"Coming!" Roya yelled, pushing her chair back from the dinner table.
She hurried to the heavy wooden door, unlatching it and pulling it open. She expected to see another panicked neighbor with a minor cut, or perhaps a drunk villager who had lost their way in the dark.
Instead, standing on her doorstep,
was Madame Clara.
The normally stern, perpetually grumpy owner of the tailor shop looked entirely unrecognizable.
Her pristine clothes were covered in thick, wet mud. Her sharp spectacles hung crookedly from one ear. Her strict, lined face was completely drenched in tears, and she was shivering violently, her chest heaving with choked, gasping sobs.
"Madame Clara?"
Roya gasped, her violet eyes widening in shock. "What's wrong?"
"My... my grandson," Clara sobbed, her voice breaking into a desperate wheeze. She reached out, grabbing Roya's sleeves with trembling, muddy hands. "Leo. He's... he's severely injured. The bullock cart... it hit a rut and rolled over into the ditch. It crushed people, Roya. It crushed my little boy."
Roya's heart skipped a beat. "What about the Church? The priests—"
"They couldn't do anything!" Clara wailed, her knees buckling slightly as she clung to Roya for support.
"They just stood there! They said their time is over. They said Goddess Matia is calling for them. Roya, please! He is only eight years old! Please save him!"
Roya froze. Her mind raced at a thousand miles an hour.
(If I go out there and use my Aether on an injury like that, everyone will see. The Church will see. My secret will be out. The clinic, our peaceful life... it could all be ruined in a single night.)
She didn't care about the other villagers on that cart. To Roya, the world was a harsh, unforgiving place where people died every day. She had learned long ago not to carry the weight of strangers.
But as she looked down at the sobbing old woman, Roya's chest tightened painfully. When her father had died, when her mother was freezing and they had absolutely nothing to eat, Madame Clara was the only person in Oakhaven who had given Roya a chance. Clara had given a starving fourteen-year-old girl a job, paid her fairly, and looked the other way when Roya occasionally took home scraps of fabric to keep her mother warm.
Roya owed this woman her life.
Roya's expression hardened into absolute iron. She grabbed Madame Clara's trembling hands and squeezed them firmly.
"Okay," Roya said, her voice dropping into a deadly serious tone.
"Take me to him."
From the kitchen table, Elara watched her daughter. She understood the massive risk Roya was taking, but she didn't try to stop her.
"Be careful, Roya!" Elara shouted from the kitchen.
Roya nodded once, and the two of them rushed out into the humid summer night.
"It happened near the far edge of the rice fields!" Clara panted as they ran down the dark, uneven dirt path.
It was a long run. By the time they reached the outskirts of the village, the summer sky had turned completely black, the moon hidden behind thick, oppressive clouds. Up ahead, Roya could see a chaotic swarm of warm, flickering orange lights.
Dozens of villagers had gathered at the edge of the road, holding oil lamps and torches. The air smelled strongly of wet mud, splintered wood, and the heavy, metallic stench of fresh blood.
"Let me pass!" Roya shouted,
shoving her way through the dense crowd of onlookers.
"Move!"
She squeezed past a group of murmuring villagers and finally broke through to the front. The scene was an absolute nightmare.
A massive, heavy wooden bullock cart rested upside down at the bottom of a deep irrigation ditch. Sacks of grain were ripped open, spilling into the mud. Five people lay scattered in the ditch, groaning in agony or lying terrifyingly still.
Surrounding the injured were three priests in pristine white robes, their wooden pendants swaying. They weren't treating the wounds. They were standing in a circle, their hands raised to the dark sky, chanting in unison.
"Oh, merciful Goddess Matia," the lead priest called out loudly. "Do not make these poor souls suffer the pains of the mortal realm. Take them to your divine embrace quickly..."
Roya felt a spike of pure, unadulterated rage.
She didn't hesitate. She slid down the steep, muddy bank of the ditch, her boots sinking deep into the muck. She shoved her way violently past the chanting priests, knocking one of them off balance.
"Hey!" one of the priests snapped. "What are you doing? Do not interrupt the sacred rites!"
Up on the road, the villagers—most of whom wore the Church's symbol—started chattering angrily.
"What is she doing?"
"Is she interrupting the priests?"
"Have some respect for the dying!"
Roya ignored them all. Her violet eyes scanned the mud until she found him. Little Leo.
He was lying trapped near the splintered wooden wheel of the cart. Roya dropped to her knees in the thick mud beside him. She only needed one glance to know that no normal herb, bandage, or traditional medicine could fix this.
The boy's right leg was half-severed just below the knee. The bone was completely shattered, jutting out at a horrific angle, and blood was pumping out into the mud at a terrifying rate. He was deathly pale, his lips blue, barely clinging to life.
(He's bleeding out. I have to work fast.)
Roya placed both of her hands directly over the gruesome, mangled wound. She closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath.
Release.
A massive surge of dense, dark purple Aether erupted from Roya's body. In the pitch-black darkness of the ditch, the energy was blinding. Roya's hollow violet eyes snapped open, glowing like twin stars. The violent surge of power caused her dark purple hair to defy gravity, floating wildly around her face and radiating a beautiful, terrifying luminescence.
The entire ditch was bathed in a ghostly purple light.
The chanting of the priests abruptly stopped. The angry murmurs of the villagers vanished.
A stunned, breathless silence fell over the rice fields. They were too shocked to even speak.
Roya didn't notice their silence, nor did she care about her glowing hair. Her consciousness dove straight into the boy's mangled leg.
It was a chaotic mess of torn flesh, severed veins, and crushed bone. Unlike hunting a virus, Roya couldn't just cut this away. She had to rebuild it.
Her Aether fractured into thousands of microscopic, highly flexible threads. She pushed them deep into the boy's leg.
First, the bleeding. Roya wrapped her Aether threads around the severed arteries, squeezing them shut like microscopic tourniquets. The heavy flow of blood instantly stopped.
Next, the bone. She guided her glowing threads to latch onto the fragmented shards of bone, pulling them back into place with brutal, agonizing focus.
Snap.
Snap.
Crunch.
She forced the bone marrow together, using her dense energy to fuse the calcified structures tight.
Finally, the flesh. Acting like a thousand invisible needles, her Aether threads rapidly stitched the torn muscle fibers and skin together, weaving the biological tissue back into a solid mass.
Sweat poured down Roya's face. Healing massive physical trauma required processing thousands of pieces of biological data at once.
Her actual muscles screamed in protest, and her head pounded as if her skull was cracking open.
Five minutes passed.
Then ten.
Then fifteen.
The blinding purple light slowly faded, sucking back into Roya's skin. She gasped loudly, her chest heaving as she pulled her trembling hands away.
The boy's leg was whole. The skin was pale and slightly scarred, but the bone was firmly set, the flesh was closed, and his chest was rising and falling in a steady, healthy rhythm.
Up on the bank, absolute chaos erupted.
"What in the devil's name was that?!" one villager screamed, pointing a trembling finger at Roya.
"It's a miracle!" another yelled.
The lead priest stepped back, his face pale with horror and offended pride. "Witchcraft!"
he shouted over the noise. "This is dark sorcery! An affront to Goddess Matia!"
Roya couldn't hear them over the ringing in her ears.
Madame Clara scrambled down the muddy bank, practically throwing herself into the ditch. She scooped the unconscious, breathing boy into her arms, pressing his face to her chest.
"Leo! Oh, my sweet boy!" Clara wailed, kissing his forehead. She looked up at Roya, her face covered in mud and tears. "Thank you. Thank you, Roya. I will never forget this. I owe you everything."
Roya tried to offer a nod, but she felt physically sick from the strain.
She slowly turned her head to look at the other victims. Two of the men laying near the grain sacks were already dead, their eyes staring blankly into the night sky.
But a few feet away lay a farmer. The heavy wooden axle of the cart had crushed his chest entirely. He was taking wet, gurgling breaths, blood bubbling from his lips.
Roya stared at him, her medical mind instantly assessing the damage. Crushed lungs. Shattered ribcage piercing the heart. Severe internal bleeding.
A cold dread washed over her. (I can't save him.)
Stitching together shattered bone and torn skin was entirely different from rebuilding a complex, delicate organ from scratch. She didn't have the medical capability or the microscopic precision to reconstruct a crushed heart.
Even if she tried, the sheer physical strain of forcing her brain to process that level of complex surgery would likely kill her before she finished. She simply wasn't capable of it.
Suddenly, a woman threw herself into the mud beside the dying man. She looked at Roya with wild, desperate eyes.
"Please!" the woman screamed, grabbing the hem of Roya's shirt. "You saved the boy! Save my husband! Please, I beg you!"
Roya's breath hitched. She looked at the woman's tear-streaked face, then at the dying man.
"I... I can't," Roya whispered, her voice trembling.
"Save him!" the woman shrieked, her voice tearing through the night. "Use whatever power you used to save the boy! Do it! Don't let him die!"
The overwhelming weight of the situation crashed down on Roya all at once. The screaming wife. The angry priests shouting about witchcraft. The murmuring, staring villagers. The stench of blood.
She was powerful, but standing in that muddy ditch, she was suddenly reminded that she was only sixteen years old. There were limits to what she could do, and looking at the dying man forced her to face them.
Panic seized her throat. She couldn't breathe. Nervousness, anxiety, fear, and profound sadness swirled into a suffocating hurricane.
Roya ripped her shirt from the woman's grasp. She scrambled up the slippery bank of the ditch and ran.
She ran as fast as her exhausted legs could carry her, ignoring the shouts of the villagers behind her. She didn't stop until she burst through her own front door.
Inside, the house was quiet. Roya was hyperventilating, her clothes soaked and caked in thick, foul-smelling mud from kneeling in the ditch. Without saying a word, she ripped off her muddy boots and peeled off her ruined clothes, tossing them carelessly into the corner of the room. She grabbed a clean, oversized sleep shirt, pulled it over her shivering frame, and walked mechanically to the bed.
She collapsed onto the mattress beside her mother and buried her face directly into the soft pillow.
Elara didn't ask what happened. She didn't press for details. She simply reached out in the dark, resting her warm hand on Roya's back, letting her daughter hide from the world until she fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.
The next morning, the sun was high in the sky when Roya finally opened her eyes. She had slept late.
She dragged herself out of bed. The smell of roasted root vegetables filled the air. Elara had already prepared their morning meal and was setting the bowls on the table.
"Good morning, Roya," Elara said softly, her eyes full of quiet concern.
Roya grunted in response. She walked outside to the water basin, splashed freezing water on her face, and grabbed a handful of gin leaves. She aggressively chewed on the sharp, minty leaves to brush her teeth, spitting the bitter juice into the dirt.
When she finally sat at the table, the silence in the house felt too heavy. Between bites of food, Roya told Elara everything she could recall. She explained the horrific state of the boy's leg, the priests calling her a witch, and the absolute chaos of the crowd.
"I couldn't save that man, Mom," Roya said, looking down at her bowl, her violet eyes shadowed with guilt. "His organs were crushed. I just... I don't know how to fix something like that. And his wife just kept screaming at me to use my power. Now the whole village knows what I am."
Elara reached across the table, covering Roya's hand with her own.
"You did what was right," Elara said firmly, her voice steady and warm. "You saved someone's life last night. You gave a little boy his future back. You can't carry the weight of the entire world, my little bird. What you did was a good thing."
Roya let out a long breath, some of the tension finally leaving her shoulders.
"Well, the clinic is definitely staying closed today," Roya sighed, looking out the window toward the dirt path. "And tomorrow. I used up a lot of my basic herbs anyway. I think I'll go to Hibi Village, near the Great Kira Forest, the day after tomorrow to restock. I need to get out of here and let the village cool down for a few days."
Elara smiled gently. "A good plan."
The rest of the morning passed in quiet peace. Roya spent the time organizing her empty herb jars, scrubbing the dried mud off her boots, and mentally preparing for the long walk to Hibi Village.
It was mid-afternoon when a sharp, distinct knock echoed against the front door.
Roya frowned. She wiped her hands on a cloth, slowly walked over, and pulled the door open.
Finn stood on the porch. He had taken off his baker's apron. He was dressed in clean, pressed clothes, and his hands were clasped nervously in front of him.
When he looked up at Roya, his eyes were unsettlingly bright. They were wide, manic, and intensely focused on her, completely stripped of his usual friendly demeanor.
"Roya," Finn said, his voice dropping to a low, breathless whisper. "Please. You have to come with me right now. I have something... very important to tell you