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There are scales before him, the scales are gold. Behind him, a river is rushing. It is very dark here. He is kneeling in front of a chair all worked with gold and gems, and a black creature sits there. It is made of smoke, the smoke stings his eyes. Its snout is long and so are its ears. Its eyes are like lamps. White opium, African patchouli, frankincense, myrrh. Beneath these, the scent of formaldehyde and industrial cleaner lightly veiled by incense.

He has been here before. He is scared.

It lifts him from the stone floor, fingers like icicles. He is cradled in its huge palm effortlessly, and he closes his eyes for this next part. One long claw rests on his chest and pierces it, easy as a needle through a ragdoll. It saws in a deep purple gash. Hot wet trails after the claw, hot wet drips down over his ribs. Something jiggles free from the wall of his chest, and he feels an absence deeper than oceans.

He doesn’t need to see to know what it is. The creature has speared his heart. It is fat and red and glistening, just like a ruby. It still twitches, thinking it’s alive, and he doesn’t want to tell it the truth. The creature lays him on the floor again, and he presses his cheek to the cold stones. He sees flickers of tooth and nail slinking beneath the scales.

An ibis-headed man places a silver feather upon one side of the scale. The jackal slides the heart off his claw, and places it on the other pan. The scale wavers. He has a heavy heart. Slowly, the side bearing his heart dips to the ground. A hiss of hunger glances across his ears like a razorblade. A squamous maw of emerald green edges into the dim light surrounding the scales. Its tongue slithers past its teeth and laves the blood from the skin of his heart. Its jaws unhinge, showing off millions of serrated teeth.

He knows what is going to happen.

He lunges for the beast, for his heart, a hawk’s shriek breaking past his lips. He lunges, and invisible binds hold back his arms. His vision blackens. Metal goes taut on the inside of his forearms, wrists; it tears skin or slides out. Spots on a roll of celluloid. Cigarette burns.

A shrill buzz whirrs up. Smoke and spice fade from his nostrils, scoured out by blood and disinfectant. Red and white. His heart is pulp in the beast’s mouth. Still he throws all his weight against his unseen shackles, still he shows his own sharp teeth and squalls like a harpy.

The binds break. He falls.

And keeps falling.

Cold linoleum slapped against Phil’s face. His throat was raw, like it had been scrubbed with sandpaper. It hurt to breathe, but he gasped and wheezed in spite of this. His eyes rolled open, huge and frightened, and were assaulted by white fluorescent light. They watered, they cleared, and he saw a splash of red on the pale grey tiles. Phil was bleeding from the crook of his elbow, from his wrists, from his nose, from his lip. The nose, though a throb of pain, he must of have smashed on the floor. The ache in his mouth was duller but deeper. Torn. He’d bitten his own lips bloody.

Vertigo whirled through his skull, he had no sense of where the hell his body was in space. Maybe he was floating. But his knees and elbows and wrists and everything hurt too much to be floating. Phil turned his head and tried to look up – or at least where he thought up was.

Feeling, agony, understanding. All of these things were creeping back into him. A few things became clear: his feet were still hooked onto a bed by getting caught on a metal rail, his legs were strung up awkwardly above him, and his upper bits were sprawled on a chilly white floor in a chilly white room he’d never seen before. Above him, needles swung from IV bags and dripped translucent blue solution onto his back.

He’d been in the bed. The needles had been in his arms. He fell, and now he wasn’t and they weren’t.

Okay. Sure. Maybe.

Phil’s limbs still hummed with numbness, but he managed to tug his legs free of the bed. He flopped into a dazed heap on the floor. Phil did his best to sit up, but that didn’t work too well so he just put most of his weight on one of the bed’s metal legs. His palms stung, and he blinked down at them. His nails had cut crescents into his palms. He coughed wetly, shook from deep down in his chest, and curled his knees against his body. He noticed he was wearing loose white pants that had no identity at all. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes.

His hair was stuck to his mouth by drool. He wiped it off. He tried to think back, to the moments before he was in the dark with the jackal, but it was more exhausting than fruitful. He quietly gave up. He might be in a hospital.

Okay. Sure.

Maybe.

There were hushed, hurried voices and clattering feet in the hall. He must have made a bunch of noise. He tried to call out to them. His throat chaffed as if he’d been screaming.

“H-hey—“ It sounded like the croak of a baby bird, wet and ill-formed and quiet. “Somebody...”

With, not only overdose patient checked into the hospital, but a poisoned one from tainted ingredients, Delilah's duty was concerned with the pathetic man and his health as a person than a criminal, however fulfilling that duty was becoming a social fete as she seemed to have acquire a small entourage. A fine-pressed and persistent gentleman from level two was trailing after her like a vulture, an assistant mediwitch shuffled behind her like a loyal cub, and a tray of potions of IV bags and solutions bobbed and floated above their heads, and whatever handful of curious visitors dared linger behind them before tending to their ailing friends or families.

The Ministry worker was babbling on about protocols and laws but seemed more keen on thrusting calligraphy adorned and stamped parchment into her face for a signature,  but she shoved it out of her way as she reached for a bottle of potion and began to shake it fervently. The paper was then be flapped in front of the mediwitch's face and clasped onto her clipboard ignorantly and obediently and the Ministry man continued directing his conversation to the tall Jamaican witch, her annoyance spiking s the bottle in her hand snapped and spewed out a string of smokea a and a dry moan churned from one of the patient's room from down the hall.

Delilah spun around on her heel to face the mediwitch, gripping the clipboard from her with one hand and carefully dangling the smoking potion in front of her with the other, "Dear, take 'dis and feed it to th' patient in room 324C, you'll be fine without me," once the witch traded items Delilah pressed her down the hall, and regarded the Ministry lackey with a hard glare and rolled all the parchment he had handed her assistant into a tight scroll.

 "You," her voice sank into a sizzle, "were not prepared for this floor,"  she slapped the roll of parchments into his chest, "to Creedish, lest yer nose take's up a fouler fate 'den dat of a gowed up junkie barely wakin' outta lethifold's whim."

What she said was really only a half-truth, he didn't need to be prepared for anything, but the man wasn't lucky enough to avoid a similar fate, by Delilah's standards. He messily hugged the papers towards his chest and began to backpedaled, tripping as he turned around and tried to maintain his composure as he strode back to the lift. Delilah exhaled a cloud of smoke[1], calming herself before she scraped the floating tray beside her to follow her into to the patient's room. Her gaze was met by a string of empty IV's and the overdose case in a pile of limbs on the floor.

She fingered her forehead with another sigh and drew her wand, casting the man back into his bed and then strode across the room. The tray bobbed behind her as she returned to his side and checked his vitals, "Tell me your wood and wand core," she asked with a analytical curiosity and began to check the rest of him with the appropriate spells.

cowered back into the lift and she turned into Phil's room. Noticed empty IV's and reloaded them. The Ministry's meddling seemed content to let him wither away on the floor, so she flicked her wand and had him up on the bed again, poses the question of what his wand was made of.

1.	Voodoo relaxing thing