"The Leech-Healer" | Daima, Ostyx, Nilsara
Daima was born on a farm in Draldon Above. Farmers supply all of Draldon’s food and textiles, so farmers are prosperous and respected in this kingdom. Her father is a wealthy farmer and her mother is a kind and courageous cavalry captain for Draldon’s armed forces. Before she was a captain, Cpt. Grae grew up tending show-horses for a prestigious equestrian club. Cpt. Grae is courageous, kind, and level-headed, often taking over matters of farm management when needed. She was frequently away with the cavalry while Daima was growing up, and ever since she became a captain when Daima was 10, Daima rarely saw her. Cpt. Grae is occupied with keeping the Vachelous settlers in Draldon from expanding, and they are not taking to it well. They keep the cavalry busy with counter-attacks. Daima is always afraid she will get a report of her mother’s death at the border of Vachelous-occupied territory.
Daima’s father, like his daughter, is a very sensitive man, but he is also cowardly. He is not cut out for farm work and so he hires out the work so that he can write poetry all day. His brother, Daima’s uncle, actually owns the farm, but her uncle has been away on missions outside of Ashnuw since before Daima was born. He sends large sums of money once a year to keep the farm prosperous. When Daima was only a baby, her cowardly father dodged the draft for the armed forces by faking having a sickness that requires him to be bedridden. Her mother joined in his place. To keep up the façade, Farmer Grae remained bedridden and pretended to be sickly until he was past the drafting age.
Little Daima believed he really was ill, and this caused her great sorrow for years. She discovered her ability for leech-healing in her sixth year when she was walking through the blighted crops of the neighbors. She was dragging her fingers sorrowfully along the stalks of oat, wishing she could purge the world so there would never be sickness again, and she began pretending she was a great healer. She didn’t expect anything to actually happen because she was only playing make-believe. The blight disappeared right under her fingers, and the oats regained their health! Daima was overjoyed and thanked Elyon, but she did not quite know what had happened. She went home and later that day a rash appeared along her skin. She thought it unrelated, and once the rash healed, she was eager to get back to her neighbor’s field and remove more blight. She did, and the same rash appeared again, so Daima began to suspect it was connected. She was disappointed to discover that her new gift of healing hurt her. How was she to heal without dying in the process? She had hoped she would have been able to heal her father, but now she wasn’t so sure.
She went to the local healer to ask questions, but they could not figure it out. Daima stopped healing until she was in her tenth year. That year, she had become so tired of worrying about her father’s health that she decided to do something drastic about it, but she didn’t know what. She knew that taking his sickness upon herself could very well kill her since she was smaller and weaker than he. Although she loved him enough to sacrifice her happiness and well-being for his health, exchanging her life for his was full-on suicide and was out of the question.
Daima was deep in thought, walking along the river, when she met the grey-bearded stranger. He must have been a very discerning individual, because he looked into her eyes and saw all the pain and sorrow. He could see that she tended to internalize emotional pain, and knew she needed an outlet. He gave her the prayer journal, telling Daima that Elyon knows her better than she does herself. He said to remember that Elyon wants to see her happy, and inscribed in the cover, “Enthusiasm is the mark of a life-giver. When you can laugh and sing and relish life, you are practicing resurrection.”
Seeing the stranger’s wisdom, Daima decided to tell him about her ability for leech-healing and her frustration over not being able to help her father. She poured out her sorrow about all the perversion she saw in the world, and how it felt like it constricted her soul. She told the man that she desperately wanted to use her ability to rid the world of at least a bit of blemish in her own small way, little by little.
The stranger, having known some leech-healers before (unbeknownst to Daima), showed her a recent cut on his calf that had begun to be infected. He asked her how much time usually elapsed between the leeching and her noticing a rash. Daima pondered and answered, “A few hours… about four to six, I’d say.”
“I’d like you to remove my infection,” the bearded stranger requested. Daima, of course, was afraid, but the stranger already knew she would be. He encouraged her to do it anyway, and he’d explain to her how to hold it and release it so that it would not affect her. Daima laid her hands on his wound and complied. The stranger explained that Daima’s ability allowed her to remove poison and pestilence from someone’s body and hold it in a small sac of fortified tissue inside her own body. Everyone is born with this sac, but most people’s sac withers away unused if they do not possess the leeching ability.
The stranger then directed Daima to put a hand over her heart, as the sac is located behind the heart. “You cannot feel it, but it is there,” he said. With her hand on her heart, the bearded man directed Daima to perform the same leech-healing action on herself as she did on his cut moments before. He explained that when she did, it would prompt the sac to release antibodies that would combat and harmlessly dissipate the infection she held within herself.
Daima was afraid, but desperately wanted to believe, so she tried. She did not feel any different, but she knew if she did not succumb to infection by bedtime, then it had worked. Before moving on, the stranger informed her that her antibodies would grow stronger and stronger each time she healed. He advised her to start small and grow her defenses by degrees. In time, she may be able to fully heal her father, but for the time being the man advised Daima approach her father’s healing bit by bit.
Daima did not succumb to infection that night, so the next morning she excitedly went to her father’s sickbed and told him everything. She thought he would be overjoyed, and was confused and hurt when he was not. Farmer Grae looked at his daughter for a long time with a conflict struggling behind his eyes. He was silent the rest of the day, leaving Daima bewildered. The next day, all traces of illness were removed from the house and her father came to breakfast in some freshly pressed clothes, instead of waiting in his gown for his bed-tray. Daima was shocked. How was he suddenly well?
Farmer Grae solemnly sent the servants away for the day to garner some privacy. Over breakfast he told Daima everything of feigning illness for years to dodge the draft, causing his wife to go in his place. He confessed his shame and self-loathing for having chosen to live that way. He was in the middle of telling Daima he intended to stand up and be a man once again, when she suddenly thrust her chair back, a tempest brewing in her eyes. Her father looked very small to her.
“You had your chance to make this change for the past decade,” she said low, her voice shaking. “You have no idea the damage you’ve caused, in more ways than you can think.” With that, she grabbed her prayer journal, her money, and a few belongings, and struck out for the river.
Daima spent two years as a nomad, going from inn to farmhouse to abandoned cabin. Sometimes she was treated well, and other times, in crooked villages, she watched or endured grievances to her soul. She was robbed, tricked, or disrespected during these times. She watched atrocities committed by unscrupulous individuals of all kinds, clean or dirty, rich or poor. She came to understand firsthand just how desperately wicked people could be, and it revolted her heart. Daima learned that she could forcefully turn her thoughts elsewhere anytime she found herself ruminating on things that sorrowed her and sickened her soul. If she was blessed enough to have access to a book nearby, it made for a good distraction.
At age twelve, Daima began seating herself every day in the town square in front of the Sanctuary of Worship and allowing people to come and let her heal minor infections and illnesses. One day an old woman, wrinkled as a walnut shell, yet standing proud at her full height of seven feet, came out of the Sanctuary toward Daima. She sat some half a dozen feet away from Daima, and thoughtfully chewed her lunch as she watched Daima place her hands first on a person, then over her own heart, repeating the movements for each new person. At the end of an hour, she approached Daima and said simply, “Do you like jackleberry nectar? Follow me, child.” She said it so unassumingly, yet somehow with so much kindness and authority, that Daima followed, intrigued.
That was Daima’s first time in Draldon Below. She followed the old woman into the Sanctuary and down a wide set of stairs to a path that wound deep into the earth. Once in the woman’s subterranean tea parlor, with tall, cool glasses of nectar between them, the woman introduced herself. She was Nilsara Dewhaven, and Daima was to call her Madame Nilsara. She explained she had watched Daima for days, the way she would compassionately heal, yet all the while never smiling at her visitors, only gazing deep into them with eyes of sadness. To Nilsara’s watchful gaze, it seemed this child was well-off, but had nowhere to go.
Madame Nilsara studied Daima over the rim of her glass of nectar, ice clinking softly against the sides. “You have an intelligent face, child. You remind me of a friend I became closely acquainted with in a book.” Daima liked this woman’s description of the act of reading. “Have you encountered the pages of Mist’s Dyadia before?”
Daima’s eyes widened in reverence. “My journey through its pages was like being able to breathe underwater!” she blurted, before she realized that description may not make sense to someone else. But Madame Nilsara understood. She put her hand over Daima’s and asked, “Would you like to see my library?”
This is how Daima discovered the existence of the Academy of Cascading Pursuits. She was thunderstruck the moment her foot stepped into the enormous, softly-lit cavern. A revitalizing smell of fresh water greeted her, as the deep, tremulous voice of a cello swelled from further within. Daima’s eyes fixed immediately on the graceful waterfall cascading from an opening in the ceiling, flowing over the floor below to create a glowing river that bisected the room. The glow came from lumistones, which provided light in the water and throughout the cavern. Teal green tapestries shimmered down from the ceiling, and were swept toward the walls before they reached the ground. Some of these tapestries streamed with glittering water.
Along the sides of the cathedral-sized room were dome-like stained glass structures protruding from the rocky face of the walls. The luminous lighting within projected colorful patterns on the ceiling through the stained glass. These domes seemed to be rooms of varying purpose; some had tables with chairs around them, some had stages with curtains, and nearly all of them had books lining the entirety of the rocky wall.
Before Daima could ask where they were, a grey-bearded man joined the old woman. Daima gasped: the man from the river a few years ago! He caught her eye knowingly, and with an unrestrained, joyous burst of laughter, pointed to the ceiling, upon which lumistones spelled out the same inscription he had written inside her journal.
After a tour and a light dinner, the old man retreated outside the room to converse with Madame Nilsara, while Daima became absorbed in a book from one of the shelves. When they re-entered the room, they explained that this was the Academy of Cascading Pursuits. The Academy was built on the idea that often, the interest in one idea cascades into another, and all are worth pursuing. The old man, Headmaster Erminy Ostyx, ran the Academy, and Madame Nilsara was the literature instructor.
They had brought Daima here because she showed potential, and they would like to accept her as a pupil of Cascading Pursuits. This could be her intellectual and spiritual haven, and its instructors could be her guardians. Daima enthusiastically accepted nearly before the words had left their mouths. For the first time in her life, her heart felt buoyant with joy and possibility. She felt her unmet potential blossoming.
She was the only leech-healer at the academy. Daima learned that some of the students there had abilities, and some had none, but all had an insatiable zest for learning. The school motto was “We seek to hone, not to control; we seek to manage, not to kill.” The Academy emphasized the need for quiet, peaceful communion with Elyon, and Daima felt this was best achieved in the surface world under the holy stillness of stars, or sitting at the base of the luminous waterfall in the cavern. Her favorite studies were astronomy and the song-poetry of Elyon.
Daima attended the Academy for eight years. When she was sixteen, Daima thought of her father and her mother, and what she had done. She had run away. She left her father alone in his shame, right in the middle of his confession and apology. She wrote him a letter, explaining the Academy (leaving out her miserable years of nomadry). She apologized for her reaction and told her father and mother how much she loved them. She explained that her healing ability was growing stronger every year.
The reply Daima received was from her father only. He wrote that Cpt. Grae had not come to visit for over two years, and had not written for fourteen months. He forwarded the letter to Cpt. Grae’s cavalry general, asking her to reply to Daima. Daima was sad, but knew her mother would write or visit if she could. She opened her journal and wrote to Elyon her concerns for her mother’s safety. She knew her mother loved her and was fighting for her safety, but she missed her.
After that, Farmer Grae visited Daima in the Academy once a month. Daima fully reconciled with him, and even healed him of a bout of poison ivy on one occasion. But she never went back to visit the farm in Draldon Above. When Daima was twenty years old, Farmer Grae arranged to come visit to witness his daughter’s Ceremony of Fluid Transition: her passing from the protective haven of the academy to the pursuit of her dreams in the adult world. Daima intended to take a few months after leaving the Academy to travel to see the sky islands, hoping most of all to catch a glimpse of a Viridian. After her time spent traveling, she intended to come back and teach Star Mapping at Cascading Pursuits.
The day before the Ceremony and her father’s scheduled arrival, everything went wrong. Daima was performing her final examination for the instructor of Healing Arts. She was to select a volunteer from the healing ward and cure them of their malady. Daima chose a young boy who had been admitted this morning with a snakebite, which was starting to grow a bit of infection. He had green foam bubbling at the corners of his mouth, a common sign that told Daima the bite was from a verdigris viper. She was being graded on the criteria of her bedside manner, her assessment and diagnosis of the problem, and the continued health of the patient in the weeks following the exam.
When Daima was nearing the end of her leeching process on the boy, commotion broke out outside of the exam room. People were yelling, and there was a screeching noise. Deep in concentration, Daima tried not to break her focus. A split second later, something erupted with a shattering crash through the domed stained glass wall of the exam room, hurtling right toward Daima’s head. She threw herself over the young boy and instinctively batted the heavy object away from her face in a panic. Then all fell silent.
The object dropped straight to the ground after Daima touched it. Daima looked. It was a raven. According to the story circulating the Academy later, the bird had been snuck in by a pupil to prank his friend, but it got loose and went on a headlong flight of sheer panic around the cavern. Daima bent down to the raven to see if it was still breathing. But the second she looked at it, she could tell the bird was dead. Strangely, she could feel the raven’s body had already entered rigor mortis. It seemed that the careless slap of her hand had killed the bird. But… rigor mortis does not usually set in until much later.
Daima started to recoil in horror, but stopped when she saw the foam at the corners of the bird’s beak. It was green, just like the boy had. Had the bird been bitten by the same snake somehow? Daima shook her head. That didn’t make sense. Daima realized people had started to gather around and stare at her. The Healing Arts instructor, who had been in shock, rushed over and yanked Daima off the floor and handed her off to Headmaster Ostyx, who had just arrived. Headmaster Ostyx wordlessly assessed the scene, then beckoned for Daima to follow him to his study.
Later that day, news came that the boy was fully and successfully healed. An autopsy had been performed on the bird, determining it had indeed died of a large amount of verdigris viper venom. The autopsy noted that the body of the bird contained the exact same amount of milligrams of venom that had been found in the young boy. Headmaster Ostyx confirmed the fear that had begun sneaking into the corners of Daima’s mind: at the moment of her hand’s impact with the bird, Daima had somehow released the venom she held into the bird.
“Have you activated your antibodies yet, after drawing the venom from the boy?” Ostyx inquired. Daima gasped; in all the commotion, she had forgotten! She moved her hand to her heart, already mentally tallying how long it had been. Her hand froze on its way to her heart as she realized that this was now evening, and the incident had happened at the break of dawn. Her eyes met Headmaster Ostyx’s. “I should be dead by now,” she uttered faintly.
“Yet, you are not. You would have become feverish hours ago,” He paused, “if there was any venom left in your body. But there is not. The raven…” his voice trailed off. Daima understood the unvoiced sentiment. She had transferred the venom into the raven and killed it. Daima later found out by writing to a leech-healer acquainted with Headmaster Ostyx that it was the act of touching the bird in a frame of intense panic that caused the poison to transfer. When one is caught off-guard in moments like those, they lose control of their faculties. Instinct takes over, and for Daima, it became a matter of wounding or even killing another in pure self-defense.
Headmaster Ostyx and Daima were both quiet for a long time. After a while, Ostyx cleared his throat and began to set out two glasses and a pitcher of jackleberry nectar, which Daima had developed quite a taste for. He poured the nectar and gazed at Daima fondly. “I’ve grown quite fond of you, Daima. You’ve changed so much since I met you as a forlorn girl by the river. Do you still have the old prayer journal?”
“I do. It’s my lifeline to Elyon.”
“And to yourself.” He handed Daima her glass and stared distractedly across the table at her closed journal. “Keep it well. Use it up. And when you do, fill this one next.” Ostyx slid an identical copy of the journal toward Daima. She opened it. Its pages were blank, but the same inscription in Ostyx’s cascading font graced the inside of the cover.
“Thank you,” said Daima, a question in her voice.
Hearing the unspoken question, Ostyx answered by walking over to the bookshelf and pulling down Mist’s Dyadia. He flipped to a passage and read some prose about how the tide of the future can change in an instant. Daima understood, but she still needed to hear it spoken aloud. Headmaster Ostyx came back and sat in his chair. “Like in the book, your future has now changed. This can be a blessing if you let it. Now, I’m aware of and honored by your plans to come back and instruct for the academy next year. But every person who is hired must pass an examination of background and morals first to make sure they can embody our presiding principal.”
“We do not seek to control, but to hone. We do not seek to kill, but to manage,” Daima said. “If I am examined, there’s no way I can pass. I won’t be admitted to come back and instruct.” She took a deep breath and pushed down the feeling of despair.
“The good news is, the boy was fully healed, and so you have passed your exam. You therefore have completed Transition. The Ceremony is merely a ritual to honor all you’ve accomplished during your time here.”
The next day, Daima’s father arrived and Headmaster Ostyx, with Daima’s consent, told him everything. Daima attended the Ceremony of Fluid Transition along with the other passing students of her age. Though the Ceremony was meant to honor her, her heart felt hollow. She had ended the life of a poor raven. She felt the familiar weight descend in her stomach again. She could feel the other students’ avoidance of her gaze, and heard them whispering about her unclean hands. She crossed her arms over her abdomen to avoid touching the other students.
And so Daima Grae passed out of the Academy of Cascading Pursuits and back into the callous world she dreaded. She no longer had a plan, but felt as if she had to get out of Draldon. Word had spread quickly, and people of all sorts in both Draldon Above and Draldon Below looked at her with anything ranging from disgust, to open revulsion. Even vile no-gooders looked at her with a twisted smile of interest, as if she was just like them. This was worst of all. Daima felt she had to go where no one knew who she was.
How does one begin a journey to re-make oneself? Daima did not know, but she suspected it began with a book, as most things do, and so she set off to walk the world afoot not knowing what she’d find, but hoping a good book will be part of it.
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