~Learnings & Leavings of a Lady~ (Training in Healing/Mystics)

[Lliae Llyhedras]

She had been out of touch for quite awhile, she knew. It was a bit annoying, considering how she had been sidetracked continually over the past year or two… the incident with the half-cyraxian, the necrotaur, a return to Prime and then a quick escape before the advent of the Pox, hiding out in the Pegasus Woods and then being kidnapped off to Arakmat to the Harem of a Sheik, becoming his Third Wife, another return to Prime and living for awhile in the tower of a Mage, the learning of Mystics, besides going back to Tk’hzaar in her head.
And now she hoped she was ready to settle down slowly, to ease herself into a quieter sort of life by stages, and above all to finish her schooling so that when she did return to her little house in Silrosia to live, she’d be a useful member of the community.
Lliae smiled. Isolated bliss beckoned, with the promise of wonderfully dull things.

She had vague ideas of how that sort of thing was meant to go. She’d move in, clean out the place, repair a few things, make or buy a few rough sticks of furniture, and sew (inexpertly… she knew it wasn’t one of her talents) some curtains.
And then, a small kitchen and herb garden out the back, and out the front and to the sides, honeysuckle, climbing roses and night-flowering jasmine, planted any old how and left to climb all over her house. She would garden, make concoctions out of the herb-garden and ramble through the forest by day collecting interesting vegetation to transplant to her garden, she would fish a bit, maybe knock over a pheasant for dinner, milk her nanny goat and tend the beehives… yes… they fitted neatly into her picture…
And by night, she’d make a small meal for one, set the table nicely and eat in the quiet of her kitchen. And then spend time reading, making notes in books and carefully pressing some of the more interesting flowers and leaves between the pages.

Until the candle burned down a little bit, then to bed.

And the next day would be… exactly the same, but different. She would make it her place, where only her bare feet would walk the rough flags of the cottage-paths, and where she could hear the animals whisper to her, and eavesdrop on their thoughts as they went about their business.
Healer and Mystic… but what profession? Priestess? Monk? Witch, maybe. That was the word for slightly mysterious, studious women who lived alone after all, but Lliae reckoned that if she was also a good midwife as well as doctor, she wouldn’t be hunted down, would have a good trade under her belt, and she could sell honey and goat-milk besides.
Anyway, she was disqualified for the other two, mainly because she didn’t have a God.
There was a twinge of regret that she wouldn’t have children or a husband (in Lliae’s book one went with the other) but she reasoned out that it was only the last vestiges of rather silly girlish ideals hanging on. Lliae knew that there probably wasn’t spare knights in shining armour hanging around waiting for maidens to happen along.

Regrets would burn away over the next few centuries.

Just you and me eh Valasse? she asked the large golden barn owl as she came swooping through the trees and alighted on the Telera’s shoulder where she stood on the outskirts of Frigid River, looking speculatively over the town as if convincing herself to go back inside.
That’s how it should be. You stick with me, girl, and I’ll take care of you. I’m all that you’ve ever needed! said Valasse smugly, preening through her breast feathers.
‘Yes,’ murmured Lliae aloud, though she knew that Valasse was happy only because, finally, she had Lliae all to herself again. The owl, otherwise a completely inoffensive personality, had the major flaw of being almost psychotically possessive of her elvish friend, and was prone to fits of jealousy that wasn’t just a Little Green Monster… it was a Big Green Monster, with tentacles and nasty sharp pointy teeth that would devour metaphorical intruders whole.
Lliae wasn’t quite sure about taking the advice of Valasse (it’d been her idea to go back “home” and it’d been all Lliae could do to detour south to see Pirvan before heading north) but she was too tired to argue anymore.

Yes, agreed the owl, now get on with it, so we can go home and be happy together alone. Forget about him. He’s probably a very busy person anyway, she added slyly, beak still lost in feathers, though one beady eye gauged Lliae’s reaction.

‘You’re right,’ said Lliae levelly, though some part inside was well aware of the terrible numbness that encased her like thick blankets, and sat down, crossing her legs and shedding her cloak to reveal arms left bare by a vest and sensible pants.
Of course I’m right. Only I know what’s best for you… Valasse purred into Lliae’s mind with considerable satisfaction, sinking her head down so that her beak rested on her downy breast and slitting her sharp black eyes.
Lliae’s dark eyes stayed on the town below her, stretching in the dawn, though her trembling fingers crept over to the small pack of slim tomes she’d painstakingly copied out in Arakmat. The Methods of Healing. The List of Herbs. And there were others, rarer tomes, also garnered from the Great Library of Arakmat. Anatomy. Surgery. Basic Biology and Physiology. How the body worked… what kidneys were meant for, what the heart did, although it was anyone’s guess as to how the brain operated, though Lliae intended to find out.

She’d used up all of the blank books she’d bought in Prime so very long ago, and the ink-pot purchased at the same time was long emptied… her fingers had been in cramps for weeks afterwards, and the ink-stains all over her hands had taken ages to scrub out, but the education she’d had as a child and young woman in Tk’hzaar had stood her in good stead.
Above all else, Lliae was good at concentrating on things.
Her eyes dropped down to the book that was now in her lap, and her hands opened it to the first page.
For the rest of the day, there was no other sound on that hillock in the sun other than the occasional rustle of parchment pages, and the hushed, breathless sound of intense concentration.
Lliae wasn’t a speed-reader. For one thing, her hands had automatically copied the books out into the elvish script she’d learnt to write as a little girl, and that took a bit of reading. The other thing was that she’d spent ages in writing these books, making sure she hadn’t missed anything, and she wasn’t about to miss anything in the re-reading of the end product.

The words were gently absorbed, and settled into her brain, jostling for room as they sank down into the depths of her mind.
And when she was done, she read them again, the image of the quiet cottage always in her head.
It started here, like the end of a thread that led through a maze.

ooc: I've PMed you the link Maddy, so you can check in on me if you feel the need. This is going to be a fairly long thread, mainly because Lliae's going to be learning a lot, so I hope I do well

[Lliae Llyhedras]

It took the whole day, but she was sure that she’d absorbed the knowledge well. After returning to Tk’hzaar and finding out that she’d had quite the education as a young Lady, Lliae had felt confident in her abilities as a scholar and a potential doctor.
Well… it was certainly better than what she’d thought she was capable of before, which was illiteracy and a life spent hunting down evil for money, a bit of food and perhaps a bed in a hayloft from a grateful farmer.
Finding out she could read and write had been a very nasty shock when she’d hit the Great Library… it was like she’d spent her whole life walking happily through a perfumed garden when she’d stepped on a rake and it had swung up and thumped her hard enough in the face to send her sprawling.
And… no matter what her current skills in Mystics, Lliae had sternly resisted the temptation to augment her mind so she could cram things in, or so she could learn faster. There might be a time when she would come to regret that.

The mind filled with many potential scenarios in the future where Lliae could have some serious results of cheating now… each as horrible as the next. For example, what if she had to remember some minute detail that could save a patient’s life and instead found that she could not recall it immediately? Or if it was swamped under by other information? Or if, worst of all, she simply couldn’t access that part of her mind anymore if the spell went wrong.
It had happened before, whole chunks of her life forgotten and lost for the better half of a century, and although Lliae would never admit to being scared of anything, deep down in the pit of her mind she was terrified of it happening again.
She’d met Mystics… namely Dallandra… who seemed to treat the ability to manipulate such energies as the easiest thing in the world, and used it for all sorts of frivolous things.

Some part of Lliae felt that was… not right… not for her, at least. Lliae would be content in having the ability, and would happily spend the rest of her days using it only when needed… something told her that not using Arcana when you had oodles and oodles of it at your command was the greatest power of all.
Besides… to Lliae, too much use of Arcana had always made her feel as if she was standing on a very high, very steep hill which had been iced over after a cruel frost. And there was a pit of crocodiles below, grinning at her.
She shrugged it off. Back to the books, then.
Lliae had been scritching away at the parchment here and there with her Quill, stopping occasionally to re-ink it from her new pot of ink that she’d purchased only a day or so before.
There were notes, and questions such as “Why notte a mild tincture of strawberry leaves in a warm beverage such as tea for a gentle laxative solution?” which had occurred to her when she’d noted that strawberries themselves produced a strong laxative when eaten in large quantities.

And then there were herbs and plants that the authors of “A Guide To Herbs” seemed to have completely ignored. Houseleek was a powerful pain-killer, she’d found in the botany guides in Arakmat, though of course they couldn’t grow it there.
Lliae mentally noted that she’d have to try to find some growing in thatched houses… its favourite habitat, and to experiment a little with it.
If her Mystical abilities were strong enough, Lliae couldn’t see why dosing herself with various medications to note their effects and to estimate their ideal doses couldn’t be done, as long as she could trust herself to purge the plants and their active ingredients from her body before they did her any harm, or made her think she could go flying with the faeries.
As for the other part, well…
It was a bit macabre, very unsettling and possibly morally questionable, but the long and the short of it was that Lliae needed a dead body of every species to study in detail.

For some reason, the drawings she’d copied down couldn’t seem to agree on the exact location of the internal organs, and they had a curiously… smooth, not-real look to the illustrations and woodcuts that irked her to no end, and made her suspect that they’d been rough estimates rather than detailed art from the hand of someone standing over an open corpse and sketching things accurately.
And that was it. To do any sort of reasonable job at all, Lliae needed to be accurate about these things. It was no good standing over someone dying on a table and going; “Well I think this is his liver.”
‘I’m going to have to spend a considerable amount of time in study, Valasse,’ she told her owl after prodding her awake, then ignored the outraged screaming in her head.
While she waited for the ranting to stop deafening her mental ears, she calmly packed up her books and ink-pot, wiped her quill clean on a rag, and bound the whole lot in its protective oilskin wrap tightly.

After awhile, she found it necessary to dull out the mental link that connected her to all the animals in Telath, so she could have a little peace at least, and when she was done packing she stood, hitched the pack, and made her way through the woods in a nice, calming walk with the howling owl still bobbing up and down in rage on her shoulder.
However, on her walk she had the good fortune to find some dock and burdock (the large leaves of this plant were a blessing from the Gods for those travellers who found the need to relieve their bowls behind a handy bush, and just had to take out a book to write that in) some angelica and even wild milfoil and yarrow.
‘Angelica…’ she murmured to herself, ‘the top finger-length of the stalk beneath the distinctive white flowers are quite good in promoting appetite and can be crystallised in sugar. Ideally look for pencil-thick pieces of a pale green. Children will happily eat this, so it’s a good stimulant for a child who doesn’t eat well.’

She wrote this down too… it was a bit of speculation on her part, and the linking together such clues as old housewives who used to crystallise everything in the hope of getting their kiddies to eat it… she wondered just how many rotten teeth had resulted from this… and the plant angelica had always been good to eat before dinner.
But she’d not known how normal, everyday fruits and vegetables could be used to aid in skin diseases and to treat burns and such things.
She paused to lean up against a tree and write;
“The fruits known as Tomatoe, Green Apple and Orange are quite beneficial to those peoples whose skin is overly oily and in a state of adolescent eruptions. Pulp the fruits and sieve their juices… the mild acids kill off potential infections in the skin problems of the face particularly, and a mask of sorts might possibly be concocted using the powders boiled from cow and pig hooves, usually intended for the manufacture of glues.”

It was worth looking into, at least. But she had a vague prediction that telling people they were putting the essence of powdered dead animal hooves onto their faces wouldn’t be a good idea.
Perhaps a plant alternative might be a bit more acceptable?
Yes, probably…

[Lliae Llyhedras]

Lliae had spent the past few days doing what she did best… listening, and thinking. It was nice to be in an area where she could be at peace yet in a reasonable amount of safety. She didn’t fear the birds and beasts of the surrounding countryside, certainly, if only because she could now sense them coming from a mile away and could either avoid them, or placate them or, in the case of one severely irritated she-bear, deliver such a mental slap that they would feel a desperate need to leave her alone.
No one wanted to irritate something that felt so nasty.
The plant-gathering had been… well, the woodcuts of anatomy were primitive but the book of illustrations had been quite, quite lovely and very instructive, far more so than any of the anatomy had been. And so she found herself on this dew-soaked morning rambling through the forests again, looking for various plants that matched the illustrations in her book… it wasn’t too hard, because the people who’d drawn the plants were totally lacking in imagination but possessing of a damn fine eye for detail and colour, and had put on paper exactly what they had seen in front of them.

And so she carfully, oh-so-carefully, plucked the flowers and leaves and pressed them between the pages carefully, leaving enough stem so she could sew some thread over them to secure them later on, and the seed-pods, and the roots went into small satchels in her bag.
Only samples for now, but it was a good idea to familiarise herself with the herbage she was going to be needing to be a good doctor.
However, she despaired of being a good therapist. Valasse had gone into a sort of permanent state of sulk, and no amount of coaxing on Lliae’s part could get the owl to reply with anything other than stiff, huffy answers. Of course, the solution was easy. Lliae could just declare she was leaving off her studies, and setting off for Silrosia, but Lliae, despite being a generally amiable sort of woman, could be as stubborn as a mule and had made her mind up.
Valasse would just have to deal with it. Besides, Lliae was sure she’d come around when she got used to the idea.

The whole day was spent tracking through the mud and the dirt and the leaf-mould and the dripping undergrowth, sometimes being scratched by blackberry thorns, and sometimes being stung by various insects, but by the afternoon, she had picked and uprooted and plucked what she felt she needed, and was sitting again on the knoll above Frigid River.
This had become one of her favourite spots, commanding as it did a fine view, with soft grass to sit on, a cooling breeze and warming sunshine. She happily stitched the greenery into its place in her book… now considerably a bit thicker than when she’d started out… and admired the end result.
Mostly flowers and leaves, but she’s prised open the seed pods and put them in as well, as well as thin cross-sections of root, carefully sliced off with one of her Sai.
The backpack was full of samples of everything, like the book, but this was for trial and error later on, the measuring of what doses were most effective, what sort of root was better for coughs, that sort of thing.

To do that, she’d need to go to the hospice at the Temple of the Faith, and to tend to the sick there, so she could make accurate notes about their recovery rates.
Because… well… many herbalists recommended tinctures of Breathwort to cure pneumonia and severe infections of the… she referred to her anatomy book for the name… bronchial tubes and lungs, but was Lungwort a better curative?
And again, would Aloe Vera, the spiky plant that she simply must get her hands on the next time she passed through Arakmat, so she could powder the gelatinous saps and carry them, the cure-all for burns? Or would Faile be the best one for minor burns, and Aloe Vera saved for the serious conditions?
Lliae was at once annoyed and elated… she felt as if she had ahold of something, and greatly desired to do her research properly… perhaps Pirvan would allow her a small room to experiment in?
Unfortunately, unless she could get some decent patient at the Hospice, there might have to be a small amount of self-mutilation so she could observe the healing effects of some plants on her…

But she figured that such drastic steps mightn’t be necessary, with any luck… well, obviously she wasn’t hoping for someone else to get sick, but… she’d be there, ready and waiting, the next time someone was bought to the Church of Faith.
It didn’t occur to Lliae that a hapless patient, upon opening their eyes, probably wouldn’t want to see Lliae standing there with a large satchel stuffed with strange smelling leaves, a sewing kit filled with oddly shaped needles and catgut, and a wide grin going “Another one? Great!”
And then there was the birthing side of things… Lliae had been listening carefully to the animals around Frigid River for a few days and, this being spring, has “felt” a fair few births.
She’d been breathlessly quiet and very subtle in her “eavesdropping” but she’d found out, in a few remarkable days, exactly what was going on internally with a new mother bringing a new life into the world… her objective viewpoint gave her the opportunity to garner a lot more information than she would have dreamed possible… and indeed was possible for the new mothers themselves, because pain got in the way of clinical notations at such a point in time.

Lliae made a note to go and check in on some of the local livestock… surely she could practice her Mystical arts on the animals to reduce their pain somewhat, and to encourage certain muscles to contract while others should relax to make the process a lot easier than it had been on some of the poor animals she’d been watching.
She also needed to concoct some birthing liniment… lanolin with juice of Thyme and Marigold, to ease the pain somewhat, and to prevent any infection would be good, and would aid the lubrication of the birthing canal, because she’d also noted that one painful problem in extended births was the waters running dry and the subsequent birth was about as painful as it could get, apparently.
Fortunately Lliae had decided to start off with livestock (who could be calmed a lot easier than their undomesticated cousins of the wilds) progress to helping other animals in the forests, and then… on to helping people.

Obviously “People” would begin with Elves, Humans, Giants, Dwarfs and Halflings… the “humanoid” species… before progressing on to the other, trickier species. A Saurid Female laying an egg had to be a sight to see… and also a Dorin and a Katta would have to be very… different.
Lliae imagined Fae-Babies like tiny peas in the palm of her hand, and smiled… she’d found her calling, though she wasn’t sure what a woman who talked to animals and bought children into the world and did professional Healing was called.
And then there would be the grave robbing soon…

[Lliae Llyhedras]

Well, another few days, and a lot of watering eyes and coughing and gasping for fresh air, and slightly light-headed feelings had come and gone in Lliae’s experiments with herbal remedies… it was a bit annoying, but she felt she was beginning to get the hang of it.
Thank the Gods that she had a Thëlyri biology though… her kidneys had probably saved her from being poisoned several times before she’d given up on the serious stuff and had had just stuck to the simpler things…
Healing cuts and bruises and scratches, for instance. Lliae, after running around in the forests near Frigid River, and not having much knowing of how to leap and bound through a forest like a doe or like the bloody Rangers did, was now suffering from any amount of mild contusions and skinned knees, elbows, knuckles and, somehow, her right buttock.

She rubbed her bruised ankle… while she was pretty good at walking through forest and wilderness… she’d been on her feet through such places for well over two damn Patterns, after all… she wasn’t good at forcing her way through forests carpeted with more bracken and brambles than one blasted woodland should possibly contain.
And then there was the mud. Being out and about in the rain on slippery hilly ground was not Lliae’s forte per se… she tended to wrap herself in her oilskin, pillow her head on her pack and find a handy bush to sleep under until the rain went away, normally… but obviously, to harvest plants at the right time, you had to be out at all hours, squelching through the mud, scraping the mud off and, on one occasion, falling down the hill through the mud and fetching up against a tree with a rather painful thump.

Lliae limped heroically onwards. She would get the damn plants, and then get back into the damn warm! Damn spring weather! Why did it have to be perfectly sunny in the morning, then thunderstorm all over Lliae in particular when she went through the trees so she had to search for what she needed under the dripping canopy?
Contrary to her personal expectations… trees tended to concentrate rain into large, fat drops that were perfectly capable of soaking the unwary head in one large splat when they were shaken loose by a gust of wind.
Lliae didn’t mind water, but she objected to the mud. And besides, it made referring to her notes in her book difficult… she fortunately had her oilskin cloak over her head, so at least the paper was dry.
Well… she knew what was on her list for today, at least.

Juniper berries… which weren’t hard to find, because Juniper trees grew well in mountains, and it wasn’t hard to find the trees with the bluish black berries, though getting said berries wasn’t much fun because of the prickly foliage.
She collected thirty, and put them carefully in her pack so she could dry them for later on, to use on people with muscular pains… she’d use a few of them, fresh, to test on herself tonight.
There was the Marigolds for a soothing balm, certainly not hard to find because so many people grew them in their gardens as a decorative flower, and peonies for clotting the blood, and a large quantity of Pinesleep, the bark of the knotty pine tree, for easing pains and causing sleepiness. These, too, were packed away.
She was fortunate enough to find a Poutel mushroom (little wonder given the damp spring climate) and some Thyme, whose flowers would make a good antiseptic lotion for her scratches.

Closer in to town, she was very happy to find some Uburna… dammit, she had bruises on her bruises, and hopefully some of this would help to heal them a little bit faster.
She noted how happily the plant grew on the edges of civilisation, and collected a goodly quantity of the stuff… somehow, Lliae was sure she’d need it.
And so, dripping wet, and feeling badly in need of a hot bath and an even hotter cup… make that a pot of tea… she called it a day and took her rather bedraggled self back into Frigid River.
Lliae made another mental note, and it was this;
Tomorrow, go and buy a good wool-lined oilskin coat, and a very large hooded cloak to wear over the lot. That ought to keep her, and her work, dry should it choose to rain on her parade again in the future.
It seemed that Doctoring wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Somehow she’d always pictured being in a warm cosy laboratory somewhere.

Mud up to the armpits hadn’t figured in her plans anywhere…

[Lliae Llyhedras]

Lliae had a cold… which was a first in the entire time she’d spent in the Allerian Empire as far as she knew… its onset had come with a scratchy throat that felt as if she’d been trying to eat sandpaper sandwiches, and, horror of horrors, a dribbly nose that… just… wouldn’t… stop!
She sneezed into a small cotton hankie that she’d ripped up out of an old shirt, blew her nose (who the hell was around to care how she blew her nose anyway?) and then folded it up into another hankie, and tucked it away in a pocket.
Damn bloody cold wet sunny-one-minute-storm-the-next spring weather!
Just being an elf didn’t mean that you couldn’t get the sniffles. If only she’d known that the narrative irony of becoming a Healer and then getting the next cold that came along was so strong… she would have invested in several months’ worth of oranges and lemons, which she’d read were a wonderful preventative against headcolds and all sorts of nasty illnesses.

Well, that’s what you got for prancing about in rainy muddy wet forests in the spring chill… her scratches and bruises had healed rather nicely due to the various herbs she’d placed on them… the bruises in particular had faded away, which was a relief. Looking black-and-blue was probably only a fashion statement for the Vysstichi, and you’d have to wait until things went yellow-and-green to look fashionably Thëlyri anyway.
At least today was one of the sunnier ones, and she stepped out into the fragrance of the warm Spring daytime, climbing back up onto the little knoll that she’d sort of made her impromptu study house, tranquil meditation place and scenic picnic spot besides.
She had with her a small bottle, several clean cotton pads (definitely not kept in the pocket that contained the rather full handkerchiefs) and a Sai or two… or three, if anyone dared to do a search of her garments.

The Telera panted as she rested on the knoll quietly for a minute or two, getting her breath back after the climb… in normal health, she would have scaled it without effort, but she was feeling a little bit shaky and tired on her feet what with having the ‘flu and all.
Perhaps brewing up a cup of medicinal tea could help her out at least a little bit… or would help to shorten the duration of the sickness at least.
She sat, admiring the view… well, the first time she’d sent he view without rain and cloud and drizzle and fog and all of the glorious weather that came with the change from Winter to Spring… and sighed into the breeze as it shifted the air around, drying the landscape out.
Time for the next part of her experiments… she’d been cautiously dosing herself on herbal remedies knocked up from what she’d gathered, but what she’d been using was just very diluted juices and pulps for now at least… she hadn’t felt well enough to experiment on some of the more dangerous brews.

However… she was sure that she would be able to deal with what she had to, today… it involved what could technically be termed as self-mutilation, though Lliae had never bothered with technicalities and wasn’t about to start now.
She drew her Sai and laid it in her lap where her crossed legs formed a sort of tent in her dress, and then withdrew the bottle of comfrey lotion and the cotton swatch from the pocket that wasn’t the hankies, and, carefully uncorking the bottle, held the cloth over the top and swished a bit of the lotion onto the cloth.
And then, carefully corking the bottle again, she rubbed the damp cloth across the inside of her left arm, making sure that it was all sterile and clean in preparation for what was to come next.
The Sai was taken up into one small hand, and the cloth was wiped over the drawn Sai the fragile left arm held out, the soft inner flesh of the arm gleaming, the skin almost translucent and showing delicate tones of lilac, as the tender tissue of her lips and eyelids often did.

Lliae wasn’t a fool, however… she dropped into a meditative state first of all, not the wreaking of the Arcane spell, but the mere mental level of peace and well-being. This, she didn’t rush, because it was very important in the preparation of what she was to do next. Get it wrong and she could die.
The small Telera waited calmly until she was ready, then tried to lift her mind away from the pain, away from the physical, and most importantly, away from the information that her frantic nerves would be sending her.
Rather… she would still be perfectly aware of what was going on, but she would be… detached from it, would not register the pain. Such a thing could be immensely useful in aiding patients and yet keeping them lucid so she could glean valuable information from them about their ailments, and therefore be able to know exactly which bit to treat, and where. And besides… it could help her if she were ever so injured in a battle that she would need a calm and collected mind, free of pain, to be able to escape or to defend herself through arcane or even physical means.

Such things could be very dangerous however, as Lliae was perfectly aware of… pain was nature’s warning system, which would alert the body to fatigue, damage and the physical breaking point between life and death… a person without the proper pain signals would be toeing that line without knowing exactly where it was.
Only if she were very desperate, in a situation where she felt there was no other option, would she do such a thing as she was planning to do right now… though she wasn’t bothered by cutting herself open and blocking pain signals at this moment in time. She was not pressed, and it was a controlled situation.
[cornflowerblue]I am, for now, unconcerned by such things. They will not affect me, and I can do what I need to, to be able to help others,[/color] she told herself softly, reaffirming her feelings when she felt ready.
And took her Sai. And with a smooth, rather scarily practiced move, sliced it across her arm a bit up from her wrist, a bit below her elbow, ignoring the slight sting as it went through her flesh.

For a moment there was no bleeding, so clean was the wound from the razor edge of the well-kept adamantinum weapon, and the lips of the injury stuck together before the pressure of the blood from gashed veins welled up and forced her skin open in a surprisingly warm flood of sensation.
There was a pause.
‘Ouch…?’ she asked herself clinically, then smiled the slightly feverish smile of someone who was not completely well, and finished, ‘I think… not. Yes. Well… time to get to work…’
And she concentrated, fixing the mental block securely in her mind so she could weave atop it another spell, one that would allow her to “feel” along the abused muscular tissue and the sliced blood vessels, the slit in the skin, to… move things along a little.
It helped to hold the cut closed with one hand as, swaying a little and with closed eyes, she encouraged the muscle filaments to bond together neatly in almost the same position.

The blood vessels were slightly more tricky, but once she’d aligned them well enough, it was only a small matter to bond the edges together, stretch the already flexible proteins into place, and the skin was basically one great big perpetually regenerating organ, so it only took a half-hour, an hour at the most, on top of the three hours that she’d spent regenerating the injured tissue, to seam the epidermal tissues together as if she had an unimaginably small, very efficient invisible needle and thread.
After all, it was the acceleration of the natural processes that she was after, not some unnatural thing that would transform her into a horribly suppurating mass of constantly mutating flesh…
But perhaps she’d overdone it a bit on the confidence in her abilities, and she was rather disappointed in herself, therefore, when she come out of the spellcasting, opened her eyes, sighed, and then, with a strangely triumphant smile on her face and her eyes fixed glassily on her unharmed arm, fell over gently sideways.

After a minute or two, Valasse soared in, and landed on her shoulder where it poked out of the rumpled dress and hair, then the owl concernedly began to nibble on one pointed ear, though this didn’t seem to help any in waking her up.
At least she was going to get a good sleep in the warm sunshine.

[Lliae Llyhedras]

It was the day after, and she was walking around on trembling legs and with a slightly weakened constitution, but she was fighting back with her Mystical Arts, for while she hadn’t known it before, now she had a good idea that the body could be… tweaked, commanded.
Lliae was good at listening to her physical body as a fighter and someone who dabbled in the unarmed combats, and she had always started the day with a calming meditation, sitting cross-legged on the floor or on her bed, just… breathing, and clearing her mind of all other distractions.
She’d thought that the Mind could overcome her body and heal itself, certainly, but what she’d not realised was, in fact, that she was capable of telling it to heal itself… Lliae had been thinking while she was ill, and thankfully dosing herself with careful compounds of various herbal teas and breathing in the vapours of crushed plants in a hot bowl of water had helped kill off the headcold.

Now, she was a bit weaker, but she felt… capable.

The cut on her left arm was nothing more than a fading scar… soon, after several weeks’ application of plant juices, the mark would be barely noticeable.
This, she noted down carefully in her book… not only could she heal people, but those who had been horribly maimed by some accident or in some battle could possibly be aided by her, something which could prove to be highly interesting, and something which she filed away mentally for later examination.
To occupy herself, she leafed through the books again; particularly interested in the “skin-grafting”… a gruesome name for an equally gruesome treatment, but it was a lifesaver to some people who had suffered bad burns.
Lliae might be able to help there, too… everyone knew that Thaumaturgists had the power to regenerate skin, and she figured that if she managed to get inside the body with her mind, to command certain… what were they called… tiny bits? Cells? To grow, so that scarring would be lessened.

Hmm.

In anycase, she went back outside and listened to the animals with her Talent as they went about their woodland ways… and Lliae patrolled the various fences around farms, sometimes squeezing through a small hole in a hedgerow so she could continue on her walk, calming skittish sheep and horses with her mind so they wouldn’t be spooked.
A sheepdog barked at her once, not sure if it ought to see off this odd person, but with a gentle reassurance in its mind that she was merely passing through and wouldn’t intrude on its territory, it sat on its haunches and whined in canine confusion, finally giving up and leaving her alone.
Lliae breathed in the air deeply… she felt much better already, and the fresh springtime air was doing her good. Having been unfamiliar with the concept of colds (it would take a particularly determined germ to survive the cold, salty waters of the Bellenic Sea) she hadn’t been totally prepared for the misery of actually being sick, but thankfully it hadn’t affected her too much, and hopefully she would be resistant to repeated exposure.

A distant bleat stopped her, drew her interest and she hesitated, turned and sent out a probing thought, sweeping the immediate area of the damp field…
There was a ewe, lying on her side in the birthing position, trying to force out of her body a dead lamb that hadn’t survived what appeared to have been an agonizing day or two, and the other sheep scattered at Lliae’s furious approach. Where was the Shepard? They ought to know better than to leave the sheep alone at such a time of year, although Lliae knew full well that sheep had the uncanny knack of managing to hide themselves away when they were in pain, so that not even the best Shepard could find them.
She went to her knees next to the ewe, and, gently… gently… put herself behind her eyes, trying to get a feel of what was wrong since she’d not seen a sheep give birth this close to before.
First of all, she drew in some surrounding Ara, used it to augment her own Vis reserves, and patiently wove a spell, carefully placing blocks in the pain receptors of the sheep’s brain so she wasn’t suffering.

‘Poor old girl,’ Lliae muttered, patting the thick wool of the swollen, heaving belly.

Then went exploring again in the ewe’s head… it wasn’t hard, the ewe was used to people in anycase, and Lliae had always practiced a gentle mental touch, especially with animals.
Something felt… stuck, very stuck, in the womb and the birth canal, and there was a hot, burning sensation at the top of the uterus that felt like something had ripped clean away… the placenta, Lliae realised, which was why the lamb had died before its birth.
Now the umbical cord and the placenta and the lamb were probably tangled up together in one large ball, impossible for the ewe to eject from her body, and she was bleeding from the tear to top it off, filling her womb with blood and plasma.
Lliae opened her eyes, and swore… she didn’t even know where to begin to help the ewe, although pulling that dead lamb free would have to be a first, otherwise the sheep would die of infection in very short order, although she looked halfway there already.

Fortunately Lliae’s hands were small, thin and soft, and the birth canal was easy to find, having dilated itself in preparation of the birth, but as she felt around, she realised sadly that she was touching a pair of tiny hooves; poking out like the lamb had been ready to land feet first on the fresh spring grass.
Lliae sighed, gently rotated her hand in the shuddering ewe, and, gripping the hooves with her fingers… one between her fore and middle finger, the other between her middle and ring finger… with her right hand, she pressed one hand comfortingly on the suffering animal’s belly and with one smooth movement… pulled the obstruction free.
The ewe didn’t even bleat, just let out a shuddering sigh as of merciful relief.
Lliae stared at the mess of lamb and afterbirth on the ground, and watched the black clots of blood seep out of the sheep as the pressures from the blood and the fluids relieved themselves… Lliae was already shaking her head.

‘Too much damage here,’ she whispered, and delicately peeled the amniotic sac away from the lamb, looking at the limp, woolly body in her hands, then shuffled around to the ewe’s front end, holding the lamb under her nose for her to sniff.
The sheep did so, the dull animal eyes and the stupid little sheep brain causing her to lick automatically at her lamb a few times before she apparently decided to give up on life altogether and slipped away as it began to rain quietly.
The Telera felt the mind flicker and die, released her hold as the animal’s spirit seeped away, back into the ether.
Did sheep have souls? Probably not… Gods tended not to worry about sheep, though their desires were simple and they didn’t demand much in the way of miracles.
Lliae laid her head on the damp wool of the ewe’s body, the dead lamb still in her lap, and after awhile she began to cry.

There was probably some metaphor for life here.

[Lliae Llyhedras]

It had taken Lliae another week to be comfortable with the sheep’s death, and for her to continue observing the farm animals giving birth in the rain and the cold, gently touching on their minds as she sat under a tree or on a rock some distance away, not interfering unless she was needed, and she made careful note that while basically all the biology of the animals were the same, there were subtle differences…
Some babies’ heads were larger. Some were smaller. Headfirst seemed to be the correct way to do things, and she noticed that legs, if in the wrong position, could be a very big nuisance.
Multiple births were not uncommon, especially amongst sheep, who seemed to be very good at being mothers to more than one baby…
One cow needed to have a calf encouraged out… Lliae was sure that the bovine would have managed eventually to give birth to the calf, who didn’t seem to get the whole idea of being born and was refusing to engage his head properly in the birth canal.

So she went over and very gently insinuated herself into the Cow’s head… just seeing things from her point of view with her Talent, nothing more, though as a Mystic she was capable of causing any creature to feel pain, or to provide a blissful lack of it should the need arise.
All the cow needed was a bit of comfort… she wasn’t overly distressed, though she would have been exhausted if the birth had proceeded as nature had intended it, and probably in quite a lot of pain, so Lliae very gently patted one rump… one leg twitched, the long tail flicked itself quietly, and felt around for the Calf’s mind.
He didn’t seem to be unhappy, but he was certainly a factitious little bugger… it was a bit difficult to piece together a mental image of what things must look like in there going only from the sensations the cow had in her uterus and from the sensations the calf had all over, but it was possible, though it took some time… the fact that Lliae had been watching proceedings with her head from afar was a great help though.

Perhaps, when she midwifed women, it would do to be sitting quietly in their mind from the time the preliminary contractions started, so that when the time came, she would know exactly what to do, where the patient was hurting, and most importantly of all, what to do next.
The cow barely noticed when Lliae pressed a hand inside and felt around the cervical muscle to check for dilation… this was also something she’d been mentally monitoring in the animals… she’d noticed that in the better, easier births, the mouth of the womb had been opened quite wide, whereas for the more difficult ones, the animals had started pushing their baby against the muscle, causing them no small amount of pain and internal bruising.
Tender fingertips, gently exploring the rather moist environment… it helped not to think about it, though she’d rather feel fluids all over the place than a dry birth, which would be sheer agony on the mother… and finally she “felt” the tickle when she touched the calf’s head.

‘Stubborn little one, aren’t you?’ breathed Lliae aloud, mostly to herself, pressing her cheek against the cow’s hide and closing her eyes as she concentrated on the sensations that her Talent was providing her… she had shut out all of the other animals in the field and had narrowed her mental spectrum so she didn’t have any interference.
Damn… it was slippery, since the amniotic sac had recently ruptured to grease the calf’s way into the world, but while she appreciated the miracle of birth and the excellent organisation of biology, it did make finding both of the calf’s front hooves a bit tricky.
She got one pointing the right direction, then had to rummage around a bit to find the other one… thank the Gods that probing gently into the cow’s womb didn’t make the beast try and kick her, or at least to run away… she seemed content standing there, cudding peacefully and ruminating on whatever secrets of the universe cows let their minds dwell upon.

‘A-hah!’ the Telera crowed quietly in triumph, as her hand locked around what was definitely the other little hoof, and pulled it gently forwards, beside its twin, and got her hand wrapped around both together… then eased them past the cervix and into the birth canal.
The cow lowed quietly in almost a questioning tone as she felt things begin to happen, and gave a gentle push with her muscles as Lliae tugged, rotating the head of the calf out of its mother’s uterus and towards the world.
‘Excellent,’ she told the little brown cow, ‘now, just to pull him free nice and easy…’
But the cow had other ideas… she seemed to sense that her calf was coming out without any of the previous fuss, and she came back from her metaphorical tea break and pushed hard as Lliae withdrew her arm in one fluid movement… and caught completely by surprise, she ended up on her backside on the ground with a slippery calf on top of her.

‘Urrgh, that’s getting just a little too close to nature for my liking,’ groaned the Telera… the calf, for his part, seemed content to lay where he was, coughing and mooing as much as a baby cow was capable of, then sat up with a sigh, shifting the small brown baby into her lap and checking to make sure that his umbical cord had severed itself, which was only right and proper for cows.
The afterbirth might take days to come away.
‘Congratulations,’ Lliae told the cow as she turned her head to snuffle at her offspring, blinking her long lashes over her dark eyes in the caramel golden face, ‘you’ve managed to make me look like you just gave birth to me. And it’s a little boy,’ she added, scraping some unmentionable piece of mucus away from one shoulder and wiping it on the grass.
She waited until the calf was happily suckling at a teat… after he’d worked out what his legs were for, and what teats were, that is… he’d tried to wear his mother’s udder like a hat for a minute or two there… and then crept away quietly, making a mental note to come and check up on them.

Nevertheless, Lliae felt rather proud of herself, though she was tired, mentally exhausted from feeling around inside two heads, and from concentrating so very hard, even though she looked like something that had crawled out of one of the pits of hell at the moment, and she stank very strongly of cow, and of cow fluids, and of crushed crass and mud.
Still… she’d helped, and she felt… good. Buoyed up, and cheerful.
And even though it rained on her head every now and then, and even though she had to stop off by a river and leap in to clean herself and her clothes off so that passers-by wouldn’t faint away in horror, she felt at peace with the world for the first time in… well, in a long time.
After all, there was a wobbly-legged calf in a field out there who was having his very first meal with her help, and a mother who didn’t feel as if she wanted to lie down and die as well who was probably coughing up her next cud to chew.

Way to go, Lliae!
She could do this.

[Lliae Llyhedras]

Another few days, and the Spring was in full swing… flowers were blooming, though spring weather was as treacherous as ever and Lliae had gotten used to putting the hood of her cloak up to keep off the worst of the rain… normally it wouldn’t have bothered her how wet she got… or not… but the constant drips beading on her long dark eyelashes annoyed the hell out of her.
Especially when she had to concentrate.
Today was fine and sunny however, and Lliae merely contented herself with lying flat on her tummy in the middle of a field, surrounded by grazing sheep and watching the small butterflies feed on those tiny, hidden flowers that had somehow managed to escape the cropping teeth of the ewes and rams.
She was feeling quite well with the world, and fortunately no other sheep had needed her help after that disaster with the ewe a cycle and more ago.

You’re being silly you know, said Valasse from where she perched in the shade of a tree’s leaves and branches at the end of the field, It’s not as if you’ve been Sheep-Cursed or something.
‘Thankyou for that sentiment, Valasse,’ murmured Lliae, but softly so that she didn’t scare the butterflies away, resting her pointed chin on her folded hands and smiling in enjoyment of the sun’s warmth on her body through her clothes.
She knew the owl was right… but Lliae, though good and practical and certainly the type of woman to confront her fears was nevertheless relieved that what little skill she possessed hadn’t been needed.
Just in case she got a repeat performance.
And… she’d almost forgotten him, and had almost forced herself to accept him as a friend.

She rolled onto her back with a sigh, staring up at the blue sky with the fluffy clouds running across it like... well, like sheep… and amused herself with making up great big pirate galleons in her mind; over there was a Sea Wyrm, coiled and looped, here was the hapless ships that were about to be crushed by the creature’s wrath, the wood moaning like a living thing as it was torn free…
Lliae shook herself out of the daydream with a slight frown… what on Telath had bought that about?
It was then that she realised that the moaning wasn’t coming from any ship, but instead, from a sheep.
Oh… oh of course. Of course… she didn’t want it to happen, and so it happened.
Mind you, the ewe who was standing a little way away from where Lliae lay probably wasn’t reasoning that far into the machinations of fate and of narrative inevitability because to her, she was just ready to give birth.
The Telera lay perfectly still for a moment and then, closing her eyes, she tried to reach into the ewe’s mind…

It wasn’t easy. Lliae hadn’t spent all day carefully watching her for one, and the animal was nervous for another… she didn’t like feeling as if someone was sitting there looking over her shoulder, but Lliae quelled the first mental rebellion and deftly inserted herself into the sheep’s head.
The problem took awhile to find, mainly because there didn’t seem to be any injury, infection of even major discomfort beyond what was normal for a mother at this late stage of pregnancy, and then she noticed that the sheep felt very… full.
Blindly, Lliae rolled herself onto her hands and knees, and moved carefully through the flock towards the ewe, who, if she was feeling things out correctly, couldn’t give birth because there was so much to give birth to! Lliae was sure she felt at least two lambs in there, but upon reaching the mother and touching oh-so-gently on the little undeveloped minds within her body she realised that there were three lambs.

Oh Gods…

The sheep was huge when she opened her eyes to take a look… and though she was fully dilated by the feel of it (Lliae would only be sure when she actually gently touched those muscles with her hands) the lambs were all… jumbled up.
When she’d calmed the ewe down and had sidelined whatever discomfort the sheep might feel in the next hour or so, and she realised with a sinking feeling as her hand and fingers explored the bodies of the lambs that it was almost impossible for her to tell one from another by feel alone.
Right, to do this the hard way…
Closing her eyes helped, and she gradually named parts and matched them with heads and bodies as she felt their baby senses register the pressure from her questing fingers.
Lamb A was curled up around Lamb B, but one of Lamb A’s legs was under the chin of Lamb C.

Lamb B was… she felt again to be sure… snuggled behind its triplets, its head hooked over the body of Lamb A, but with its hind legs either side of Lamb C, who was sort of squished between the two but with its head facing towards the birth canal.
She found one forehoof, and gently tugged to make sure, then located its companion by the simple expedient of running her fingers up one leg, along the front of the chest, and finally unfolding the other forehoof out from under Lamb C’s body.
And gently began to tug it forwards, towards the outside world.
The other lambs jostled a little bit, but fortunately the ewe’s waters had only recently broken, so the lamb was slippery and slithered out and onto the ground like a little eel.
The Telera only paused to wipe its nose clean, and then went back in for the other two.

Lamb A was easily found… both of the other lambs had rotated gently in their mother’s womb with the disappearance of their sibling, so that Lamb B was even further back, and Lliae gently cupped the second baby’s head and pulled a little bit so the front part of the body… and the little fore-hooves… were easily found.
She pulled them through the cervical muscle, and then the rest of the lamb followed them out to meet its little sister, who was already bleating loudly in the manner of all babies everywhere.
Another short pause to clear the nose of any mucus, then Lliae chuckled in delight as she found Lamb B, which seemed to be eager to follow its sisters, and this time the Telera had the room to cup her hand underneath the woolly little chest, to run her hand forwards and to grip both of the hooves in one swift move.
Then she was helping it on its way, with a push from its mother, and Lliae was cleaning the last little nose.

The ewe, miraculously deflated, turned and baa’ed bemusedly at her own personal little flock, then settled down to lick and eat the strings of matter from her lambs, all three of whom were drying fast in the sunshine as Lliae sat back on her haunches, watching them with fondness in her dark eyes.
All of the triplets’ long little tails… which would be docked later on in life to prevent them from getting flyblown… were wriggling and twitching in delight as they all had their first meal, the greedy little buggers guzzling their mother’s milk down into empty bellies.
A quick pause by a streamlet to wash herself clean, and she took her leave for the day, although she did make a detour to check out the calf that she’d helped into the world the other day… the calf was cute enough, but his mother seemed intent on examining Lliae as closely as possible, and Lliae wasn’t used to livestock.
Somehow, having a cow go “Mrrruuuaaah” and spraying you with a fine mist of spit made you realise that all cows did not, in fact, go “Moo”. It was like having a dribbly-nosed monster try to suck on your hand in a friendly way.

When she’d extracted her fingers from the affable bovine mouth, she was on her way, across the green fields and the forest surrounding them, a small speck when seen from above as she knew only too well, having seen herself through Valasse’s soaring eyes when she was aflight.

[Lliae Llyhedras]

It was another fine day, and Lliae was busy chasing sheep around a field… one of the stupid creatures had managed to gash itself on a nasty pointed stick in a hedge, even through all of that protective wool, and now she had to catch the blasted thing, and to sew it back up.
Lliae stopped, and huffed softly where she stood… she might be fast on her feet, and even faster in her natural element, but she hadn’t counted on the unpredictable cunning that was Ovis, or sheep… so she reckoned that she’d have to either get herself a crook… and that wasn’t happening, because Lliae wasn’t a Shepherdess, would never be a Shepherdess, has no intention of ever becoming a Shepherdess.
Right then, you little bastar- you little bit- you damn sheep. I’ll show you!

She was a Mystic, wasn’t she? There was no bloody rule about her using it only for Healing.

Lliae flumped down, crossing her legs and frowning quietly as she drew herself into herself, that inner part of her that remained level and calm even in the greatest storm of emotions that could rock the body and soul. Some people called it their Wal, Lliae always wished there was a word meaning “Centre of Being”. There ought to be, anyway, if only to describe the peace and the detachment she felt when she finally meditated herself into a state of mental preparation, whether it be for spell casting, or fighting.
Mind you, Lliae’s meditations were strictly non magical in nature, just a way of calming herself down.
When she was done, she gently drained the Ara in her immediate vicinity… using it to buffer her own flow of Vis, weaving it artfully into a mental flow of Arcana that she slid into her very nerves… the pearly cords in and radiating out of her spine into all of her limbs.

Though she’d read about this sort of thing, Lliae had never done this before although in theory anything was possible when using the power of the mind, and she was one of those people who were quite talented when it came to thinking unusually about usual things.
“Strengthen the Neural Links”. Well… she remembered what it had felt like to feel weak when sick, as if her arms and legs weren’t working properly, weren’t quite doing what she wanted them to do. She also remembered what it had been like, casting the Enfeeblement spell so long ago for the first time, and having it cast upon her.
So… she was trying for the opposite of that sensation. To sharpen her reflexes, to increase her strength and reaction time, her already remarkable Thëlyri agility and speed…
In a few minutes’ time, Lliae was blurring across that field in hot pursuit of the sheep, who, she had to admit, was a pretty good little mover for someone with a bleeding flank.

She ran and ran and dodged around other sheep, and even once smacked right into a hedge herself that she’d not realised she was going to reach so very fast, but still the sheep eluded her, though she’d managed to grab it once or twice, it had merely kept on going, dragging her along for a ride.
Ten minutes later had her back in her cross legged position, panting slightly through parted lips and glaring balefully at the sheep, who was glaring right on back.
Lliae felt the spell wearing away, and she rubbed her new set of bruises resentfully, figuring that she was going about this all wrong… it wasn’t speed and strength that was the problem… Lliae might be fairly strong given her race and her sex, but strength wasn’t the same a mass. She was just too light to pile onto that sheep and to bear it to the ground where she might overpower it.

Fancy! Lliae outwitted on the battlefield by a sheep!

‘What’re you looking at you woolly maniac?’ she snapped, and the sheep only managed to look even more smug with a face that by rights shouldn’t be capable of a range of emotion beyond a sheepish “Dur?”.
Well… it might’ve won the battle. But it hadn’t won the war, not yet. Not if she had any say in this.
Out came a book, with the Theories of Mystics on the inside of the first page, and she leafed through it up to the levels she was capable of casting up to, looking for a spell that would help her… she didn’t want to knock out the sheep, because she didn’t want to spend the rest of her day waiting until it woke up or came out of its paralysis, nor did she want to have to unravel the spell. Doing that always felt like she was admitting defeat, or something.
Aha… this looked tailor-made, and with her Talent aka Gift aka Curse she ought to be able to manage fairly well on an animal.

Lliae put her book away, breathed in… out… in for four heartbeats, hold for two, out for four heartbeats, until her breathing had settled into an unconscious rhythm, and she only very faintly monitored it with the back of her mind.
She went looking for her Wal, found it, then rested there for awhile, calming her turbid mind and gradually weaving a gentle spell around her own mind, enmeshing that part of it that she always sent out to animal minds, the part that she put behind their eyes and their ears and under their skin…
Strengthened it. But… subtly, oh so subtly, because Lliae was a great believer in not doing anything by force, but shaped it so that she would slide in and take control… but in a gentle way, by laying strong suggestions in the sheep’s hindbrain… not strictly commanding it what to do, but instead almost the same thing, except that the sheep would think that it was making the decisions.

She could feel it at the other side of the field, just out of her sprint-and-grab reach, and she sent that spell, that part of herself over, laden down by charm and wreathed with head-spinning glamour… she’d heard that Elves were supposed to have pots of it, so by rights she ought to be able to spare some.
It wrapped around the sheep’s head, wriggled around its mind and wove gentle fingers into its brain, bedazzled and beguiled it…
‘Come to me,’ whispered Lliae.
Come to me, whispered another part of her.
The sheep paused, and if Lliae had been feeling slightly narrative, she’d have written in imaginary sparkles glittering in its eyes. But all there was on its face was a slightly bemused expression, and then, guided by Lliae’s will, and to her secret delight, it came tottering over to her.

The Telera rested her hands gently on its side, and she folded the gaping flap of skin back over the wound after she’d gently dribbled on some of the lotion she’d prepared according to the book of Herbal treatments. It really was no more than the juice of several plants, collected for their antiseptic properties, but it would help. After that, she sat back to weave another spell, on top of the Beguile that she already had going, a spell like she’d cast upon herself the other day…
With her will, she sen