The spell... lands her someplace. Unexpected.

It's a room - the walls are flat, stone; it's lit too dimly to see properly, but not true-dark. Someone's behind her, she can hear them breathing; she spins to face them almost before she realizes they're there.

He is lying crumbled on the ground, naked, both hands swollen around finger-bones repeatedly broken. He has short-cropped hair that's caked with blood and chunks of it are missing. He's shackled to the wall. There's some sort of vicious infection around the shackle. He's bleeding. It's hard to identify a square inch of skin that isn't bleeding.

She can't see him, in the dark, but her mage-sense isn't so limited.

Usually, anyway. She's knocked out of her first attempt at the trance immediately; she has no idea what that is, but it's big and complicated and omnipresent, overwhelming enough that, encountered unexpectedly, she can't keep enough focus in the face of it. The second try, more careful, works, and she extends an invisible, silent tendril.

Well.

She needs to not be here. She thought she'd rather be anyplace but where she was; she was wrong.

He can come too. She's not much of a healer and two-thirds of what she knows could just as easily poison him, but it's hardly as if she could do worse than leaving him here.

She notes the location-signature - not that she intends to come back here, but if he wants to come back to this world at all, it'll come in handy. Then she approaches him, trying to find some place she can touch with reasonable confidence that it won't cause him pain... no luck. She touches his arm, the barest whisper of skin on skin, and he disappears; she follows a scant moment later.

He doesn't stir when the person comes in. He doesn't stir when the person touches him. He does stir when he is moved; he curls up, slightly, notices that his leg is free, curls up even more and does not bother choking back a whimper.

She barely holds back a whimper of her own in response; instead she starts humming, as soothingly as she can manage; her worry and distress come through anyway.

She'd give him a blanket, but that seems like it'd do more harm than good. She starts a fire, instead, building it for warmth, not efficiency.

He doesn't even have the energy to flinch at a fire. He definitely doesn't have the energy to try to find the thoughts of whoever's just moved him. He makes a sort of self-preserving half-assessment of whether being lucid could possibly help and it couldn't so he stops.

She gets the fire going. She has another look at him, with her eyes and her extra sense both; she sets a stone to warm for warm water for washing and another for hot water for soup and then gets her medical supplies - something for pain, first, just one berry, it won't help much but it probably won't poison him, either, and she can give him more once she sees whether it helps at all.

He is not voluntarily going to eat anything but he won't do more than token resistance.

She can tell he's not lucid; she's pretty much chalking it up to that, and she's familiar enough with the problem to have an idea of how to get around it. That and some patience should lead pretty readily to success.

They forcefeed him some drug. He again half-evaluates whether he should be lucid for this; result is 'no'.

Ten minutes before she can reasonably check if that's doing any good whatsoever. She sets up a basin with water and a sponge, while she waits, and starts putting together a poultice for his leg, still humming.

Humming's different. Air feels different. Different can't possibly be good.

She notices the uptick in stress, when she goes to check his pain level. Should she give him something for that? Hard to tell - the usual wisdom is not to bother for people who aren't awake anyway, but this is obviously an extreme case and the usual wisdom doesn't take the mage-sense into account at all. On the other hand, she only has a little bit of the stress plant and it's too late in the season to get much more - and there's a good chance she's going to need it to keep herself going, now. She'll wait.

Stranger seems to be waiting for something. Possibly for him to wake up, so he doesn't. 

Pain level: ambiguous. She'll check again later.

The warm-water stone is ready; she teleports it to the basin, waits another minute for it to heat the water, and then takes the sponge and gets started cleaning him off. She starts with his shoulders, wringing a little bit of water onto them as a warning before gently dabbing at them.

That wakes him, though he tries not to make it obvious. What are they doing? Wax? Metal? The skin's just going to get infected - not that it really matters, he is fairly sure Moringotho's personally ensuring his continued life...

Dab dab, dab dab. Her humming's keeping time with his breathing, now that she's close enough to see it, without her particularly noticing that she's doing so.

After a few minutes, she pauses to trance and check on him again.

Conscious, exhausted, in terrible pain, terrified of her but in sort of distant abstract way.

There's not very much she can do about most of that, but if he's awake she can at least introduce herself. She lets her claws click on the stone floor as she moves to sit where she can see her, with the just-rinsed sponge in her lap, then stops humming and makes a louder questioning noise.

He shudders even though it hurts to do so.

She winces, sympathetically, and tries again.

It's trying to introduce itself. Possibilities: it's another prisoner in his cell, or a new creation of the Enemy's, or a psychological game that involves him coming to believe one of those things only to later somehow be betrayed.

Nonetheless.

Hello. What's your name?

..........

Well that's, uh, straightforward.

"Kobold."

Kobold, he says seriously, as if this is very important. 

She nods, dubious about this whole exchange, and then shows him the sponge - I'm cleaning you up; I'm sorry it hurts.