Completed Back to her Roots

[Tsaba]

35th Summer, 513 Tsaba sat once more with a pile of unmarked parchment in from of her, and a damaged book to one side. She liked copying books, certainly. To preserve such knowledge beyond the lifespan of the paper was an important and sacred task. But Plants to Help and Heal was a terrible choice of book, and not only because she wasn't completely confident in her ability to replicate sketches of plants. Tsaba knew almost nothing about plants, but the 'help' and 'heal'... She bit her lip. The past was nothing to avoid. She'd had a good past.Good enough. It wasn't as if copying out the book would be exactly like those hours spent on her master's medical notebooks anyway. It was just a book about plants, plants that happened to be used in medicine. No problem. Tsaba carefully opened the book, winced at the damage on the first page, and began copying out the decipherable parts of the Table of Contents. many of the words were deformed beyond recognition, but she would know them when she hit the relevant chapters. Nothing to worry about. Tsaba was in her element. She was being a scribe.

[Tsaba]

The book turned out to be a sort of plant encyclopaedia, with a page or two dedicated to each plant within. It was huge. She knew that copying it out would be no mere night's work. And the illustrations... Tsaba looked at the first entry (alfalfa) and immediately decided to do the illustrations on each page first. That way, if she messed up -- and she would -- she didn't waste time filling in the words on a page she couldn't use. She touched her quill to parchment, and began drawing the diagram of alfalfa. And immediately spoiled it. Her second attempt looked better, but the plant's width was wrong and the lines wobbly. The third attempt, she smudged immediately. It wasn't until the fourth that she had an alfalfa diagram that she was relatively happy with. But Tsaba didn't tire. She didn't need to rest. And she didn't get bored easily. So she let the fourth attempt dry, and then began to fill in the words. The bottom fifth or so of the page was difficult to make out; water had deformed it and spread the ink. Tsaba copied what she could, doing her best to preserve the spacing and page position of the words as well as the words themselves. A well-copied document should look as much like the original as possible. She didn't know how long it took her to note down the medicinal properties of alfalfa, but eventually she had a full page to set neatly aside.

[Tsaba]

"Make sure you spit out all the juice," Craun reminded Tsaba as she dutifully chewed a mouthful of root. She spat the root, along with all the fluid in her mouth, into the small copper bowl he held under her chin. "If it's medicine," she grumbled, rubbing her aching jaw, "how can it be bad to swallow?" "That which can heal can also harm, Child, depending on how it is given and how much is received. This is as true in medicine as it is in all things. This root is for a poultice, it is not intended to be swallowed. And while drinking a little will not hurt you, you have a lot of root to chew." Tsaba picked up some more of the root and scowled at it. "Why can't you chew root while I do bandages? I need practice at bandages." Craun just laughed; a wheezy, dry sound that sounded a lot less healthy than his exuberant manner would suggest. "Yes, that you do. But you also need to learn that being a healer involves a lot of boring, repetitive tasks, and a few aching muscles. And these patients need their bandager to be quick about it, given the size of this outbreak." He rubbed a gloved hand in the child's hair. "Finish this lot, and then we can take a break." Tsaba wrinkled her nose at her Master, but put the root in her mouth and began to chew. Tsaba pushed back the eighty-year-old memory and relaxed her jaw to stop her teeth from grinding. She'd been angry that day. Not at Craun, not for making her help with the poultices; that was normal. She'd been angry because... well, she hadn't known why at the time. All she'd known was that a man died holding his child's hand, and the child cried, and that had hurt. With time and hindsight, it was pretty easy to see why that had upset her. It wasn't that she really thought about her parents. Or cared. It was eighty-five years ago. But sometimes, she remembered how much it used to hurt, and being on the mainland was just making that worse. On Sahova, she'd shut away memories that weren't useful or important. But in Zeltiva... It was the memory of pain that hurt. Not what she'd lost. Tsaba carefully copied down the depiction of the root that she'd been chewing all those years ago, trying not to remember the texture of the root, or the weight in her heart.

[Tsaba]

With her little writing brush, Tsaba painted thick stems ad broad leaves. She painted tiny flowers and spindly roots. She remembered the smell of a few of her subjects, the texture of a few more. Most were unfamiliar; she had worked with what was available in Sahova, and her training had not been based in herbalism. But under her brush, all manner of plants took shape. She made a lot of mistakes. Beside her, a pile of errors on parchment grew. She resolved to take it home with her and use the leftover space for glyphing practice or something. And beside each plant, she detailed its location and its use. Aloe Vera for burns and skin pain. Arnica to ease the stiffness in the bones of the elderly. None of them, of course, useful to her. None of them had been useful to Craun when he administered them, either. He'd been dead long before they met. What must that have been like? To spend several lifetimes healing others, unable to heal himself? To rely so heavily on his own failures, to stay alive only because there was a steady supply of dead that he had been unable to save... and to know that there was no need for concern, because the dead would always keep coming? Because there would always be failures? And he'd kept doing it. Offering life to the people around him until they drove him out. Offering life to two orphan children who would have died on the streets. Offering it again when he had to leave, explaining the Daek-Nuit, the meaning of immortality... Tsaba had been turned too young. She knew that. But as each year passed, and it became more and more certain that she would be dead if she were still human, it became harder to resent that. It became easier to remember that Craun had been trapped, that the offer that had looked like taking advantage of children through the lens of regret was in fact sincere and desperate. He offered it young not to take advantage, but because it would be the last chance to do so. He waited until the last chance. And they'd known the risks. The failures weren't his fault. They were Tsaba's, perhaps, but not her foster father's. And he'd kept helping her afterward. She never blamed him, really; she couldn't. She wasn't sure that she would ever understand what had possessed the Nuit to suddenly take on two orphan apprentices. But she couldn't fault him for what he did. Tsaba filled in the last few details on Arnica, momentarily grateful that she was a Nuit. Had she been human, her tears would have ruined the page.

[Tsaba]

Eventually, Tsaba's candle burned out. She was tempted to light another one and keep going. There was no reason not to. She didn't tire, she didn't need food. Except... Except there were people outside. There were things to see. There were other things to do, things beyond a cramped room and the golem-work of copying books. She'd known that she wouldn't get such a book finished in one sitting. She'd accepted that. And she shouldn't so easily fall back into the patterns that had made her want to leave Sahova in the first place. As a Nuit, there was no reason not to keep working until she needed to maintain her body. As a Nuit, that was a natural thing to do. It was also the sort of dreary regime that had left her wanting to kill herself. "That which can heal can also harm, Child, depending on how it is given and how much is received. This is as true in medicine as it is in all things." It wasn't that she resented her condition. It was a long time too late for that sort of thing. But perhaps she didn't have to give up the 'drawbacks' of humanity too quickly. Simply being among the living had already done so much for her; why change what worked? She may not need sleep, but that didn't mean she should give up rest. She may not feel as she used to, but that didn't mean that she should forget. She had eternity. There was no need to change too fast. Tsaba lit another candle. She left it lit long enough to tidy up the room and put her tools away. Then she extinguished the flame, and went outside.

[Eldritch]

Tsaba :

Skills
Copying +3
Drawing +2

Lores
-Choosing to keep the drawbacks of the living.

Notes :

Nothing to note

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