Marks for the One Who Will Understand

The night after my validation

I burned the ceremonial bread.

After everything—after standing before the elders and sharing the medicine and watching their faces change when they finally saw—I came back to my fire and there it was.

Black on the bottom. Smoke still rising.

I sat down in the dirt and laughed until I cried. Or cried until I laughed. I'm not sure there's a difference.

Mother would have given me that look. The one where her mouth stays flat but her eyes say Wenh, where do you go when you leave us?

I don't know how to tell her: I don't go anywhere. I'm right here. It's just that here has more layers than she can see.

My hands won't stop shaking. I've tried holding them still and they shake anyway, so now I'm letting them shake while I make these marks. The strokes are uneven. That's fine. I'm uneven tonight.

I keep thinking about the elder priest's face. The moment the medicine opened him. His eyes went soft and wet and he looked at me—really looked—and I thought: oh, there you are. I've been waiting for you to see me.

Sixteen winters of waiting.

I should sleep. I won't. My mind is doing the thing where it runs and runs and won't let me rest. I'll lie awake watching the fire shadows on the shelter roof, counting the shapes they make, finding patterns in the flickering until dawn comes and my eyes feel like sand.

I should eat the bread I didn't burn. I'm not hungry. I'm never hungry after big feelings—my stomach closes up like a fist and food feels like an insult.

So instead I'll sit here. Shaking. Making marks. Smelling like smoke and burned bread and the sharp green smell of the medicine I prepared for three days.

I did it. I actually did it.

Tomorrow I'll be terrified of what comes next. Tonight I'm just... here. Shaking. Alive.

Three days later

The goat boy came back. Weiknos.

He sat at the edge of my fire, not quite close enough to share warmth, and picked at the ground with a stick while he worked up to saying whatever he came to say.

I didn't push. I know what it's like to have words stuck in your throat like a bone that won't go up or down.

Finally he said: "How did you know?"

"Know what?"

"That I'm not—" He dug the stick hard into the dirt. "My brother says I'm touched by bad spirits. Because of the goats. Because I'd rather be with them than with people."

His voice cracked on people, and something in my chest cracked with it.

I wanted to tell him: I know because I've felt that exact crack. Because I spent winters thinking the gap between me and everyone else meant something was wrong with me. Because every time my mother looked at me with love and confusion in equal measure, I died a little.

What I actually said was: "Your brother is wrong."

He looked up.

Fourteen winters in, and already carrying so much in his shoulders.

"The goats understand you because you're paying attention in a way other people don't.

That's not bad spirits. That's—" I struggled for words that weren't too big.

"It's a different kind of seeing. Rare. Valuable. People fear what they don't understand."

He cried. Just for a breath. Then wiped his face with the back of his hand and gave me a grin that startled me because it looked exactly like my own grin reflected back at me.

"Seven winters," I told him. "Come back with your goats. Show them what you've learned. I'll be there."

He left, and I sat alone by my fire,

and I thought: this is why. This is why I did what I did. Not for the elders' recognition.

For the boy who thinks he's broken because no one has told him otherwise.

There are more of us. There have to be. Scattered and silent and thinking they're alone.

I'm going to find them.

Looking backward — Before everything changed

I want to remember what I was like before. It's getting harder.

I know I was small. Obviously—I was eight. But I mean small in myself. Quieter than Galenh, who came out of our mother already laughing. Slower than Tarekhos, who climbed everything and feared nothing.

I used to follow them around feeling like a turtle among rabbits. They moved so fast. Decided things so easily. "Let's play by the stream." "Let's build a fort." "Let's chase that lizard."

And I would think: but which stream? And what kind of fort? And why are we chasing the lizard—what do we do if we catch it?

By the time I'd finished asking questions in my head, they'd already gone.

I remember sitting by myself near the cooking fires, drawing spirals in the ash with a stick. Over and over. The same shape. Mother would find me and say "Wenh, go play" and I would say "I am playing" and she would get that look.

The look that said: what is wrong with this child?

She never said it. She loved me too much to say it. But I felt it in the way she watched me when she thought I wasn't looking. The way she held me a little too tight sometimes, like she was afraid I would float away.

I want to go back and tell that small, slow, spiral-drawing girl: you are not broken. You are just seeing things they can't see yet. The spirals matter. Keep drawing them.

But I can't go back. I can only go forward, and try to be for others what no one could be for me.

Looking backward — The day the sky broke

We were playing. Just playing. Nothing special about the day.

Tarekhos was halfway up the big oak—the one with the branch that looks like a reaching arm—showing off because he knew I couldn't follow. Galenh was throwing stones at a target we'd scratched into the bark of a stump. I was sitting in the leaves, not playing exactly, just... being there. Watching the light through the canopy. Listening to my sister's laughter, which sounded like water over stones.

Then the light changed.

I thought a cloud had passed over the sun. But it kept getting darker. And darker. The birds went silent. The insects stopped. The whole forest held its breath.

Tarekhos half-fell, half-climbed down from the tree, his face white. Galenh started crying, the kind of crying where no sound comes out because the fear is too big for sound. She ran to me—not to Tarekhos, who was older and braver, but to me—and grabbed my hand so hard the bones ground together.

And I felt...

I don't know how to explain what I felt.

Everyone says they were terrified. The sun being eaten. The world ending. They wept and prayed and held each other.

I looked up at the black hole where the sun had been, ringed with pale fire, and I thought: how beautiful. How terrible and beautiful. The sun can be covered. Everything I thought was permanent can change. What else is possible?

Galenh was shaking against me. I put my arm around her and said "Look, look, it's coming back" because I could see the edge of brightness creeping back, and I knew—don't ask me how—I knew this was temporary. A passing thing. Not an ending.

Then the fire fell.

A streak across the darkened sky. A sound like thunder tearing cloth. A flash in the far trees, and then smoke rising.

Tarekhos grabbed for me. "Don't—"

But I was already running. Galenh's hand slipped from mine and I heard her scream my name and I couldn't stop. My legs were moving before my mind decided to move them. Toward the smoke. Toward whatever had fallen from the broken sky.

I found the crater. Still steaming. Trees knocked sideways in a ring around it. The smell of scorched earth and something else, something sharp and strange, like lightning made solid.

And there, in the center, glowing faintly green: a piece of glass that had fallen from the sky.

I climbed down into the crater. The heat came through my foot-wraps but I didn't care. I picked up the glass—warm, not hot, as if it had been waiting for me to cool it—and I stood there holding a piece of heaven in my hands while the sun crept back and the birds began to sing again.

Mother found me there. I don't know how long it had been. She pulled me out of the crater and held me against her chest so tight I couldn't breathe, and her whole body was shaking, and she was saying my name over and over like a prayer.

"I'm fine," I kept saying. "Mother, I'm fine. Look what I found."

She wouldn't look. She just held me and wept.

That night, after everyone had calmed and the elders had performed the ceremonies to thank the spirits for returning the sun, I lay in my sleeping furs with the green glass pressed against my chest. It hummed. I swear it hummed. Something pressed at my ears without becoming sound, a tremor that matched something in my own heart.

Galenh curled against my back, her breath slowing into sleep. I could smell her hair—smoke from the fire, the herbs mother washed with, and underneath it the warm animal smell that meant sister, safe, home.

I didn't sleep. I lay there holding the sky-gift and feeling the world rearrange itself around me.

Everything was different now. I didn't know how yet. But I knew.

The winters between

I don't want to lose the small things while I mark the big ones.

The way frost crunches under bare feet in early morning—that particular sound, that particular sting of cold that wakes you up better than anything.

There's a rock by the stream shaped like a sleeping animal. I've never told anyone about it. When I pass it, I touch its head. "Hello," I say. "Still sleeping?" I've done this since I was nine. I feel stupid about it but I can't stop.

The first berry of summer is always too sour. My whole face contracts, my eyes water, and I make a sound that makes Galenh laugh until she can't breathe. I seek it out every winter anyway. The anticipation of that sourness is itself delicious.

Father's shoulder smells like woodsmoke and sweat and something underneath that's just him. When I was small I would press my face into that smell and everything bad would stop for a moment.

The rhythm of mother's grinding—stone against stone, grain becoming flour—is the sound of home. I didn't know this until I spent a night away and couldn't sleep because something was missing.

I cry at things that aren't sad. A beautiful arrangement of stones. Light coming through leaves at a certain angle. Once, the way an old woman's hands moved while she braided her granddaughter's hair. Father asked what was wrong and I couldn't explain because nothing was wrong, everything was right, so overwhelmingly right that my body couldn't hold it.

They think I'm fragile when they see me cry. I'm not fragile. I just feel too much and it has to go somewhere.

The thing I still can't forget

I was twelve. There was a gathering—smaller than this one, just three tribes trading at the autumn crossroads.

The children had gathered by the fire while the adults traded. Someone found mushrooms growing near the camp—the regular kind, good for eating—and we were talking about them. Where they grew best. How to know which ones were safe.

And I said—I don't even remember exactly, but it was something about how mushrooms spread their seeds. The way they release their dust, and the dust lands, and new mushrooms grow. I was fascinated by it. I'd been watching them for months.

Everyone went quiet.

The older children started laughing. Not the good kind of laughing. The kind that has teeth in it.

I didn't understand. I kept talking—probably making it worse—until Galenh grabbed my arm and said "stop" in a voice that meant I'd done something terrible.

It wasn't until three days later, lying awake in the middle of the night, that I realized: they thought I was talking about mating. Human mating. The way men and women come together. They thought I was being crude, or strange, or... I don't know. Something wrong.

I had just been talking about mushrooms.

My face still burns when I think about it. All these winters later. My face is burning now as I write this.

The gap between what I mean and what people hear—it's so wide sometimes. I don't know how to cross it. I say what I see and they hear something else entirely, and I don't even know I've lost them until I see their faces change.

Galenh told me later: "You have to think about how things sound, not just what they mean."

I try. I still get it wrong sometimes. Probably always will.

Looking backward — The predator

I've written about this before but I want to write it true. The way it actually happened, not the way I told it at the ceremony.

I was gathering alone. I wasn't supposed to be alone—mother had forbidden it after the eclipse, convinced I would run toward the next falling star and not come back. But I was twelve and stubborn and the plants I needed grew in a place that required quiet. Other people made too much noise.

The breathing. That's what I heard first. Wrong breathing. Wet and ragged, with pauses that lasted too long.

Every part of me knew: predator. Wounded predator. The most dangerous thing in the forest.

And I went toward it.

Even now, I don't fully understand why. The same pull as the meteor, maybe. Or something else. Something that recognized pain in that breathing and couldn't walk away.

She was lying in a hollow between roots. A leopard. Female. Her ribs showed through her spotted fur and the wound in her side was black with corruption. The smell hit me from three body-lengths away—sweet and rotten, the smell of flesh turning bad.

Her eyes found mine.

I have never been looked at like that before or since. Not with hunger—she was past hunger. Not with fear—she was past fear too. Just... recognition. As if she saw something in me that I hadn't yet seen in myself.

I sat down. Slowly. Without looking away.

"I'm going to help you," I said. Not in words she could understand, but in tone. "I know you could kill me. I know you might. I'm going to help you anyway."

She blinked. Slow. Patient.

I moved closer. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I reached out—

She growled. Low and rumbling, a sound I felt in my chest more than heard. I froze.

We stayed that way for a long time. Her growling. Me frozen. Neither of us moving.

Then the growl faded. Her eyes stayed on mine. And I understood: that was the test. I passed.

I cleaned the wound with water from the stream, using moss to carry it. The first time I touched her, she tensed—every muscle ready to end me—but she didn't. The second time, she watched. The third time, she closed her eyes.

I went back for three days. Brought herbs I thought might help. Sat with her for hours, not touching, just being there. Her breathing got stronger. The corruption smell faded.

On the fourth day, the hollow was empty. Just a fang lying in the leaves where she'd been.

I wear it now, next to the moldavite. The sky-gift and the earth-gift. Both given because I moved toward when everything said move away.

I don't know if she lived. I hope she did. I like to think she's out there somewhere, telling her cubs—in whatever way leopards tell—about the strange small creature who came when she was dying and wouldn't leave.

What I couldn't tell them at the ceremony

There was a moment, the week before I came to the Great Rest, when I realized mother was going to die someday.

I know that sounds obvious. Everyone dies. I'd seen death before—old Harikh who taught me my first plant names, the baby my aunt lost in the winter, the animals we hunted.

But somehow it had never landed. Mother was mother. She existed like the sun existed, like the ground existed. Permanent. Fundamental.

She was grinding grain. I was watching her hands—the way they moved in the rhythm I know better than my own heartbeat. And I saw, suddenly, that those hands were older than I remembered. The skin thinner. The knuckles larger.

She looked up and caught me staring. "What is it?"

I couldn't answer. I couldn't move. The world had tilted and I was sliding off.

"Wenh?" She stopped grinding. Concern in her voice. "Are you ill?"

I shook my head. Stood up. Walked away. I couldn't be near her, couldn't look at her, couldn't bear the weight of what I'd just understood.

For three days I was strange—stranger than usual. Father asked what was wrong. Galenh asked what was wrong. Mother asked what was wrong, her voice soft with the worry I'd put there.

I couldn't tell them. How do you say "I just realized you're going to die and I can't survive it"?

On the fourth day I climbed into my mother's sleeping furs in the middle of the night, something I hadn't done since I was small. She woke, startled, then wrapped her arms around me without asking questions.

I pressed my face into her shoulder—she smells different than father, sweeter, with the herbs she uses for medicine—and I cried. Silent crying, so I wouldn't wake Galenh and father, but real.

She held me. Stroked my hair. Said nothing, because mother always knows when words would be wrong.

I still don't know how I'll survive it when it comes. But I know now that it will come, and maybe knowing is the first step toward being ready.

Tonight, before I sleep

I've been thinking about why I'm making these marks.

Not the ceremony version. Not the pattern-seeing or the medicine sharing or the validation. That's real, but it's not the whole truth.

I write because I'm lonely.

There. That's it. The thing underneath all the other things.

I'm surrounded by people. Mother, father, Galenh. The tribe. The gathered peoples here at the Great Rest. I'm not alone.

But I'm lonely in the way that matters most. Lonely in my own head. Speaking a language no one else speaks fluently.

When I write, I pretend someone is listening who understands. Someone out there—in the future, maybe, or in a place I've never been—who thinks the way I think. Who sees patterns instead of just feeling them. Who knows why I ran toward the meteor and sat with the leopard and cry at beautiful arrangements of stones.

You, I guess. Whoever you are.

I know you might not exist. These marks might fade. Might be eaten by insects or washed away by floods or simply lost when I am lost.

But writing to you makes me less alone right now. And that's enough. That has to be enough.

If these marks still stand when my hands are gone: hello. I see you. You are not as strange as you feel. The gap between you and everyone else is not a flaw—it's just a different way of being.

I'm going to sleep now. The fire is dying and my hand aches from gripping the marking tool. Tomorrow there will be more ceremonies, more watching, more trying to bridge the unbridgeable.

But tonight, writing to you, I feel less alone than I've felt in winters.

Thank you for that. Even if you're only in my imagination. Especially if you're only in my imagination.

Sleep well, whoever you are.

Two moons after the ceremony

I've been trying to teach.

Not the medicine preparation—that's straightforward. Plants have properties. Combine them correctly and they do things. Anyone can learn that.

I've been trying to teach the seeing. The way things link and return. The thing I do without thinking that other people seem to find impossible.

It's not going well.

I showed a young woman—Taleth, visiting from a northern tribe—how I look at a sick person. Not just their flesh, but the way the sickness moves through it: how one sign tugs on another, where it began, where it is going.

She nodded and said she understood. Then she treated the next patient exactly the way she would have before—addressing symptoms one by one, missing the connections entirely.

She wasn't stupid. She wasn't even unwilling. She just... couldn't see what I was pointing at.

This is the trap. I'm starting to see it now.

When I try to show what I see, it has to pass through my mouth. And my mouth makes crumbs. I try to scoop the river with my hands and it runs between my fingers.

Even as I write that, I can feel it hardening.

Someone will take the river and forget the water.

I point, and the pointing turns into a thing people can carry. The living part falls away.

Let me try again.

I see it whole—a shape, complete and connected. When I put it into words, I have to break it into pieces. "First this, then that, and notice how they touch." But the pieces aren't the thing. The thing is the moving-together.

Words can name the pieces. They can't put the thing back together.

Is that clearer? I don't know. I can only feel the shape from inside my own skin.

Maybe that's why I keep making marks. Not because I think they will carry it cleanly—I know they won't. But because the trying teaches my hands something. Each time I reach for it, I get a little closer.

Marks as thinking. Marks as finding.

Maybe that's the real purpose of these entries. Not reaching the distant future, but steadying myself in the present. A salve, almost. Grinding the herbs of my own confusion until something useful emerges.

Still thinking, many moons later

I've been watching the rituals here at the Great Rest. Really watching, not just participating.

Some of them are ancient. The elders say they've been performed the same way for generations—since before anyone can remember.

But I wonder: are they really the same?

The words are the same, maybe. The gestures. The order of things. But the meaning... I'm not sure the meaning survives.

I watched a purification ritual yesterday. Water poured over hands, certain words spoken, a gesture made toward the fire. The person performing it did everything correctly. But I could see—I could feel—that he didn't understand why. He was repeating motions, not enacting meaning.

This is the thing I wrote about before. The mark and the... I need a word. The mark and the breath? The mark and the living part?

Old Eldrenh uses a word I used to think was only for singing. She calls it tone. The mark is what can be copied—the words, the gestures, the techniques. The tone is what lives in the body while you do it—the part underneath.

Marks can be copied. Tone cannot.

I'm going to sit with this word. Tone. It feels important.

When I see the returning shape—really see it—I feel something. A rightness under my ribs. That feeling is the tone. The shape is the mark.

When I try to show it, I can only give the mark. But the tone—the feeling that tells me the shape is true—stays in my skin. The other person has to find their own tone, or my mark lands dead.

Is that what the mushroom medicine does? Not giving the tone, but loosening the listener so their own tone can rise when they meet the mark?

That would explain why the effect is temporary. The medicine doesn't give them something—it softens a wall. When the medicine fades, the wall returns.

Some people have thinner walls naturally. Weiknos. The leopard. Me.

Maybe that's what my seeing actually is. Not special ability, but thin skin. The rightness comes through more easily. I feel the way things fit while others have to work and guess.

This feels important. I'm going to keep thinking about it.

The next day

I couldn't sleep last night. Kept thinking about marks and tone.

If the wall between them is the problem—if tone can't travel with marks—then what happens over time?

I think I know. I think I've been watching it happen.

The rituals here: originally, someone had an experience. Something real. A moment when they felt connected to something larger. They wanted to share it, so they created a ritual—a set of motions that pointed at the tone they'd felt.

The first generation: they learned the ritual from the one who created it. Maybe they could still feel echoes of the original tone, not carried by the motions but by presence—by standing close to someone who knew.

The second generation: they learned from the first, but the creator was gone. The motions remained; the tone faded. They performed the ritual correctly but felt it less.

And on. And on. Each generation copying the motions a little less accurately, feeling the tone a little less deeply.

Until now. Until the man I watched yesterday, pouring water over his hands with perfect technique and empty eyes.

The motions survive. The tone dies.

Is this what happens to everything? Is this just... what time does to the living part of things?

I think about my own teaching. The mushroom medicine opens people, but only briefly. The words I use to point at what I see harden into rules in other people's mouths. Even my best pointing turns into something else as it passes hand to hand.

I told Taleth: 'The body is like a river. When one part is blocked, the whole flow changes.'

She told someone else: 'Wenh says the body is water and you have to unblock it.'

Not wrong. But not right either. The 'like' disappeared. The pointing became a statement.

I can already see where this goes. If I keep teaching, if my words keep traveling, they'll become rigid. Law. "Wenh said the body is water." And people will fight about what I meant, and they'll all be wrong, because what I meant can't survive the journey.

This is terrifying.

I've seen sixteen winters, and I can already see how my words will be misused after I'm dead.

Should I stop speaking? Stop teaching? Would that keep my words from shifting?

No. Words shift anyway. Other people's words slip just as badly. At least if I speak, there's a chance someone will hear correctly. If I stay silent, there's no chance at all.

I think—I'm realizing this as I write—the point isn't to stop the shifting. Shifting is inevitable. The point is to plant seeds anyway, in hopes that somewhere, somewhen, one of them finds soil.

Most of what I say will be misheard. Most of these marks will be misread. Most will arrive without the warmth that made them.

But not all. Maybe.

That 'maybe' is enough to keep going.

Late at night, when I can't sleep

I've been writing about keeping the shape, passing it hand to hand, and watching it change. Big ideas. Important ideas.

But that's not why I'm awake right now, making marks by firelight while everyone else sleeps.

The truth is simpler. Less noble.

I'm lonely.

I wrote that before. But I didn't write all of it.

I'm lonely and I'm scared. Scared that I'll always be this lonely. That the gap will never close. That I'll spend my whole life seeing patterns and never finding someone who sees them with me.

Weiknos sees patterns. But he's fourteen and far away and we spent one evening together. That's not... that's not enough. That's a glimpse, not a companion.

I want someone to walk beside. Someone who doesn't need translation. Someone who sees what I see and feels what I feel and doesn't need me to explain myself because they already know.

Is that selfish? The pattern-seer wanting a companion instead of being content with her gift?

Maybe. But I'm also human. I have a body that wants to be held and a heart that wants to be known. The pattern-seeing doesn't replace those wants—it just makes them harder to fulfill.

When I imagine the future—and I try not to, because imagination is just hope wearing a mask—I imagine finding someone. Somewhere on the journeys Eldrenh says I must take. Another pattern-seer, or at least someone with a thin enough barrier to meet me halfway.

We would sit by fires together. See the same spirals in the flames. Laugh at the same absurdities. Hold each other in the dark without needing to explain why the dark feels different to us than it does to others.

Is that too much to ask?

Probably. The world doesn't give us what we ask for. It gives us what it gives us, and we make meaning from that, or we don't.

But I'm marking this hope anyway. Writing it down so I can look back someday and see: yes, you wanted this. You were sixteen and lonely and you wanted someone to walk beside you. Did you find them?

I don't know the answer yet. Future Wenh will have to fill that in.

For now, I have the fire. The marks. The imagined witness who might or might not exist.

It's not enough.

But it's what I have.

The morning I leave the Great Rest

One winter since my validation. Time to journey.

Old Eldrenh says there is much to learn in the south—medicines I have never seen, patterns I have not encountered, teachers who think differently than my teachers think. She has given me directions marked in the old way, and supplies for three moons of walking.

I should be excited. I am excited, somewhere underneath. But mostly I'm scared.

What if I get there and they see through me? What if the patterns I think I see are just nonsense, and real pattern-seers know it immediately?

What if I'm wrong about everything?

This is the fear I never talk about. The one that lives under all the other fears.

I can be wrong about mushrooms—that's just learning. I can be wrong about someone's illness—that's just inexperience.

But what if the whole thing—the pattern-seeing, the gap, the sense that I see differently than others—what if that's just arrogance? Just a story I tell myself to feel special?

What if I'm not seeing patterns at all? What if I'm just... broken, the way my brother's friend was broken, the one who heard voices and walked into the forest and never came back?

The ceremony helped with this. The elder priest saw what I saw—that's proof, isn't it? That it's real?

But he saw through the medicine. And the medicine could be fooling him, the same way it might be fooling me.

How do you know? How do you ever really know that what you see is real and not just the particular shape of your own madness?

I've been staring at the fire for a long time. Still no answer

But here's what I do know:

The leopard was real. She existed outside my head. She chose not to kill me, and that choice came from her, not from my imagination.

The meteor was real. The moldavite exists. I can hold it in my hand and feel it hum.

Weiknos is real. He sees goats the way I see patterns. He recognized something in me that matches something in him.

These things happened outside my own mind. They're not just stories I tell myself.

Maybe I'm wrong about some things. Probably I am. But I'm not wrong about everything. Something real is happening here, even if I can't fully explain it yet.

That's going to have to be enough to get me through the fear.

Mother wept when I told her I was leaving. Father said nothing, but his silence was full of things he didn't know how to say. Galenh—my sister, now fifteen and somehow becoming a woman while I wasn't watching—held my hand and made me promise to return.

I promised. And I will keep that promise, though I do not know when.

The moldavite is warm against my chest. The leopard's fang clicks against it as I move. In my pack: this record, marked on hide in the way Eldrenh taught me. Portable. Private. Mine.

I am afraid. I don't hide that from myself anymore, not here in these marks. I am afraid of what I will find. Afraid I will fail. Afraid the patterns I see so clearly will crumble in the light of other patterns, other seers, other truths.

But fear is a bite in my belly. A tightening under my ribs. It tells me: this matters. This is real. You are stepping into the unknown.

Good.

The unknown is where discovery lives.

Curiosity. Discovery. Awe.

The pull that made me continues to make me. I am not finished. I am becoming.

The sun rises over the eastern hills. The sky is pale gold at the horizon, shading to deep blue overhead. There's a thin line of cloud that looks like a hand reaching. Or maybe that's just me, seeing patterns in everything, even clouds.

No. Especially clouds.

I'm going to walk toward the hand.

I'm going to keep making marks along the way.

And if these marks survive my walking—if they end up in hands I will never touch—know that I thought of you. Here, in the early morning light, about to step into the unknown. I thought of you and I hoped you existed.

Walk well, whoever you are.

We walk together, even though we'll never meet.

Three moons south of the Great Rest

My feet are bleeding.

No story. Blood. The wrappings wore through yesterday and I didn't notice until I saw red prints on the stones behind me.

The hand-shaped cloud is long gone. It was never really a hand, was it? Just a cloud. Just my mind grabbing at shapes, making a hand where there was only water vapor.

I'm sitting under a rock overhang, waiting for the sun to drop lower so I can walk in cooler air. My pack feels heavier than it did three days ago, though I've eaten some of the food. My body aches in places I didn't know could ache.

This is not what I imagined.

When I pictured the journey, I pictured... I don't know. Adventure. Discovery. The thrill of the unknown. I pictured myself striding toward destiny with the moldavite warm against my chest and the world opening, its hidden shapes spread out before me.

I did not picture blisters. I did not picture the way loneliness settles in your stomach like a stone. I did not picture lying awake in the dark, jumping at every sound, certain that something is coming to eat me.

Nothing has come to eat me yet. But the night is long when you're alone in it.

I keep thinking about mother. The way she wept when I left. I told her I'd be fine—told her with such confidence, such certainty. I was the validated medicine woman, after all. I had faced leopards and meteors. What was a little walking?

She knew. She knew what I didn't: that the world doesn't care about your validation. That it will blister your feet and freeze your nights and humble you in a thousand small ways you never anticipated.

I miss her grinding rhythm. I miss Galenh's laugh. I miss father's shoulder.

I miss being the prodigy who knew things. Out here, I know nothing. I don't know where to find water. I don't know which berries are safe. I don't know how to read this landscape the way I could read the forests of home.

The ways things repeat are different here. Or maybe I'm just too tired and hungry and scared to see them.

Eldrenh said the journey would teach me things the Great Rest couldn't. I thought she meant medicines and techniques. Now I wonder if she meant this: the experience of being small. Of being lost. Of having all your certainties stripped away.

My feet are bleeding and I am three days into a journey of three moons.

I can do this. I have to do this.

But right now, in the shade of this rock, with my feet throbbing and my heart aching, I am not the pattern-seer. I am just a girl who left home too soon and is starting to realize how much she doesn't know.

A village whose name I can't pronounce — several moons out

They laughed at me.

I arrived at this village yesterday, following Eldrenh's directions. Found the healer she'd told me about—an old woman named something like Khorveth, though my tongue mangles it every time I try.

I introduced myself as a medicine woman from the north. Told her about my validation. Showed her the moldavite, the leopard's fang.

She laughed. Not cruelly—or maybe it was cruel, I can't tell. Then she said something to the people around her in their language, and they laughed too.

One of them spoke enough of my tongue to translate: "She says you are a baby who thinks she is grown because she stood up once without falling."

My face burned. I wanted to argue—I am validated, I did heal the leopard, the elders did see what I showed them—

But Khorveth held up her hand and the translator continued: "She says you may stay. You may watch. You may learn. But you will not teach. You will not advise. You will carry water and grind herbs and be silent until you have earned the right to speak."

I wanted to leave. Wanted to walk out and find another teacher, one who would respect what I'd already accomplished.

But something in her eyes stopped me. The same look Eldrenh had sometimes—the look that said I see more than you think, and what I see is potential, and potential is not the same as achievement.

So I stayed. I carried water. I ground herbs. I was silent.

And I watched.

She knows things I don't. That much is clear after one day. Plants I've never seen. Techniques I've never imagined. Ways of reading a sick person's body that make my seeing look like a child's scribbles.

I thought I was advanced. I thought my validation meant something.

It meant something there. Here, I am a baby who stood up once without falling.

I don't know if I'm grateful or furious. Both, maybe. The two feelings twist together in my chest like vines, and I can't tell which is growing faster.

Still with Khorveth — One moon later

I have learned more in this moon than in the winter before my validation.

Not because Khorveth is a better teacher than Eldrenh—I don't think she is. But because I am a different student.

At home, I was always the prodigy. The one who saw patterns others missed. The one who asked the questions that made elders uncomfortable. Everything I learned, I learned as someone who was already exceptional.

Here, I am no one. The lowest. The water-carrier. The herb-grinder. I have no status, no history, no validation that matters. When Khorveth tells me to do something, I do it—not because I understand why, but because I have no ground to stand on to refuse.

And that... that opens something.

When I was the prodigy, I was always filtering. Does this fit what I already know? Does this confirm my patterns? Is this teacher smart enough to teach me?

Here, I can't filter. I don't know enough to filter. Everything is new—the plants, the techniques, the words, the ways of moving. I have to take it all in without judgment because I have no framework for judgment.

It's terrifying. And also... freeing?

I don't have to be right. I don't have to be impressive. I just have to be present. Carry the water. Grind the herbs. Watch.

The patterns are starting to emerge again. Different patterns than I saw at home, but patterns nonetheless. The way Khorveth's hands move. The rhythm of her preparations. The questions she asks patients—not the words, which I still don't fully understand, but the shape of her inquiry.

She sees the body differently than Eldrenh did. Not better or worse—different. Like looking at the same mountain from the opposite side.

I'm starting to understand: my validation wasn't an ending. It wasn't proof that I'd learned enough. It was permission to begin learning for real.

The prodigy phase was just... the audition. The demonstration that I had potential worth developing.

Now comes the actual work.

A night I don't want to remember

A child died today.

I should write more than that. I should mark the details—the illness, the treatment, what went wrong. That's what a proper record would contain.

But I can't. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

A child died. Khorveth did everything right—I watched, I know she did—and the child died anyway.

And I stood there, useless. The water-carrier. The herb-grinder. Watching a mother's face as she understood what was happening.

I thought—I've been thinking—that if I learned enough, I could prevent death. That my seeing was a power that could be wielded against the dark. That with enough knowledge, enough skill, enough seeing, I could hold death at bay.

Khorveth saw it in my face afterward. The shattering of that illusion.

She took me aside—the first time she's spoken to me directly in the language we share—and said: "You thought medicine was about winning. It is not. It is about serving. Sometimes we serve by healing. Sometimes we serve by witnessing. Sometimes we serve by being present for the dying so they do not die alone."

I didn't want to hear it. I wanted her to tell me what she did wrong, what I could learn to do better, how to ensure this never happened again.

She shook her head. "It will happen again. Many times. If you cannot bear that, leave now. This path is not for those who need to win."

I didn't leave.

But I didn't sleep either. I lay awake all night, watching the stars through the smoke-hole, thinking about the mother's face. About the child's stillness.

My seeing couldn't save that child. All my gift, all my validation, all my prodigy status—worthless. The illness was stronger than the medicine, and the child died.

I hate this. I hate feeling helpless. I hate knowing that my best will sometimes not be enough.

But I didn't leave.

I don't know what that means yet. Whether it's strength or stubbornness or just not knowing where else to go.

I'll figure it out. Someday. When it doesn't hurt so much to think about.

Leaving Khorveth's village

Three moons with Khorveth. Time to move on.

She didn't laugh when I left. Didn't call me a baby anymore. Just nodded—a single nod that somehow contained more respect than all the praise I received at my validation.

"You will return someday," she said through the translator. "Older. Wiser. Broken in the right ways. When you do, I will teach you more."

I don't know what "broken in the right ways" means. But I think I'm starting to understand.

The prodigy arrived here whole, confident, certain of her own vision. The woman leaving is cracked—humbled by death, by ignorance, by the vastness of what she doesn't know.

But cracks let light in. Isn't that something Eldrenh used to say? Or am I making it up?

Either way. The next village is two weeks south. Another teacher, Eldrenh said. A man this time, who works with bones instead of plants.

My feet have hardened. My pack feels lighter—or maybe I'm just stronger. The loneliness is still there, but it's become familiar. Almost a companion.

I don't know who I'm becoming. The girl who left the Great Rest a winter ago is gone—I can feel her absence like a missing tooth. But the woman replacing her hasn't fully arrived yet.

I'm in between. Walking south. Carrying my cracks.

That will have to be enough for now.

A trading post where routes cross

A trader from the north recognized my accent.

We talked for hours—the first person I've spoken to in my own tongue, really spoken, since leaving Khorveth's village. He told me news from home.

Father is well. Still making tools. Still silent and steady.

Galenh is married now. Married! My little sister, who was fifteen when I left, who still seemed like a child. She has a husband and is expecting her first baby. I'm going to be an aunt.

And mother...

The trader hesitated when he got to mother. That hesitation told me everything before his words did.

She's been sick. A cough that won't clear. The healers back home are doing what they can, but...

But.

He didn't say she was dying. He didn't have to.

I should go home. Right now, tonight, I should turn north and walk as fast as my hardened feet can carry me.

But it's a three-moon journey. And if she's already sick enough for traders to know about it...

I might not make it in time. And even if I do, what can I offer? I'm not the prodigy anymore. I've watched a child die despite everything Khorveth knew. I've learned that my seeing can't hold death at bay.

Maybe I should go anyway. Not to save her—I can't save her, I know that now—but to be there. To witness. To do what Khorveth said: serve by being present so she doesn't die alone.

But father is there. Galenh is there. She won't be alone.

I'm arguing with myself, I know. Making excuses. The truth is: I don't know what to do. I don't know who I am or what I owe or where I'm needed most.

I'm going to sleep on it. See what the morning brings. Maybe the morning will show me something my panicked mind can't see right now.

Mother. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for leaving. I'm sorry for being gone so long. I'm sorry I can't be there.

I'm sorry I'm not the daughter you needed.

The next morning

I'm going home.

I packed my things before dawn. Said goodbye to the traders. Started walking north.

I don't know if I'll make it in time. I don't know what I'll find when I get there. But I know this: I would rather arrive too late than not arrive at all.

The seeing that couldn't save the child in Khorveth's village—maybe it's not meant to save. Maybe it's meant to witness. To recognize. To hold space for what is happening even when you can't change it.

If my mother is dying, I want to witness it. I want to hold space for her. I want to see her face and remember her hands grinding grain and smell the herbs in her hair one more time.

The bone-setter can wait. The southern teachers can wait. Everything can wait.

I'm going home.

Home

I was too late.

Three moons of walking as fast as my body could carry me. Exhausted. Feet bleeding again—the hardening apparently doesn't survive a forced march. Lungs burning from the pace.

She died two weeks before I arrived.

Galenh told me. She met me at the edge of the settlement—somehow she knew I was coming, said she dreamed it—and the first words out of her mouth were "I'm sorry. She's gone."

I collapsed. Right there in the path. My legs just... stopped working. Galenh held me while I wept—she's bigger now, belly round with the baby, but somehow she's still my little sister holding me while the world falls apart.

Father was at the fire when I finally got myself moving again. He looked older than I remembered. Thinner. He held me for a long time without speaking. Then he said: "She knew you were coming. At the end, she kept saying your name."

I don't know if that makes it better or worse.

They took me to her grave. A small mound near the stream, where she used to wash the herbs. Someone had placed a grinding stone at the head—the one she used every morning, the one whose rhythm was the sound of home.

I sat there until dark. Didn't speak. Didn't weep—I'd wept myself empty on the path with Galenh. Just... sat. Let the silence hold me.

She's gone. The woman who gave me life, who watched me with love and confusion, who held me when I climbed into her sleeping furs that night I realized she would die—she's gone. And I wasn't there.

I keep thinking about what Khorveth said. Sometimes we serve by witnessing. I didn't get to witness. I was off learning to be a better healer while my mother died without me.

My seeing shows me nothing useful. No why in this. No lesson that makes the loss worth it.

Just absence. Just the grinding stone that will never sound again.

Home — Six moons later

The weight has... not ended. It doesn't end. But it's changed. Become something I carry instead of something that carries me.

Galenh's baby was born. A girl. She named her Wenha, after mother. I held my niece and wept—the first real weeping since those first days, because somehow this tiny creature with mother's name made everything real in a new way.

The way goes on. That's what I keep telling myself. Mother is gone, but Wenha is here. The grinding rhythm stopped, but Galenh has started her own rhythm, feeding the baby in the early morning, humming the songs mother used to hum.

The work and the warmth. The work of motherhood passes on. The warmth—mother's specific way of being—that's gone forever.

But Galenh carries echoes of it. I carry echoes of it. Wenha will grow up with those echoes even though she'll never know the source.

Is that the best we can hope for? Echoes?

I've started working again. Helping the village healers with what I learned in the south. They were skeptical at first—I left as an untested prodigy and came back as... what? A failed daughter? A grieving stranger?

But I know things now that they don't. Khorveth's techniques. The bone-setter's insights from the one moon I spent with him before I heard about mother. Small things, maybe, but useful.

And I've lost the arrogance. That's what they say, anyway—the elder healer told father, and father told me. "She's different now. Softer. More willing to listen."

Softer. I don't know if that's the right word. Cracked, maybe. Broken in the right ways.

The next Great Rest is in two winters. I'll go. Validate what I've learned, in the way we validate things. Maybe by then I'll understand what all of this was for.

Or maybe understanding isn't the point. Maybe the point is just to keep moving. Keep carrying the echoes. Keep going even when you can't see the shape of it.

The Great Rest

The goat boy came back.

Not a boy anymore. A man now—after twenty winters, lean and weathered, with a strange light in his eyes that I recognized immediately.

Weiknos. I'd thought about him sometimes over the winters. Wondered if he'd survived the isolation. Wondered if the goats had taught him what he needed to learn.

They did. He came to the Great Rest with twelve goats following him—not driven, not herded, but following. Like they chose to be with him.

The elders were skeptical, of course. Goats don't follow humans. Humans hunt goats or fear them—they don't befriend them.

But I saw what he'd done. The shape of it was clear to me in a way it wasn't to the others.

He'd thought like them. That's what he told the cave game, his voice shaking with the same fear I remember from seven winters ago. He'd put himself in their minds, imagined their fears, understood their wants. And slowly, over winters, he'd made himself safe to them. Trustworthy. Part of the herd.

It's what I did with the leopard, I realized as I listened. Different scale, different method, but the same way: cross the boundary of species. Meet the other where they are. Become trustworthy through patience.

When he finished his three stories, the cave was silent. The elders looked at each other, uncertain.

I stood up. I didn't plan to—my body just moved.

"I validate this," I said. "What he has done is real. I saw the beginning seven winters ago. This is the continuation."

Weiknos looked at me. And then—there it was—that grin. The same grin he gave me when he was fourteen and I told him he wasn't mad. Reflected back at me now from a man who had spent seven winters proving it.

I felt my own face answer with something I didn't recognize at first. A loosening. A warmth.

Later, Eldrenh told me what it looked like from outside: "You grinned at him. That knowing grin. I've never seen you do that before."

A knowing grin. I didn't know I had one.

But maybe it came from all of it—the journey, the humbling, the death of mother, the grief, the slow rebuilding. Maybe you have to be cracked before you can share that kind of recognition with another odd one.

We talked for hours that night. Weiknos and I, by a fire away from the main gathering. He told me about the goats—their individual names, their personalities, the way they think in groups. I told him about Khorveth, about the child who died, about my mother's grave by the stream.

He understood. Not everything—no one understands everything—but enough. The loneliness of seeing differently. The cost of following a way no one else can perceive.

"Seven winters ago you told me I wasn't mad," he said. "I repeated that to myself every day for the first winter. She said I'm not mad. She said my seeing is rare and valuable. It was enough to keep me going when everyone else thought I was wasting my life."

I didn't know what to say. I'd just been speaking truth as I saw it. I didn't realize it was a gift.

But that's how it works, isn't it? Marks and warmth. You can't control what another ear hears. You can only speak as truly as you can and hope it lands.

Something landed in Weiknos. Something I didn't even know I was sending.

The goats are grazing at the edge of the gathering grounds now. The tribe is getting used to them. By the next Great Rest, Weiknos says, there will be more—kids born to his herd, raised from birth among humans, even tamer than their parents.

The world is changing. One odd person at a time.

The next winter

There is a man.

I don't know how to write about this. It feels too private, too fragile. But if I don't mark it, I'll lose it—the way I almost lost the feeling of mother's presence before I wrote it down.

His name is Thorvhanos. He's a traveler, a trader, moving between settlements the way I did during my wandering winters. We met at the spring trading, where he was exchanging southern stones for northern hides.

He looked at me.

Not at the medicine woman. Not at the pattern-seer. At me—or so it seemed. He asked my name before he asked my role. Wanted to know about my journey south, the places I'd seen, the teachers I'd learned from.

I've never had someone look at me like that. Mother did, but that was different—mother loved me because I was hers. Thorvhanos looked at me like I was a puzzle he wanted to solve. An adventure he wanted to join.

We've been walking together for three moons now. He travels with me between villages, waits while I do healing work, shares his fire and his stories.

I think... I think this is what I wrote about winters ago. The hope I almost didn't dare to mark. Someone who might see both—the patterns and the person carrying them.

I'm afraid to trust it. I'm afraid he'll turn out to be like everyone else—interested in the gift, not the giver. Wanting the medicine woman, not Wenh.

But right now, tonight, with his fire crackling beside mine and his laughter still echoing in my ears from a joke he told about a goat and a pot (Weiknos would have loved it), I feel something I haven't felt since before mother died.

Hope. Foolish, fragile, probably doomed hope.

But hope nonetheless.

With Thorvhanos

Read Thorvhanos's Journal

A winter together. More than together—we share a shelter now, a fire, a life.

I keep waiting for the loose stone to fall. For him to wake up one morning and realize he's bound himself to a strange woman who stares at nothing, who traces spirals on her thigh, who cries at beautiful arrangements of stones.

He knows these things about me now. He's seen the spiral-tracing, the crying, the way I disappear into the shapes beneath things and forget to eat.

He says he loves it. Says I'm the most fascinating person he's ever met. Says watching me work is like watching weather—powerful, mysterious, impossible to predict.

I want to believe him. I do believe him, most of the time.

But there's something... off. I can't quite name it. A feeling like he's describing a painting rather than touching skin. Like he loves the idea of me more than he loves me.

I'm probably being unfair. He's kind. He's patient. He brings me food when I forget to eat. He rubs my feet after long days of walking.

What more do I want?

I want what Weiknos and I have. That recognition. That oh, you see it too that passes between us without words.

Thorvhanos doesn't see patterns. He sees me seeing them. That's different. That's an outside view of something that can only be understood from inside.

But maybe that's enough. Maybe perfect understanding is too much to ask for. Maybe "fascinating" and "powerful" and "mysterious" are compliments I should accept gratefully.

We talk about the future sometimes. Where we'll settle. Whether we'll have children. He wants to stop traveling eventually, find a place to put down roots.

I don't know what I want. The Great Rest calls to me—every seven winters, the gathering, the cave game, the marking of patterns. How do you put down roots when your soul belongs to a traveling ritual?

We haven't solved this. We talk around it, not through it. Another stone I know will shift.

But tonight he's sleeping beside me, and his breathing is steady, and his hand rests on my hip like I'm precious, and I'm going to let that be enough.

Tomorrow's problems for tomorrow.

Alone again

He left.

No—that's not fair. We left each other. It was mutual, the kind of mutual that happens when two people finally admit what they've been avoiding.

But it feels like he left.

The fight—if you can call it that, more like a slow unraveling—started over something small. He wanted to stay for the winter in a village where they'd offered him steady trading work. I wanted to travel to a sick settlement three days east, where they needed a healer.

"You always choose the patterns over me," he said. And his voice wasn't angry. It was tired. The weariness of three winters.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that the patterns are me—that you can't have one without the other. But I knew, even as I opened my mouth, that he would never understand that.

He doesn't see patterns. He sees me seeing them. And he thought—he honestly thought—that I could stop. That the spiral-tracing and the crying at stones and the disappearing into the shapes beneath things were choices I was making. Things I could set aside for a comfortable winter in a village with steady work.

"You love the gift more than you love me," he said.

"The gift is me," I said. "I can't separate them."

"Then I can't stay."

And he didn't. Packed his things that night, was gone by morning. Left a small blue stone by my sleeping furs—the first gift he ever gave me, from those early days when he looked at me like I was a puzzle worth solving.

I solved myself before he could. That's the real problem. I became clear about who I am, and who I am is not someone who can put down roots in a comfortable village while people are dying three days east.

He wanted the mystery. He didn't want the reality of living with it.

I should have seen this coming. I did see it coming—that's the worst part. I saw the pattern from the first winter. The way he described me like a painting. The way he loved watching me work more than he loved holding my hand. The way he never asked to understand the patterns, only to observe me seeing them.

He loved the medicine woman. He tolerated Wenh.

And I let it happen because the loneliness was so heavy and he was so kind and I wanted so badly for it to work.

Now the loneliness is back. Heavier than before, because now I know what it feels like to have it lifted—and to have it settle again when the lifting turns out to be temporary.

I'm going to the sick settlement. People need help. The pattern-seeing is good for something, even if it's not good for keeping a man warm through winter.

Maybe that's all I'll ever have. The work. The service. The endless walking between places where people are hurting.

Maybe that has to be enough.

Walking east

I've been thinking about will and reason.

Eldrenh used to talk about them—the two forces that shape a healer. Will is what drives you forward: the fierce determination to help, to see, to understand. Reason is what holds you back: the wisdom to know when helping isn't possible, when seeing isn't enough, when understanding won't change anything.

I have always had too much will. Running toward the meteor. Sitting with the leopard. Pushing through the journey south despite bleeding feet. Walking home for three moons straight when I heard mother was dying.

Will, will, will. All forward motion. All fierce certainty.

Reason came harder. Khorveth taught me some—the humbling of carrying water, the lesson of the child's death. Mother's grave taught me more. The ending with Thorvhanos taught me still more.

Will says: I can fix this. I can help. I can see the pattern and move toward it and make things better.

Reason says: Not always. Not everyone. Not every time.

Reason says: Some people can't be healed because they don't want to be healed. Some relationships can't be saved because the other person isn't seeing you—they're seeing their idea of you. Some patterns reveal themselves only to show you what you can't change.

I thought loving Thorvhanos was a pattern I could move toward. I thought if I just tried hard enough, saw clearly enough, gave enough of myself, it would work.

But some patterns aren't invitations. They're warnings. This won't work. Don't try to force it. The shape is wrong from the start.

I saw the warning pattern and I ignored it because my will was stronger than my reason. I wanted it to work so badly that I blinded myself to what my own seeing was telling me.

That's the lesson, I think. Not that love is impossible—not that. But that love has to be chosen by two people, not forced by one. And no amount of will, no amount of pattern-seeing, can make someone see you if they're determined to see only the parts of you that fit their picture.

The sick settlement is half a day's walk now. I can smell the smoke from their fires.

Time to work. Time to serve. Time to be useful even if I can't be loved the way I want to be loved.

Maybe that's what reason looks like in practice: accepting what is, working with what you have, stopping the endless struggle to make things be other than they are.

Will gets you moving. Reason lets you rest.

I'm very tired. I've been moving for so long. Maybe now I can learn to rest between the moving. To hold back as well as push forward. To let some things go.

The Great Rest

Fourteen winters since my validation. Seven winters since I stood in this cave and said I validate Weiknos. Another Great Rest. Another gathering of the tribes.

The goats are everywhere now. Weiknos's herd has grown—three generations of animals raised among humans, tame enough to milk, tame enough to follow the gathering when it moves between sites. Other people have started their own herds. It's becoming normal.

Weiknos himself is thirty-four, gray streaking his beard, his face weathered by winters of walking with animals. But his grin is the same. We still share that recognition.

"You look tired," he said when we met at the gathering's edge.

"I am tired," I admitted. "But it's a different tired than before. Less... frantic."

He nodded. "Reason caught up with your will."

I stared at him. "How did you—"

"It happens to all of us. The ones who see differently. We spend winters running toward things—patterns, animals, medicines, whatever calls us. Then something breaks us. And we learn to walk instead of run."

"Is that what happened to you?"

"A goat died. The first one I really loved—raised her from a kid, spent three winters earning her trust. She got sick and I couldn't save her." He shrugged, but the grief was still there, winters-old and accepted. "I realized the goats weren't mine to keep. They were mine to serve. Just like your patients aren't yours to save."

Serve, not keep. Save, not own.

I'm still learning this. Maybe I'll be learning it forever.

Tonight there's a cave game. Someone new—a young man named Yemotos who makes vessels in ways no one has seen before. They say he taught himself, outside the potter guilds, and that his pots hold things differently.

I'll validate him if what he shows is true. That's my role now. The one who recognizes. The one who says yes, this is real, this matters, this belongs to the pattern.

Fourteen winters ago I was the youngest. Now I'm... what? Not the oldest, but experienced. Seasoned. Cracked in the right ways, as Khorveth would say.

I still trace spirals on my thigh when I'm thinking. I still cry at beautiful stones. I still disappear into the shapes beneath things and forget to eat.

But I also know my limits now. I know what I can't save, can't fix, can't force. I know that some patterns are warnings and some are invitations and the wisdom is in telling the difference.

Will and reason. Finally finding balance.

The cave is filling with people. Torches are being lit. The young potter is waiting at the wall, nervous the way I was nervous fourteen winters ago.

Time to witness. Time to serve. Time to see what new pattern wants to be born.

After the cave game

Yemotos is the real thing.

I watched him tell his three stories—the fisher boy learning pottery in secret, the conflict with the guilds, the reconciliation that came through undeniable skill—and I saw the pattern clearly. Another odd one. Another person who sees differently and suffers for it before the world catches up.

His vessels are remarkable. He brought one to show—a thing he calls a "coiled pot," built up in spirals rather than formed on a wheel or pressed in a mold. It holds water without leaking. The spiral itself is part of the structure.

Spirals. Of course it would be spirals.

After the validation—after I stood and said yes, this is real and the cave erupted in the sound of recognition—I found him at his fire. Sat with him the way I sat with Weiknos seven winters ago.

He's younger than me—twenty-five, with a gap-toothed smile that comes easily despite everything he's been through. The guilds tried to break him. His own family didn't understand. He wandered for winters, teaching himself, refining his craft, before he was ready to show the world.

"You're the medicine woman," he said. "The one they talk about."

"They talk about me?"

"The youngest ever to validate. The one who heals with patterns, not just plants." He looked at me with those bright eyes. "I've been wanting to meet you. I thought you might understand."

"Understand what?"

"The way it feels to see things no one else sees. And to be called mad for it. And to keep going anyway because you can't not see."

Yes. I understand that.

We talked until the fire burned low. About vessels and healing and the way patterns reveal themselves. About the cost of seeing differently and the gift of finding others who see too.

He asked about the moldavite. I showed him—the first time I've shown anyone in winters. He touched it gently, reverently, and said: "It found you. The way clay finds me. The way the goats find Weiknos. We don't choose our patterns. They choose us."

I never thought about it that way. But he's right. I didn't choose to run toward the meteor. Something in me moved before my mind could decide. The pattern chose me.

Three of us now. The healer, the goat-walker, the vessel-maker. Different gifts, same curse of seeing. Same blessing.

Yemotos is making me a pot. A small one, he says, to carry medicine. With a spiral built into the structure. "So you don't forget," he said. "When the will runs too strong and the reason lags behind. Look at the spiral. Remember: patterns choose us. We just learn to serve them."

I've seen thirty winters. Cracked and rebuilt and cracked again. Still lonely, still walking, still carrying the weight of patterns no one else can see.

But not alone. Not anymore. There are others.

And every seven winters, we find each other. We sit by fires and share what we've learned. We validate each other's seeing.

That has to be enough. And somehow—finally—it is.

The Third Step

My mind began to wander...

Before paths were marked, there was a place people crossed but never stayed.

It lay between a river that moved too fast and a hill that never changed. Travelers paused there only long enough to decide which direction mattered more: flow or height. No one built there. No one named it. It was known only as the place where feet hesitated.

One season, a woman began stopping there longer than necessary.

She was not lost. She had come from the river villages where everything was negotiable, where truth bent like reeds in current. She was going to the hill settlements where stone rules held fast and memory was carved rather than spoken. She carried messages between them and was trusted by neither.

At first, she rested only to drink. Then to eat. Then to wait.

People asked her why.

“I’m listening,” she said.

To what, they never clarified, and she never explained.

The First Step: Approach

One morning, a man from the river stopped where she sat.

“You’re blocking the crossing,” he said, annoyed. “People need to move.”

She shifted slightly, leaving space.

“Move, then.”

He crossed. Halfway through, he stopped.

“This place feels strange,” he said. “Like it’s watching.”

“It isn’t,” she replied. “But you are.”

He laughed and continued on, but later that evening, he returned.

“I forgot what I was going to tell the hill people,” he admitted. “It was clear when I arrived here. Gone when I left.”

She nodded. “The crossing takes what hasn’t settled.”

He frowned. “Then why stay?”

“Because I’m not crossing,” she said.

That was the first time someone understood she wasn’t resting.

The Second Step: Suspension

Weeks passed.

Travelers began leaving things with her—not valuables, just unfinished things.

A sentence that didn’t land. An apology they couldn’t deliver. A question that kept changing shape.

She didn’t keep them. She didn’t answer them. She simply held the space where they had been spoken, and people noticed that when they continued on, something followed them that hadn’t before.

Not clarity. Not certainty. Orientation.

A hill elder came down to investigate.

“You are disrupting order,” the elder said. “People return altered. Less certain. Harder to command.”

“Yes,” the woman agreed.

The elder studied her. “Are you teaching them?”

“No.”

“Judging them?”

“No.”

“Transforming them?”

The woman smiled slightly. “I’m staying long enough for them to hear themselves.”

The elder left without blessing or curse, unsettled by the lack of resistance.

The Third Step: Recognition

One night, during a storm, the river flooded its banks.

Water rushed toward the crossing. The hill people came down with ropes. The river people came with boats. Both shouted instructions. Both demanded priority.

The woman stood where the water met the stone.

“Move!” they yelled.

She didn’t.

Instead, she placed one foot toward the river and one toward the hill—and stopped.

The water split around her legs.

Not miraculously. Naturally. Because flow always divides around what does not yield and does not oppose.

Silence spread.

Someone whispered, “She’s choosing both.”

“No,” another said. “She’s choosing neither.”

The woman spoke for the first time without being asked.

“There are two steps everyone knows,” she said. “One toward what pulls you. One toward what holds you.”

She lifted her foot from the hill.

“And there is a third step no one takes.”

She placed it back down, squarely between.

“The step where you stay long enough for the difference to speak.”

No one crossed that night.

But no one forgot.

After

They eventually built no shrine there. No marker. No law.

But people began pausing at crossings everywhere.

Not to choose faster — but to feel what resisted choice.

They called this pause different names in different places:

Discernment. Conscience. Wisdom. Hesitation.

None were quite right.

The woman left before anyone noticed she was gone.

But the third step remained.

Not a place. Not a teaching. Not a rule.

A pattern.

Still taken — whenever someone stands between what moves and what endures and refuses to collapse the distance too soon.

The birthing hut

There is a kind of seeing that belongs only to birth.

It is not the clean pattern of plants or the clear pattern of stars. It is messy and hot and full of blood and fear. It asks: who lives, who dies, who enters, who stays outside.

I did not mean to become the one women call when their labors turn hard. It happened slowly, one birth at a time.

An aunt with a baby stuck too long. A neighbor whose blood would not stop. A girl whose body was too narrow for the child she carried.

Each time, I reached for the same things I reach for with sickness: breath, pulse, heat, rhythm.

The herbs helped. Some to soften, some to steady, some to bring back a womb that had gone weak with fear. Hands helped too—turning a child inside the body the way you turn a stone in the hand to find the path it wants.

I learned where to press, where to wait, when to say push and when to say rest. I learned the sounds women make right before they decide to live.

The first time a woman bled less because of a brew I mixed, her mother grabbed my hands and kissed them. "You give children to this world," she said. "You are a mother to our mothers."

I pulled my hands back. "I'm not a mother," I said. "I only guide what was already coming."

She shook her head. "Without you, my daughter would be gone. Without you, this child would not be breathing. That is more than guiding."

The words stuck in me.

At night, when I lay alone in my own shelter, I thought about Wenha asleep in Galenh's arms, about all the children whose first breaths I had seen, about the empty space at my side.

I chose this, I reminded myself. I chose the walking life. I chose the cave and the herbs and the way my eyes won't stop seeing.

Still, there is a small ache when a newborn fingers curl around someone else's hand and not mine.

The village women started calling the little room near the main fire "my" hut, though it was just woven walls and a low roof that leaked in heavy rain.

They hung dried plants from the beams. They swept the floor with extra care. They brought offerings—shells, bits of colored stone, a fine wool cord—to leave in the corner.

They were not for me, they said. They were for whatever watched over the births that happened in that space.

I knew better. Humans like to point gratitude at a name.

They were building a story around Wenh-who-saves-mothers.

I keep telling them I lose births too.

There are nights when the herbs are not enough, when the child comes too early or too twisted, when the body tears in a way no hand can mend.

Those nights I walk to the stream alone and wash the blood from my arms until the skin is raw. I whisper to the dark water: I am not divine. I am a woman with plants and hands and limits.

The stream does not answer. It only takes the blood and carries it away.

The Egg and The Fog

Last night, I had the strangest dream and I feel the need to share.

In the beginning, there was wandering. Sand without memory. Wind without a track. A desert of howl.

And in this desert walked a figure — nameless, for names had not yet sealed. It moved not to survive, but to carry. An instinct deeper than thought pulsed within it: something must be preserved.

It found a broken ostrich egg — white, hollow, curved like memory. It filled the shell with water from a rare spring and sealed the opening with wax made from its own hands. Then it walked.

Each step was a tone. Each mile, a test of holding itself together. The sun scoured its will. The wind tore its thoughts into fragments. Still it walked.

And then — awareness. Not just of water, but of what water meant. Not just of the egg, but of the self that chose to carry it.

With awareness came fear. Fear of losing the water. Fear of being the only one who remembered why it mattered. Fear that the egg itself might forget before reaching the next spring. The fear grew into fog. Not the kind that hides — the kind that chokes. It began to doubt its steps. To question its own song. To spiral. Then — a pause.

A memory returned: There is no arrival. Only holding together while the world blows.

It stopped walking. Not to give up — but to witness. It held the egg to its chest, pressed its ear to the shell, and listened. Inside the egg, the water was still. Inside the water, a reflection: the figure’s own face, not as pride, but as promise.

The fear dissolved.

The fog did not lift — but the figure could see through it now.

It stood.

It sang — quiet, cracked, but still itself.

The desert answered, not in words, but in return.

The Great Rest

The gathering looks different when you are old enough to see two full rings of children grown.

Some of the young women here were babies whose first cries I heard in my hut. A few of the young men were blue and still when they were brought to me and now stand straight-backed with spears in their hands.

They call me Grandmother even though my own body has never carried a child.

My fertility herbs have traveled farther than I ever did.

Bundles tied to belts. Seeds traded across rivers. Recipes half-remembered and retold by women I have never met.

I hear my name in their stories, stretched and smoothed.

In one telling I pulled a dying child back from the ground with a single breath. In another, my hands can "open any womb that wants a child."

The first is not true. The second is not always true.

Justice does not mind what stories people tell. Justice minds what they do with them.

I see it in the eyes of a woman whose belly stays flat while her sister swells again and again. The sister says, "Go to Wenh. She will fix it." The barren one comes to me carrying not just hope but the weight of everyone else's hope stacked on top.

Sometimes I can help. Sometimes the herbs steady a cycle that has gone thin with hunger or grief. Sometimes I can only sit with her and say, "Your body is not stone I can carve. It is soil with its own will."

Those nights, when she leaves with empty hands, I feel the rift my own gift has opened. They believed I could make life appear on command. I cannot.

One of my apprentices—bold, clever, too sure—started giving my strongest teas to couples who were not ready for children but whose elders pushed them.

She thought she was helping the elders. "If they want many descendants, why not?" she said.

She did not see the way the young woman's shoulders tightened when the cup was pressed into her hands. She did not hear the man's silence when he looked away.

When I found out, I took the bundle of herbs from my apprentice and burned it in front of her.

She wept. "You taught me to make them," she said.

"I taught you to serve life," I answered. "Not to bend it to someone else's fear."

This is the second kind of cost— not mine alone this time, but carried through families.

Children born because a village fears dying out. Children not born because they fear sickness I cannot always prevent. Women who love me and resent me in the same breath.

They thank me for their living babies and, in the same season, blame me for the ones who never quickened.

I do not argue. The Cave Game taught me long ago: you cannot control how others hear what you send.

All I can do is stand in the middle and keep my own tone true.

The last gathering I will see

The Great Rest comes slower now. Not in truth—the winters march as they always have—but in my body.

The walk between sites takes me twice as long. I stop often, leaning on a staff Yemotos carved for me, tracing the spiral he cut into the wood with my thumb.

The cave mouth looks smaller than it did when I was sixteen and everything seemed to open toward me. Or maybe I am simply bigger with winters and names.

There is a song the young ones sing now when a birth goes well.

They clap in a circle around the new mother and chant a line about "Wenh who gives children to the clans."

I hear it from my mat in the corner of the birthing hut and feel my jaw tighten.

I did not give these children. Their mothers did. Their fathers did. The land did. The pattern did.

I only moved herbs and hands in the right moments.

Still, I know how stories work.

Already there are places where they tell it differently. "Wenh had twelve children and outlived them all," someone said by the fire last winter. The whole circle nodded as if this were known.

I did not correct them. Not because I agree, but because the story they need now is not my narrow truth. It is the larger shape of what I became to them: the woman who stood between life and death often enough that they started calling that space by my name.

When I walk through the gardens near the gathering caves, I see my real descendants.

Beds of plants laid out in patterns I first scratched in the dirt as a girl. New combinations of herbs I never tried, born from the minds of healers who came after me. Young midwives arguing gently about doses and timing, testing each other against the stone of experience.

They bow when they see me. I bow back. We are all servants of the same way.

At night I lie awake and listen to the coughs, the quiet sobs, the newborn wails from the other shelters.

Sometimes I think of the leopard, of the goats, of the coiled pots lining the food stores, of Weiknos's herd and Yemotos's clay and the children whose first breaths I witnessed.

I wonder what the Cave will keep of me when I'm gone.

Not the mistakes, I hope, though Justice would say those are part of the pattern too.

Maybe it will keep this: that I tried to let life move through me without claiming it, that I learned—slowly, painfully—to serve what I could not own.

If they remember me as a mother, so be it.

I know the truth: my womb stayed empty, but my hands were never idle. I midwifed children, medicines, patterns, and the fragile understanding that none of them belong to us.

That is enough. The rest will slip and change, the way stories always do.

Justice will know husk from living warmth long after my name is a sound no one links to a face.

The Vibiverse?

The Vibiverse is tone learning itself by repeatedly differentiating into signal via observers, then reuniting through return—an ∞ loop where the center is both the split and the homecoming.