Swamped

You start flipping through. You already read enough to grasp some of the plot.

There's a Prince Namde, and a commoner named Frei. They have a passionate affair. But Namde's mother, Kasa, insists on an allegiance with the Aedrans, and so Namde has to marry a foreign princess to cement the alliance...

Somehow, the names jump out at you this time. You imagine connections between the central characters, how they interact throughout the novel. You process the pages faster than you thought possible, and your mental diagram updates almost immediately.

What you see at the end... you wouldn't be able to describe it to anyone else. If you were to draw it, it would just be a mess of lines that don't seem to be pointing anywhere else.

But... you know, just know that it's a metal.

And now, when you look at Captain Long, you see that metal everywhere. No, not quite... you see small pieces of it, flowing through his body. It's hurting him. You need to stop his pain...

A moment later, you feel something moving from your missing arm. Then you see it. A brightly glowing arm, much larger than the one you lost, moving towards the Captain.

Your ethereal arm reaches in, and the toxic metal flows into it. You withdraw it.

A moment later, you see Captain Long sitting up, smiling, and a large chunk of oddly-colored metal floating in the air in front of you.

Then you pass out.