so i listen to the    wind for an answer

Perhaps pain and regret and guilt is what makes them pour themselves into healing. She can’t fix the past and she knows it, no matter how many times she replays her life over and over in her mind. No matter how many times she tries to find what she missed or come up with different ways she should have handled a situation. She cannot go back and implement these things. No, all she can do is torture herself with them in the present, with all the what if’s. But she can heal. She can help others, take away their pain and fatigue and give them something, however small. She can teach others how to heal, can give them tools for saving others and themselves. She can make a difference with healing. Where she has failed before, perhaps at this, she can succeed.

Perhaps that’s why she found herself drawn to it so quickly. She’d grown up a diplomat and a fighter, yet given the chance to choose for herself, she didn’t pick the things she’d known all her life. She’d picked something entirely new, had thrown herself into working and learning about an art she’d never even considered before. The job had fit her like a glove, and she found herself becoming someone else. Still her, but a different version of her. Perhaps not a better version of herself though, because she’d buried the pieces that had hurt too much. Tucked away the warrior and the princess and the girl who’d once controlled the wind. She’d become quiet and complacent.

Part of her still knows that Corbin would be both pleased and disappointed in that way of his. The stern look that hid a smile behind his eyes. Because she could be all those things, couldn’t she? She could be a healer and a fighter. She could be quiet and loud, complacent and revolutionary. He would have wanted her to be more. But instead, she hid behind the one thing that took away pain. The one thing that didn’t leave her with more what if’s, with more guilt. And she cannot quite bring herself to be more than what she has become.

“Oh!” she says with pleasant surprise when he says he has healing magic. Delight and surprise crosses her face, and she grins a bit. “I am a healer, and I’m actually questing for healing magic of my own. My quest is to find others with healing magic and learn about the elements they use to heal.” She pauses for a moment, somewhat unbelieving that she could have managed to run across him here. But then again, the world is a small place sometimes. Often when you least expected it to be small. “Would you be willing to tell me about your magic?”

lyanna