage the bone to knit."

He placed his hand flat on the ruined floor. The bark on his palm fused with the wood.

"This will be unpleasant," the butler said. "For everyone involved."

"What will—"

The floor heaved.

Victor lost his balance and grabbed the doorframe. The Gargoyle shrieked, covering her head with stone arms.

The wood beneath them didn't just move; it grew. The splintered ends of the floorboards writhed like living muscle fibers, knotting together in a frantic biological weld. It sounded like a forest growing a century's worth of wood in five seconds.

Bark scabbed over the cracks. The amber sap hardened into resinous clots. The floor didn't look like smooth hardwood anymore; it looked like a healed scar—gnarled, tough, and uneven. Heat radiated from the spot, the fever of rapid cellular regeneration.

The Slime was ejected from the c***k with a wet squelch, bouncing across the room like a rubber ball.

Fenrir, who would normally be barking or chasing the Slime, sat in the kitchen doorway with his tail tucked. He watched the writhing floorboards with profound canine skepticism, wisely deciding that fighting a carnivorous, self-healing building was above his pay grade.

Victor watched in horror. He felt the vibration in his own skeleton. It wasn't just the floor. The walls pulsed. The ceiling rafters groaned as they thickened, reinforcing themselves. The entire house contracted, a massive diaphragm taking a breath.

The house wasn't being repaired. It was healing.

And it was hungry.

Victor saw debris—splinters, dust, loose nails—being absorbed into the wood. The floor ate the wreckage. It metabolized destruction to fuel growth. A loose screw dissolved into the wood like sugar in tea.

"Calcium," Yggdrasil whispered, eyes closed in concentration. "We need calcium. Or silicate. The matrix demands raw material."

He looked at the Gargoyle.

"Madam," Yggdrasil said politely. "You are leaking."

The Gargoyle looked down. Dust fell from her stone skin. "I... I shed when I'm nervous. It's just granite dust."

"Excellent," Yggdrasil said. "Don't move. The patient needs a graft."

The roots of the house surged up around the Gargoyle’s legs. She screamed, but they didn't attack. They wove together, forming a cradle—a thick, gnarly pedestal of living wood that locked her massive stone feet in place. It grew up to her shins, securing her to the foundation. The wood fused with the stone dust, creating a composite material harder than either alone.

"A brace," Yggdrasil explained, standing up and wiping sap from his hands. "It distributes your weight directly to the bedrock. You are now part of the foyer's structural integrity. You are a load-bearing ornament."

The Gargoyle tested her weight. The floor didn't creak. She was locked in, but she looked relieved. "It's... tight. It feels like a hug. A very aggressive hug."

"It is a splint," Yggdrasil corrected. "Do not try to fly indoors again. The house will not tolerate a second injury to the same limb. Next time, it might decide to amputate the foreign object."

The room fell silent. The groaning stopped. The floor was ugly—scarred and bulging—but solid. The heat began to dissipate.

Victor let go of the doorframe. His heart hammered against his ribs. He felt a phantom ache in his left shin, exactly where the floor had snapped. A throb of sympathetic pain.

"Sympathetic response," Yggdrasil said, noticing Victor rubbing his leg. "You are the Master of the House. When the house breaks, you bruise. It is a natural feedback loop. The connection is strengthening."

"That," Victor said, pointing at the floor, "was not carpentry."

"No," Yggdrasil agreed. "It was orthopedics."

The butler reached into his apron and pulled out a small, grim notebook. The cover was made of dried skin. He scribbled with a piece of charcoal.

"Emergency medical services for structural trauma," Yggdrasil said. "Plus the cost of accelerated metabolic growth. The house is depleted. It needs nutrients. High-density minerals."

He ripped the page out and handed it to Victor.

"Five thousand gold," Yggdrasil said. "Payable immediately. The house is hungry, sir. If we do not feed it gold, it will start eating the furniture. Or the guests. It has a particular craving for iron right now."

Victor stared at the paper. Then he looked at the heavy gold ingot the Gargoyle had given him—her "copay" for the therapy session.

It was worth exactly five thousand.

"Of course." Victor felt a hysterical laugh bubbling in his chest. "Of course it is. The house counts my pockets."

He handed the heavy gold bar to the tree-man.

Yggdrasil didn't pocket it. He pressed the gold against his chest. The bark of his skin opened—a wet, toothless mouth—and the gold sank into him like a coin dropped in thick mud. It vanished with a soft slurping sound.

"Nutrients received," Yggdrasil said. A flush of green vitality ran through his leaves. The weariness vanished. "The house is satisfied. Digestion will take approximately four hours."

"Does it... does it have dental insurance?" Victor asked, watching the spot where the gold had vanished. "Or am I the insurance?"

"You are the provider, sir," Yggdrasil said dryly. "And the gold was 24 karat. Excellent purity. The foundation will be stronger for it."

The Gargoyle watched with wide, stone eyes. "Is... is this normal? Do all houses eat money?"

"Completely," Victor said. He walked over to the Slime, still trembling in the corner, and patted its jelly-head. "Welcome to Blackwood Manor. Try not to break anything. It bites back. And the medical bills are extortionate."

A low rumble vibrated through the floor. It wasn't the groan of breaking wood. It was deeper. Rhythmic.

THUMP-THUMP... THUMP-THUMP...

It came from beneath them. From the basement.

"What was that?" the Gargoyle asked, gripping her new wooden brace. "It sounds like... a heartbeat."

Yggdrasil adjusted his apron. He looked toward the basement door, his expression unreadable.

"The healing process has a side effect," the butler said. "It wakes the patient up. The house's metabolism has been jump-started."

The basement door rattled. Not from the wind. Something was pressing against it from the other side.

"The house is metabolically active now," Yggdrasil said calmly. "I suggest we close the kitchen door. The digestive enzymes can be quite acidic. And the basement... well, the stomach is growling."

Victor looked at the basement door. The handle was turning. Slowly.

"Right," Victor said. "Session over."