Chapter 4: The Village Healer

Chapter 4: The Village Healer

By dawn, Amara’s hands were stained with rosewater and thyme.

The apothecary bustled with early risers—farmers collecting poultices for aching backs, mothers seeking salves for teething infants, and the occasional curious villager hoping for a glimpse of the stranger who had unsettled their routines.

But Lucien Virell had not reappeared.

Not in the village square. Not near the inn. And not at the edge of the woods where he had last stood like a ghost carved in moonlight.

Amara tried to lose herself in routine—measuring herbs, boiling tisanes, layering petals and bark into glass jars—but her mind kept returning to the slip of paper now hidden beneath the floorboard in her room. Eleanor Virell. The same last name. The same strange energy pulsing from the symbol inked at its center.

She hadn’t dared tell her aunt about the paper—or the figure in the woods. Hilda already eyed her too often with worry, like watching for cracks in a porcelain teacup.

But even Hilda couldn’t ignore what happened next.

Around midmorning, the blacksmith’s daughter burst into the shop, sobbing and wild-eyed.

“It’s Father! He’s fallen ill—his skin is gray and his hands won’t move—please, Mistress Hilda, please come!”

Without hesitation, Hilda and Amara gathered their tinctures and herbs and followed the girl through muddy streets toward the smithy. When they arrived, the air inside was thick with heat and metal, but the smith himself lay slumped on a bench, breath rattling, skin cold as stone despite the blazing forge.

“This is no fever,” Hilda whispered. “This is… wrong.”

Amara knelt beside him, her fingers brushing his wrist.

And she felt it: not illness, but interference. Like something had reached through the veil between life and death—and left its shadow behind.

She touched the silver chain at his neck. It was warm. The smith groaned.

“Bring me the valerian and belladonna,” she said quickly. “And… the yew bark.”

Hilda froze. “Yew? That’s deathroot, girl.”

“I know. Just trust me.”

Reluctantly, her aunt complied. Amara crushed the herbs together in a small mortar and pressed the mixture to the man’s chest, whispering an incantation she hadn’t known she knew—words that rose from memory like breath fogging a mirror.

The room went still.

Then—the smith gasped.

Color rushed back to his cheeks, and he sat up as if waking from a nightmare. His daughter cried out, hugging him fiercely. Hilda stared at Amara, suspicion and awe warring on her face.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I… don’t know,” Amara said truthfully. Her hands were trembling.

But Lucien’s words echoed in her mind: “Before the veil closes again.”

Later that evening, after the shop was closed and Hilda had gone to bed, Amara stepped outside into the cool spring air. The village was quiet now, the only sound the distant hoot of an owl and the crackle of frost beginning to form on the stone paths.

She walked to the well, hoping—without reason—that Lucien would be there.

He wasn’t.

But as she turned to leave, she noticed something strange scratched into the stone edge of the well—something that hadn’t been there yesterday.

The same symbol from the tree… and the page… now etched in stone.

It pulsed faintly in the moonlight.

She wasn’t just dreaming anymore.

Something ancient was waking—and it had begun with her.

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