healing

Author’s Note: This piece was shaped with a little help from AI. It provided assistance on things like the structuring, some names, shortening some verbose language/ideas as I'd written, and gave me the odd turn of phrase here and there.

I sat bolt upright in bed. Where were my curved daggers? My boot knife – my boots? My knife that I kept… oh. Oh. Quite a few weapons of various types lay neatly arranged on a bedside table, and my beloved bow leaned, thoughtfully unstrung, against the wall.

The day after my experience whilst gathering milk thistle I rose early, I was feeling strangely unsettled as if there were some unfinished business I had failed to attend to.  I had my breakfast and then headed to Errak’s home in Bree, a cottage just north of the Inn Gate which skirted the Bree farmsteads.  Upon my arrival I could hear chopping wood, I headed to the rear of the cottage where.

Last night there was a knock at my door. When I answered a man was there with a babe in arms swaddled tightly. His hair was very blond and was disheveled and wet from sweat, he appeared out of breath and quite pink of the cheeks. I immediately sensed he had run to me from his home with the child.

A year. It had been a year since the poem Eiragerd had written for her own self. Somehow, again, this date managed to surprise her. Yes, she'd had further growth and goodness in the year between.
But somehow, on the very day she thought would pain her again, she was given unexpected blessing.

She sighed as she weighed her options.  None of them felt right.  Honor, justice, right, wrong, fair.  Were those just words?  Were any of them real?  She could not tell. Life and death.  Those are real.  A man no longer lives.  What is one supposed to do next? She did not know. So she decided.  She would do what felt right.

The morning light creeps through the windows and the slight blond girl wakes.  She slowly stretches before rising and getting dressed.  Once outside she finds a quiet flat spot in the grass just outside one of the paddocks.  She sits cross legged in the grass pushing aside the memory of her mother scolding her to “sit like a lady” she lays her on her legs palms up.

Eiragerd remembered the day. She could not have forgotten it if she cared to. Yet, she was surprised to find it did not stab her as she dreaded it would for weeks.
It was like any other memory and any other pain now. Looking back, she could not help but admire the growth it had brought about in her. Inspiration hit, and she could not help but write her heart on paper.