Chapter One

The needle slid through torn flesh. Dregner Relk worked in silence, his large hands nimble as they stitched the jagged wound. The small boy beneath his fingers whimpered but remained still, too scared to move.

“Almost done,” Dregner said, his voice barely rising above the howling wind outside the cramped hovel.

He tied off the last stitch and reached for a small tin from his battered satchel. The salve inside smelled of bitter herbs and copper.

“This will burn,” he warned, “but it keeps the rot away.”

The boy nodded, tears tracking clean lines down his dirt-smudged face. When the salve touched the wound, he bit into the leather strap Dregner had given him, muffling his scream.

The boy’s mother hovered nearby. “Will he heal true, healer?”

Dregner nodded once. “Keep it clean. Change the dressing daily.” He pressed a small packet of herbs into her callused palm. “Brew this. Three sips morning and night.”

“We’ve nothing to pay with,” she said, shame colouring her words.

Dregner closed his satchel. “I didn’t ask for payment.”

Outside, Blindrock revealed itself, a collection of buildings clinging to existence at the edge of a vast forest. A frontier settlement that had long since stopped growing, now merely surviving. The villagers moved through their daily routines, eyes downcast, shoulders hunched against an unseen weight.

They watched him. Their gazes followed his progress through the muddy central path, a mixture of hope and suspicion in their eyes.

The village elder waited at the communal hall door, a wizened woman with a spine like iron despite her years.

“Healer,” she said, the word neither welcome nor dismissal. “How long will you stay?”

Dregner shifted his weight. “Until my supplies run thin or I’m no longer needed.”

She nodded, as if he’d confirmed something. “We’ve three more sick, another injured. The winter was harsh.”

“Winter is always harsh in Wralia.”

A smile touched her lips. “True enough. There’s space in the old storehouse. Not much, but it’s dry.”

“It will serve.”

The storehouse was little more than a stone shell with half its roof intact, but it offered walls against the wind and a door that closed. Dregner arranged his possessions: bedroll nearest the door, medical supplies organised by function and urgency, herbs sorted by potency.

A blade had caused the wound on the boy. It was too clean for an accident. The villagers’ glances toward the forest edge told a story they weren’t sharing. Blindrock had troubles beyond sickness and a tough winter.

Night fell quickly across Blindrock. Dregner lit a single candle, its flame casting his scarred face in harsh relief as he inventoried his supplies.

A knock at his door interrupted his count. The elder stood outside, a wooden bowl of thin stew in her hands.

“We share what we have,” she said, offering the bowl.

Dregner accepted with a nod.

“There’s something you should know, healer.” She glanced over her shoulder at the darkening treeline. “We’re not alone out here.”

“Bandits?”

“Of a sort. They come from the forest. Try and take what they want, who they want.”

“How often?”

“When hunger or greed drives them.” Her eyes met his, searching. “They say you were a soldier once.”

Dregner’s hand twitched toward the long-absent sword that once hung at his hip. “Who says?”

“Word travels. Even to places forgotten like Blindrock.”

“I was many things once,” Dregner said. “Now I heal.”

“Only heal?”

“Only heal.”

She studied him, then nodded. “Then pray they don’t come, healer. For all our sakes.”

After she left, Dregner sat in the darkness, the stew cooling untouched beside him. His hands trembled slightly in the candlelight. He stared at them as if they belonged to someone else.

The tremors worsened. His head ached. He clenched his fists until his knuckles whitened, fighting for control.

The past haunted him.

Dregner pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until stars burst behind his eyelids, driving back the pain and the shadows of memory.

When he lowered his hands, they were steady once more.

Dawn broke grey over Blindrock. Dregner moved from home to home, tending the sick and injured.

For each, he did what he could with what little he had. The villagers watched him work with a mixture of gratitude and guarded hope. They offered what payment they could. Dregner accepted only what he needed for his own survival, returning the rest with gentle insistence.

By midday, word of the new healer had spread beyond the village borders. A man arrived, leading a mule with a young woman slumped across its back, her leg bent the wrong way. Dregner directed them to the communal hall, clearing a table for his work.

“What happened?” he asked, examining the fracture with careful hands.

“Fell from the high pasture,” the man said. “My daughter. She’s all I have left.”

Dregner nodded, reaching for his satchel. “I’ll need to set the bone. It will be painful.”

“Can you save her leg?”

Dregner met the man’s desperate gaze. “Yes.”

Relief flooded the father’s weathered face. “Whatever you need, whatever it costs…”

“I need strong hands to hold her still,” Dregner interrupted. “And clean water. Nothing more.”

The setting was brutal work. The girl screamed despite the wraith flower extract Dregner administered, her body bucking against the restraining hands of her father and two village men. Sweat beaded on Dregner’s forehead as he manipulated the broken bone, forcing the jagged ends back beneath the skin.

His hands began to shake.

The communal hall blurred around him, replaced by mud and smoke and the din of battle. The broken leg beneath his hands became a shattered knee, one he had destroyed with a strike of his warhammer.

“Healer?” The father’s voice cut through the memory. “Healer, is something wrong?”

Dregner blinked, forcing himself back to the present. “No.” He steadied his hands through sheer force of will. “Hold her firmly now. The worst is almost over.”

He completed the setting, splinting the leg and wrapping it in clean bandages soaked in a poultice of his own making. When it was done, the girl lay unconscious but stable, her breathing even.

“She’ll need rest,” Dregner instructed, packing away his supplies. “Keep the leg elevated. No weight on it for at least a moon’s turn.”

The father clasped Dregner’s shoulder, his eyes bright with unshed tears. “You’ve saved her future. We’ve a small farm northwest of here. Come to us if you ever need shelter or food.”

Dregner nodded stiffly, uncomfortable with the gratitude.

That night, he sat alone in his borrowed shelter, the candle casting shadows on the stone walls. The wind carried the promise of rain that might or might not come to the parched land.

Dregner’s hands had steadied, but the memories lingered at the edges of his consciousness, circling like wolves. He reached for his satchel, removing a small leather-bound journal from its innermost pocket. The pages were filled with precise diagrams and notes: remedies, procedures, and observations on healing practices from across Wralia.

He turned to a blank page and began to write with painstaking care, recording his work. The young boy’s knife wound. An old man’s twisted joints. The broken leg. Each entry meticulous, each a tally against the darker ledger he kept in his mind.

A ledger that would never balance.

The shouts came first, distant but urgent. Dregner paused in his journaling, quill held above the page as he tilted his head to listen. The cries grew louder, joined by the harsh clang of metal.

He closed the journal, tucking it back into his satchel’s hidden pocket. The soldier in him recognised the sounds, could interpret each shout and clash from experience. The healer in him knew what would follow.

His hands trembled. Dregner clenched his fists until the knuckles whitened.

Outside, chaos erupted. Villagers screamed. A building caught fire, its orange glow casting dancing shadows through the cracks in his shelter’s walls. The sounds of combat drew closer: the wet thud of blades meeting flesh, the desperate pleas for mercy.

A pounding at his door made him flinch.

“Healer!” A woman’s voice, raw with terror. “They’ve come! We need your help!”

Dregner didn’t move.

“Please! They’re killing everyone!”

His gaze locked on his healer’s satchel. Beside it, leaning against the wall where he’d placed it upon arrival, stood his walking staff, sturdy oak and heavy enough to crack a skull if wielded with intent.

“Please!” The woman’s voice grew desperate. “My son… they’ve taken my son!”

Dregner moved at last, but not toward the door. He retreated to the far corner of the storehouse where a small trapdoor led to a root cellar beneath. He lifted it with shaking hands, the sounds of slaughter growing louder outside.

A young man’s face appeared in the doorway, blood streaming from a gash across his forehead. “Coward!” he spat when he saw Dregner crouched by the cellar entrance. “They said you were a soldier!”

“I was many things,” Dregner replied, his voice hollow. “Now I heal.”

“We need fighters, not…”

The youth’s words died in a gurgle as an arrow punched through his throat from behind. He stumbled forward, body jerking as he clutched at the shaft, eyes wide with shock.

Dregner dropped into the cellar, pulling the trapdoor closed above him. Darkness enveloped him, broken only by thin slivers of firelight seeping through the wooden slats. The youth’s body landed heavily atop the door, blood dripping through the cracks.

In the damp darkness, Dregner pressed himself against the earthen wall. A woman screamed somewhere above. A thud silenced her.

Dregner closed his eyes, but it did nothing to block the sounds. The youth’s accusation echoed in his mind. Coward. Was that what he had become? Or had he always been one, hiding his fear behind the fury of battle?

No. He had made a vow. Violence would not heal this broken world. It would not bring back those he had killed. It would not wash the blood from his hands.

But as the night stretched on and the screams faded to silence, doubt crept in. What good was a healer who survived while his patients died? What redemption could be found in bandaging wounds after refusing to prevent them?

Eventually, the sounds of violence subsided, replaced by the crackle of flames and the moans of the wounded. Only then did Dregner emerge, his healer’s satchel clutched like a shield before him.

The village centre had become a tableau of suffering. Bodies lay where they had fallen, some still, others writhing in pain. Buildings burned, casting hellish light over the scene. The survivors moved among the chaos like ghosts, searching for loved ones, helping where they could.

Dregner stepped into the carnage, his resolve hardening. This, at least, he could do. This small atonement he could offer.

“Bring the wounded to the communal hall,” he called, his voice carrying over the din. “Those who can walk, help those who cannot.”

The villagers responded, carrying and dragging the injured toward the hall. Dregner worked through the night, moving from one broken body to the next.

His hands remained steady now, guided by purpose and necessity. The tremors that had plagued him earlier were nowhere to be found as he focused on his work. This was his redemption, not in preventing suffering, but in easing it after the fact.

The sun rose over a village transformed. Where there had been life and modest prosperity, now there was ash and grief. The raiders had taken what little of value Blindrock possessed—food stores, tools, even people. Two young women were missing, carried off into the forest.

The elder found Dregner as he tended to the last of the wounded, a man with a deep slash across his chest that would likely claim his life before nightfall.

“Eight dead,” she said, her voice hollow. “Six gravely wounded. Two taken.”

Dregner nodded, continuing his work. “I’ve done what I can for the wounded. Some will recover. Others…” He trailed off, the prognosis clear in his silence.

The elder looked at him. “You could have changed those numbers.”

“Perhaps.” Dregner tied off a bandage. “Or perhaps I would have added to them.”

“You chose to hide while people died.”

“I chose to heal rather than kill. It is all I can offer now.”

She studied him. “The soldier in you isn’t dead, healer.”

Dregner said nothing, turning his attention back to his patient. The elder watched him a moment longer before moving away, her shoulders bowed under the weight of the night’s losses.

Left alone with the dying man, Dregner allowed his composure to crack slightly. His hands began to tremble once more. He curled them into fists, pressing them against his thighs.

The man before him would die. Others had already died. More would die in the future, while Dregner Relk stood aside and clutched his healer’s satchel like a talisman against his own nature.

Yet what was the alternative? To take up the sword again would be to acknowledge that his vow meant nothing: that when faced with hard choices, he would always revert to the man he had been.

No. Better to be thought a coward than to become that man again.

Blindrock began the slow process of rebuilding. The dead were buried in a common grave at the village edge, mourned with simple words and silent tears. The wounded were tended in homes and the communal hall, their recovery uncertain.

Dregner moved among them, offering what comfort his skills could provide. Some accepted his help with gratitude. Others turned away, unable to separate his healing from his failure to fight.