Golden eyes, impossibly old, gazed into mine with a softness that carried the burden of wisdom and time. Without knowing how, I knew his name. It awakened from somewhere deep within my mind, as if whispered to be by the mist itself. 

    Wind-speaker.

    His hand stretched toward me, his voice low and soothing. “Look with me… and find… your pain.” The words, steady despite his age, echoed softly.

    The world lurched, and suddenly I was standing beside him, looking down at my own body slumped in the chair. My breath caught—colors swirled across my skin like ghostfire, those softly glowing blue and green lights in the northern sky. 

    But my shoulder, the one numbed by Head-knocker’s first blow, was a throbbing storm of angry red. The color stretched from my shoulder to my wrist, flickering like a bonfire.

    Wind-speaker’s hand clasped mine, his grasp surprisingly strong. “To-gether,” he said, and guided my hand to touch the wounded red fire of my shoulder. “Your wound… carries more than flesh’s pain. It festers… with… echoes of malice. We… You, I… Shall purge it.”

 
    I felt myself splitting in two. One part of me screamed as searing pain lanced through my shoulder. The other part felt…expansive, as if I were a river brimming with floodwaters. Silvery motes of light flowed from Wind-speaker’s hand into mine, spiraling into the crimson of my injury. My shoulder became translucent, and I could see the raw chaos of the wound—pockets of writhing, swirling red energy.

    The silver light wasn’t gentle—it seared like frostbite and fire, twisting deep into my muscles. The light pushed against a wall of darkness, like mud, revealing more than pain. My bones ached, stretching as if realigning after being out of place for years. A wave of nausea hit me, and for a moment, I swore I could feel every tendon weaving itself back together, fiber by fiber. The sensation was unbearable—then, just as quickly, it passed, leaving only an aching emptiness where the damage had been. 

    As the pain faded, the raw crimson of my flesh gradually shifted, first to orange, then yellow, until it faded to the soft blues and greens that matched the rest of my body.