The concerning squashy spot on her head unsquashes, and her color gets somehow better, and the sluggish bleeding slows further.  Once the channel hits she groans, and gasps in a long breath, and then starts coughing and trying (without much immediate success) to roll onto her side.

If she's conscious she can wait till the evening channel for another dose, he's not going to burn a prepared spell on an unwise wizard. "What happened?" he asks her.

Conscious but barely so and unhappy about it; it takes a moment for her to get the coughing under control and sit up, and by this point somebody has located the other two adventurers and they rush in with the same question, much more loudly.

Well, if she can't answer. "Report," he tells the interior patrolman.

"Heard an explosion, barged in, the wall was cracked and the blanket on fire and she was down, spellbook was out, brought her here and rang for you, sir."

He nods; that's about what it looked like.

(Omar translates this for Tariq, who's glowering around indiscriminately but looking more than a little scared under it, and goes to help her sit up.)

Khalida is still coughing intermittently and having to run more of her breathing on concentration than is really ideal; she caught 'spellbook', it being nearly the same word in both languages, but focusing enough to parse a whole sentence and formulate a reply is going to be a bit.

"Guiu, go collect her spellbook lest anything happen to it, and make sure the fire is out."

"Yessir."

The blanket is thoroughly out, but as Txell picks up the book she can spot a sock blown under the farther bunk that the earlier patrollers missed, still smoldering slightly; it's not in a place where it could have lit anything else on fire before it burned itself out, though, between the stone floor and the stone wall.

Wonder of wonders, the spellbook has some crumpled pages where it landed but they're blank ones towards the end, none of the actual spellcharts are damaged.

By the time she returns, Khalida is sitting up unsupported and breathing almost normally.  She also looks like she's coming slowly to the horrified realization of just how dumb she just was.

And she gets to do that right there laid out on a bench in the mess hall where hundreds of passing Chelish soldiers can watch her do it!

Txell stomps out the sock and brings the spellbook to its wizard.

Who clutches it to her chest with both arms like a drowning man clutches his log, or a mother her child, and then looks up at the commander like she's fearful he might take it away again.

"She thank you book," Omar says to the other wizard, still with a hand on Khalida's shoulder (knowing her well enough to tell that words won't be happening), and then to Artigas, "Also we thank you, for this healing.  Very thank you."  He gives Tariq a Look until the other man gruffly nods and seconds this.

A curt nod. "There will be an evening channel, at the usual time unless there is another emergency. Guiu, you're responsible for alerting the party if she's not present at the channel, whenever that might be."

"Yessir," says Txell.

Everyone is staring at her.

Everyone is staring at her.

Khalida shoves herself to her feet and- does not bolt out of the room and instead grabs onto Tariq to keep from falling which of course makes everything worse- 

(She is a grown ass woman and an adventurer and she is not going to bury her face in the nearest friendly shoulder and sob.  She is not.)

(Continuing to not takes concentration for a few moments though.)

It feels like it takes longer than the whole horrible trek through the snow but she makes it to the door on her own two godsdamn feet and sags against the corridor wall, except there are still people in the corridor and she can feel them watching her.... Their room is the only private space she knows offhand but she'd have to go through like half the fort to reach it and also she- does not really want to see how badly she exploded it right now- she pushes off the wall and unsteadily heads for the next door down the corridor to hide in the kitchen where at least less than half the fort will be judging her, at least where she can see it.

(Omar hovers in the doorway for a moment in case anyone has questions about why there's a distraught wizard folding herself into a ball in the most out-of-the-way corner she can find, but... he's pretty sure they already know.)

If nobody tries to kick her out, she'll spend a while just curled around her spellbook with a pounding headache and- well, not exactly post-fight shakes, but post-something.  Eventually, the shakes subside and the headache eases up a bit, and she'll uncurl enough to take a deep breath and Prestidigitate the blood and soot off.

Ow ow ow fucking OW

She loses the spell and only barely catches it- has she somehow broken her magic- grits her teeth and focuses on her breathing until she can force the panic back down- tries again,  pleasepleaseplease-

(an echo, a breath, a hint-)

-it takes more concentration than it has since she was twelve and feels like dragging her brain over rocks, but she gets through the spell and tucks it away again and it works.

She tries it a few more times and it doesn't get easier but she also doesn't get that close to dropping it again.  She will worry about whether her brain is broken after the evening channel.  She tucks her spellbook in between her coat and shirt, and silently goes to join whoever's actually on dish duty today.  If she closes her eyes and takes a couple breaths after every dish she can keep up a more or less steady pace, embarrassingly slow compared to her usual but she grinds her way through enough that the other wizard can knock off for an extra break after the lunch rush.  

Somebody brings Khalida a bowl of stew, and she's a bit off food still but she can get most of the rice down (and gives the beef to the skinniest cook, still without speaking), and she gets through a few more dishes and then goes to curl up behind the water barrels again and take a nap.

She wakes disoriented and with a crick in her neck, collects herself gradually- there's a weird emptiness in her head that's somehow completely orthogonal to the pounding headache filling it.  At least she's not hearing voices after the channel, that can wait for after the channel.  Which... looks to be pretty soon, actually,  she must've slept quite a bit longer than she expected.  She just has to go join the crowd out there like nothing's wrong and then she'll be fine again.

Which she'll definitely go do.

Any minute. 

If she doesn't show up he'll send Txell for her.

She's not hard to find, (even if the two adventurers hanging around the door to the kitchen weren't a clue), she's hesitated in the doorway but emerges just as Txell comes to look for her, not quiiite late.

And when she is in range, another channel hits her.

She sags back against Tariq's shoulder with a long sigh as the headache abruptly lets up.

The emptiness in her head is still there, though, more obvious now that the headache isn't distracting her and making it hard to think, like a missing tooth you can't stop poking at- or, no, like running your hand along what you thought was a solid wall and suddenly putting your whole arm through it, like an entire different direction you couldn't go in before.... 

Maybe it's just that she didn't eat much today.  Maybe it's just that she barely prepared any of her spells.  Maybe she really did knock her head cockeyed somehow.  Maybe channeling can't fix crazy.  

If nobody seems inclined to yell at her ask her questions now that she's back up to fighting trim, she'll look for a quiet corner to settle into and fill back up on Endure Elements.  (The guys follow her like a pair of overprotective geese, Tariq slinging an arm around her shoulders again.)  The pages aren't damaged, but she doesn't relax until she's set up the scaffold and confirmed she still knows how and it still works.  It's harder to concentrate on than it usually is, though, and not just because she usually does this in private and she can still feel herself being watched.  There's a persistent sense of- something more, that new direction waiting for her to reach out, a new angle there to look back at the same familiar things from... 

She is not going to do any more messing around with spell prep today.  She is going to set up Endure Elements the exact same way she has done a thousand times already and she is not going to explode anything. 

She's still looking quite a bit more nervous than usual when she goes to see if the night patrollers are up for taking it.

They barely register who's doing their Endures. They are insisting to one guy that he is absolutely forbidden to make the "I spy with my little eye... snow" joke even one more time.

The patrollers do not explode!

Hooray! Off they trudge.

And the little party can head on up to their guest room.

The guys have cleaned up the room and sorted their damaged things and gotten some replacement blankets from somewhere, and it's this, of all things, that finally tips her over the edge into tears.  Tariq wraps her up in his arms and she turns her face into his chest and sobs.

(The sense of being watched has mostly faded by now- it's just her people here and they know her and they're not going to judge her- well, Noor absolutely will, but Noor judges everyone all the time and only likes Omar because she thinks he's her mother.)

She cries herself out after a bit, and Omar plunks Noor on her lap and goes to wheedle or sneak some stew out of the mess.  She organizes her notes while he's gone- the guys understandably had just put 'all plausibly magic-related papers' in one big pile- she's missing most of Mount and one page of Reduce Person but the rest are salvageable.  When Omar returns with the stew she realizes she's suddenly ravenous and wolfs her portion down without even pausing to look at her notes again.  

Khalida settles in to go through the pile of 'probably needs mending' on Omar's bunk while he brings the dishes back to the kitchen, but she's scarcely kicked off her boots when she's... just going to rest her eyes for a moment...

...she dreams of running barefoot straight up the side of a building in a city taller than Aktun, artificial lights everywhere turning the night as bright as day, blood sweet on her teeth and angles tumbling through her mind...

...of an immense library opening onto (predictable safe beneficent) nothingness and suddenly encountering an old friend or a new enemy deep in the stacks, of plotting to catch a murderer over breakfast, of a precious forbidden dangerous vulnerable box of mice...

...scamming tourists with cold-read fortunetelling in the park while she dreams disaster every night and no one will listen...

...a half-grown raccoon, determined to haul an abacus as big as she is across a forest floor...

...a castle floating in endless sunset clouds, full of books and cats and geometries that shouldn't exist, besieged over and over in grand sky pirate battles but everyone wakes up safe the next morning...

...an endless spiraling hallway that is also a trap that is also a friend that is also herself...

...exploding stars out the window, again and again and again...