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The village’s central fire burned, waning and waxing with gusts of wind over its embers.

In the shade of the mighty branches of the yhanba, under the pale glow of the Allorian moons, Ki’Remi stood, arms crossed.

Eyes on Issa as she knelt beside yet another fevered child, her palms pulsing with illumination in time with the child’s shallow breath.

The power she wielded glowed with white-hot heat.

Twas ethereal because it did not burn its recipient. It healed.

More patients gathered under the massive branches, waiting their turn, hunched in pain.

She worked the line methodically, running those miracle hands over their bodies.

The Rider noted she wasn’t just restoring them.

She was imbuing them with peace, assuaging their suffering, and chasing away their worries and fears.

It unsettled him.

That’s when he narrowed his meta vision on the creases on her brow and the haggardness around those nebular starred eyes.

A stab of guilt hit at his misplaced assumptions.

She meant well. That was clear.

Her face was serene, but there was a strain at the corners of her mouth, a tremor in her fist she tried to hide.

The healing was costing her.

He saw how her skin dimmed after every act of restoration, how she sagged to her knees between interactions, and how she brushed an arm over her sweaty brow.

That’s when he caught sight of her chrono, the ticking time bomb on her wrist.

He jolted as it all came together in his mind.

It wasn’t just compassion that drove her; it was compulsion.

Fokk, was there a relentless power that had a hold over her?

Forcing her to wield her power?

As the villagers murmured thanks, color returning to their cheeks, their health restored, Ki’Remi’s stomach turned.

He recalled the relentless obsidian attackers and shadow-wrought ships that fired ancient tech on them.

He deduced they were hunting her.Why?

More emotion roiled in him because, along with her mystery, her approach to healing reminded him of the archaic purpose he had rejected.

Legends he’d buried beneath the cold, unwavering logic upon which he built his life.

This impossible, maddening woman forced him to confront what he had long denied: that his healing gift had more components than its frigid, fact-based ascetic stratagem.

As much as he wanted to turn away, as much as he desired to tell her off, give her a hard time for her unauthorized doctoring, or better still, rid himself of her particular blend of complicated, he couldn’t.

No matter how hard he tried to fight it, there was a whispering truth in the back of his mind:

She embodied everything he spent his life avoiding, what he needed to embrace to find the peace that had long eluded him.