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Silque

On pilgrimage from Rigel to Sofia. Still a child, she is unaware that it will be her last journey with her mother, as well as the first pilgrimage of a Saint.

In the dappled sunlight, Silque walks alongside her mother. Enjoying the forest’s shade, they walk long hours, yet the child’s short legs keep the pace dreadfully slow. Her mother has not talked much at all. That is to say, Silque is bored out of her mind. There is a great deal of trees to see, but not much else. In her boredom, she recalls an odd experience she had last time they camped.

Silque closes her eyes. At first, she notices some hidden sounds and smells. Her steps are awkward now and her mother tells her to stop dragging her feet. But she shuts her eyes ever more tightly, using all the willpower of a child to shut herself off from any sense of the world around her. After a few minutes of doing so, Silque begins to sense new things. At first, it’s large, radiant bubbles. She doesn’t see them, but she can feel their presence: their size, distance, and intensity. She allows herself a peek now and again, identifying a bubble as a deer or a bird. Her mother, walking just ahead of her, is incredibly bright, but her bubble isn’t too large. She follows her mother’s trail, allowing Silque to remain in the world of lights without the risk of getting lost or falling behind. As the process carries on, she becomes aware of large bubbles with low intensity, densely scattered around the path (trees). A foam of light runs across the ground, a tight constellation of stars of all brightnesses (herbs, mosses, insects, rodents, and the whole spectrum of miniature life). Silque is lost in love with the swirling, flowing lights all about her, a world all to herself, a world full of life. She cannot distinguish the forms, for now she sees but darkly, but in time she will learn to understand the myriad images.

As Silque is lost in contemplation, a flash of light strikes her and a bubble explodes and reds, blues, and purples fill her eyes (an eagle delivers a fatal strike to a hare). Reeling, she suddenly becomes aware of a large number of bubbles that don’t radiate the same way, not so bright, not so purely. They flicker and dim and, most importantly, they hurt to sense. A spiny clump is curling in on itself (a bleeding fox), a quicksilver ball undulates (a far-off villager vomiting from a chronic disease that will ultimately be fatal), a spicy bubble sizzles (a mouse crawling through a rosebush). Silque’s constellations spin and spin, but it does not rise to a cacophony. She cannot resolve the whole scene in her head, but she couldn’t do the same for the stars at night either. Neither was any less beautiful.

Now, it is worth remembering that walking with eyes closed is a bad idea. This fact is unchanged by the ability to magically sense life. Silque, carrying on in her magical world, trips and falls down a small embankment, bringing her sensory rapture comes to a harsh stop. The two do not pick up their journey again, on account of a child’s pain at scrapes and bruises. When they start again, Silque, the one-day healer, has bandages and salves on her arms and legs.

Elise

Xander has ordered Elise to reinforce Corrin on his solo mission to quell the Ice Tribe. Elise, urgently and happily, prepares herself to join her adoptive brother. She sorts through books from her studies for some reference materials she’ll need on the trip.

Elise thumbs through textbooks, indices, and her own notes. The first tomes on staff maintenance and repair are quick reviews (she had made thorough notes on the subject at the beginning of her studies). A few sheets of paper were enough to refresh her memory should she need to fashion some staves in the wild. Her hands move to the legal texts. Codices of Healing Malpractice details the diverse manners in which the healer could negligently harm their subjects. Legal Principles of Nosferatu covers a history of the legal treatment of the nosferatu spell, which had been banned in Hoshido and was taught only to warmages in Nohr, a development resulting from the ease with which healers could carry out assassinations in the guise of healing via the fell spell. Nosferatu had a number of theoretical uses which Elise had studied, she recalled, as she skimmed her old notes. Disease and the Healing Arts made the controversial argument that nosferatu could perhaps serve a healing function in the treatment of disease. Disease had long been one of the great challenges for healers. Injury and short-term mental trauma were the traditional domain of healing, while medicine was the only known tool against most diseases and poisons. The same author argued that diseases were, in fact, living; healing could not treat the disease because it could not kill or erase, only repair. Indeed, healing a sick person would aggravate many diseases, while delaying death in others (predicated on whether the healing affects the disease or the human body more). Thus, the application of nosferatu to the problem to destroy malignant factors within the body. As of yet, the healing community believed such a line of thinking and experimentation to be unethical.

Finally, Elise finds her encyclopedias of herbal remedies, disease identification, and diagnostic methods (including distinguishing between healing, medicinal, psychological, and mixed cases). These enter her satchel in full. With that, Elise judges her literature sufficient for the mission.

She calls Cassita to send some last flowers down to the undercity. The snowfall outside Castle Krakenburg is heavy and will slow the journey. Elise sees Effie and Arthur waiting below in the courtyard with horses and supplies. Based on road and weather conditions, they had calculated that the swamps are be the best place to rendezvous with Corrin. And so, Elise sets out with a bundle of books and joyous heart, ready to do what she loved most: supporting those she loved.

Mitama

Another battle is on the horizon. As is her custom, Mitama calligraphs new and old poems on shide to hang from her festal rods, a part of her pre-battle ritual. The poetry protects and preserves her soul amidst the horrors of war.

Underneath mother’s sky /

Sleep, dream, child of war, of her /

Spring brings scarlet buds.

The clamor of swords /

Crying out for attention /

Angry at silence. /

I rest my pen remorseful /

For sleep will not come /

Til we or they are smitten. /

Entering repose /

Resting one way, another /

I go out sleepy /

With the words of life and death /

Catching in my breast, /

Carrying in hand a rod /

Beautif’ly arrayed /

To bestow heaven’s blessing /

On those who fight, those who die.

Flora

It is Flora’s turn to prepare Corrin for the day, another day in a dread castle. The captive songbird longs for home and refuses its master a song.

Flora’s freezing hands glide around Corrin’s body, securing clasps, trimming armor, checking for wounds. Every time her fingers brush his skin, he is jolted awake, breaking his morning stupor. Flora knows Corrin feels uncomfortable whenever she conducts morning preparations. He often tries to force a conversation. She answers as little as possible and, when the questions become particularly unpleasant, she silences the boy with a sharp touch on his nape.

Flora’s icy hands sting Corrin, but on such days, it is Flora who cannot endure it. The greys of a forsaken castle, iced-over snow, and a pestering noble-child mock her. They are shadows of the pure whites and blues of the soft snow of her people. They lack everything that a home should proffer: a family for her to care for, a family to care for her.  This long into her captivity, Flora can no longer remember the face of her father. This, as she grows more familiar with Corrin’s physique: grooming his hair to taste, ensuring the fit of his dress, soothing wounds and aches.

Looking past her silence, Flora had become the perfect maid. She knows her master’s needs. She has learned every manner of healing, for body and soul. She wields an artisanal touch for cooking and cleaning, crafting a soothing, satisfying experience for her master. Felicia has a slight advantage as a combat healer, but in all else, Flora is superlative.

Indeed, Corrin could want nothing from Flora, save the one thing she does not have herself. Flora knows only to heal others, to bless others, to serve others. When she dares think of her own heart, she detects nothing. When she prepares herself early each day, she dresses herself as she would a doll. Felicia did not know her, still innocent and unaware of their captivity. It is impossible that her father knows her now. And every time it was Flora’s turn to prepare Corrin for the day, she cannot help but think of another Flora, a Flora of the Ice Tribe, a Flora who would know nothing of soothing the fears of a nobleman, what food he would need when he was hurt this way or that. A Flora who loves her sister, who loves her father, who loves her people, not as a stranger, but as a friend. Perhaps, this is a Flora who loved Flora enough to heal her soul. She cannot bear it alone, but Flora has no one else. So today, and every day, she longs for this other Flora, dreaming of meeting her, understanding her, loving her.

Libra

A harsh sun burns a Plegian battleground, where Ylisseans and Plegians bleed out. Healers move quickly to save those they can, before the march is forced to continue. Libra heals a now legless man, Plegian by his armor. He may never walk again, but there is hope that survivors such as him can receive further treatment from pursuing armies or nearby villages.

As Libra attempts to move to a new patient, a hand catches his arm. Libra spins, panicked. He breaks the grip and stumbles backward. The man he had just healed looks at him blankly, raising himself on one arm. The man drops his hand with a weary look. He had wanted to thank the man who saved him, an Ylissean stranger in religious garb. But he perceives his thanks are unwelcome; so he relaxes his arm and lapses into unconsciousness.

Libra looks at the defeated man and the rush of fear subsides. His arcana tells him that people are bleeding out and dying all around him. He had just come from a typically brutal battle on the Plegian plains. And yet, what terrified him most that day was a cripple’s touch. He closes his eyes and detects a pair of lights, lying close to each other, blink out together. Libra recognizes the dead lights as one of those constellations that could not live without the other. Their lifeforces had bled into each other in reflection of a profound bond, the strength of which only close friends and healers experienced in sensing life could perceive. Every moment he tarries, another star will burn out under the Sun’s harsh gaze.

Libra curses himself for being such a poor war monk. With a duty to fight for truth and heal all he encounters, his intolerance of human touch is a grave obstacle. Unlike so many soldiers and medics, he can handle blood, he can handle battle. But what they could handle, mere human contact, he cannot. His fear of human touch does not subside. He often wonders if he is too warlike, too antisocial. Above all, he asks himself what he is doing wrong, why he is like this.

Libra will bear this guilt for years more; a war is full of trauma and pain and confusion, that is, it is a time when everyone can feel their souls and minds fleeing under pressure. That is, war is not a time where many people are going about healing the mind, when the body requires so much attention. Libra is one of those healers of the soul, too, through his monastic service and devotion, his attendance to religious rites, confessions, preachings, and counseling. But there are not enough people like him to go around. His first love and future wife will be one of the first to help him understand what was happening to him, among other friends in war and faith. The time will come, not too far distant, when Libra will not bear this burden alone. He will even come to understand it, manage it, understand how it all came about. Yet the time has not yet come, and it is his burden to live with his phobia, inflicted on him during his cruel youth by souls grimmer than his. And so, Libra bears the burden of fearing human touch, a burden atop the burden he chose for himself: healing.