The Wanderer and the Healer
The road out of the shrine was a ribbon of broken concrete flanked by fallen holo-billboards that still blinked static prayers. Arjun walked without haste. The mark on his palm had cooled to a faint glow like embers; every now and then he pressed his thumb to it as if to reassure himself the pledge was real.
Rain had left the world smelling of wet earth and metal. Somewhere ahead, a wind line carried the metallic tang of ozone — a sign that the old city’s energy grids still thrummed beneath the surface. Arjun kept his hood up, not because he needed protection from the weather, but because traveling alone invited questions he could not yet answer.
He had no belongings besides a water skin and a small utility knife his father had carved into the handle with a crooked pattern. That knife felt absurdly small now that the universe had decided to involve him.
A sound reached him — low, wet coughs and the thin cry of a child. He turned off the main road into an alley where a collapsed transit tunnel opened into a narrow courtyard. There, by the ruins of a fountain that still spat irregular jets of phosphorescent water, a woman knelt beside two figures: an old man with a bandaged head, and a little boy shivering under a torn blanket.
The woman moved with efficient calm. She washed the old man’s wounds with a small vial that shimmered green, murmured something under her breath, and then took a piece of cloth to wrap the boy’s feet. Her hands were steady but marked with soot and small scars. When she looked up she met Arjun’s eyes and did not flinch.
“Are you—” she began, then stopped. Her accent carried the soft edge of villages not far from the river-plain. “You carry the mark.”
Arjun had intended to conceal it. He lifted his palm slowly, not sure if he should be ashamed or proud. The lotus-and-flame glyph still pulsed faintly. The woman’s face changed — recognition, a flicker of fear, and then something like relief.
“I’m called Mira,” she said, without ceremony. “Healer. Wanderer.”Arjun tasted the word—witness, healer, wanderer—each one a little like destiny.
“Arjun Varad,” he replied. “I… left the shrine this morning.”
Mira nodded toward the boy. “They came from the northern tracks. Raiders. Took the water and left a scorch where the well stood. I tied what I could; the boy’s fever will break if he drinks the decoction twice more.”
Arjun crouched beside them. The old man’s breathing was ragged; the skin around his eyes was the gray of someone who had starved for months. Arjun’s first instinct was to sharpen the knife at his hip and look for whoever had done this, to make them pay. The mark on his palm warmed like a warning.
Instead, he reached for the green vial Mira had used. “What’s that?”
“A simple antiseptic blend,” Mira said. “Bio-resin and lotus sap. A touch of old-world nanofibers to seal when you need it most.” Her voice was practical, almost clinical. “It’s not a cure-all. But it buys time.”
Arjun’s fingers brushed the vial. The mark on his palm flared faintly. He felt, for a breath, a whisper like wind through leaves: the same question he’d heard in the shrine.
“Will you bear pain that is not yours?”
Dozens of answers lined up in his mind — duty, righteousness, family honor — but his hand obeyed a simpler truth. He touched the old man’s forehead and felt heat, the uneven pulse like a small drum. He pushed the cap off the vial and, with Mira’s direction, drew a thin sip into the boy’s mouth.
The child coughed, then drank, eyes fluttering like tiny shutters. Mira smiled briefly and then packed her tools with the efficiency of someone who had no time for theatrics.
“You shouldn’t be alone on a road like this,” Mira said finally, glancing at the skyline where the neon-saints blinked like tired watchers. “Especially with that mark. It invites things that look like salvation and taste of ruin.”
Arjun looked at her. He wanted to ask how she knew the mark’s meaning, whether she’d been to the shrine herself, whether she understood everything it signified. But the woman’s eyes held histories she seemed reluctant to reveal. He sensed she had seen worse than he had, and had learned a practical philosophy: act first, explain later, if at all.
“Why do you wander?” he asked instead.
Mira’s hands paused atop her bag. For a second she looked older, thinner, older than her years. She did not answer with rhetoric or lore. She said, quietly, “I seek to make small rights. A bandage, a meal, a path for those who cannot walk it. That is all a healer can do. The rest… I leave to the gods.”
Her voice contained an edge of defiance that did not match the softness of her actions. Arjun watched her collect the blanket and fold it with the same care he had seen his mother stitch clothes as a child.
As they rose to leave, the old man coughed again and, with surprising clarity, said, “May the Yodha be blessed.” The words seemed to come from instinct rather than belief. The boy clung to his blanket and mumbled something that, if translated, could have been a prayer or a wish.
Arjun felt a pull — not a command, but an urge that the path he had chosen would take him through places like this, where small mercies mattered more than grand confrontations. He wanted to ask Mira to come with him, to help him find the next shrine or to tell him more about the relics, but something in her shuttered.
“Why do you help strangers?” he asked instead, testing the terrain of her silence.
Mira’s expression flickered. For an instant, something like amusement crossed her face. “Because someone helped me once,” she said, and the words landed like a pebble tossed into a still pool. Ripples spread through her features. “Because once is all it takes to change a life.”
Arjun drank that in. He had his own catalog of retirements he’d performed in his head—his father’s last breath, the village that had laughed at his dreams. None of it felt like the kind of mythic origin Mira hinted at. Her confession was too small to be a sermon and too heavy to be a lie.
They set out together along the ruined highway for a while. Mira walked with an easy gait, occasionally stopping to check hidden corners for survivors or to barter with folk at the side of the road. Arjun discovered that she knew the world in a way he did not: where the water caches lay, which tech-shamans might take a favor, which markets traded in little things that could make a village survive another week.
At a junction, a child barreled out from behind a toppled synth-grove, face streaked with tears. He grabbed Arjun’s sleeve and shouted, “He came last night! The man in iron! He took my ma’s ring!”
Arjun’s breath tightened. Old instincts flickered toward action. He turned to Mira. She looked at the child, then at Arjun. “Do you want to chase thieves tonight?” she asked gently.
“Yes,” Arjun said.
Mira’s hand found his arm, light but firm. “Then do not chase with a blade in your fist unless you want to become the blade. Chasing is different from hunting. Protect the people first; the rest comes after.”
He almost disagreed. He almost said it was the same. Instead he listened and watched as she produced a small coin and knelt to speak with the child. She learned the thief’s likely direction — the south hollow where salvage traders sometimes hid — and then, without rhetoric, taught Arjun how to read the tiny clues: boot marks in the dust, a bent shard of reflective plastic, a smear of oil on a stone.
He followed her lead. They moved like two halves of a single thought; his youth and fire, her hands and tact. They found the hollow before dusk. A lean man with metal braces across his forearms sat with a haggard dog and a tin cup. Beside him, on a ragged cloth, lay a small silver ring.
The man’s eyes widened when Arjun approached. “We took nothing but food,” he said quickly, an excuse already forming, trembling on the air. “I swear, we—”
Arjun could have let his anger decide. The mark on his palm flared, a hot little sun. He thought of the shrine and the monk’s words: it will awaken by truth, not by strength. He thought of the old man in the courtyard, the fevered child. He thought of a thousand slights that turned to poison if answered with more violence.
Instead, he asked, steady and clear, “Why did you take the ring?”
The man’s shoulders sagged. He spoke of hunger, of debts to a salvage lord, of an injured wife who could not work. The story was familiar and human and terrible in its smallness. The thief’s eyes did not flash with malice. They were damp with shame.
Arjun looked down at the ring for a long moment. The temptation to strike was real. He remembered his father’s face, the way his father had died refusing to leave a woman’s child behind in a storm because he could not imagine doing otherwise. Arjun’s mouth tasted of iron and resolve.
“Return it,” he said, and then surprised himself. “And I will help you fix the debt.”
The thief stared as if hearing a sentence from a world that did not belong to him. He stammered thanks and cried in a way that made the dog whine. Mira quietly negotiated a barter with a salvage trader nearby: a crate of preserved protein in exchange for labor building a rain catchment. She gave the thief food from her own pack and a patch for his left boot.
As they walked back toward the highway, the sky bruised with evening light, Arjun felt the mark on his palm pulse with a warm, almost tender beat. It was not a show of power. It was recognition. Whatever force had chosen him seemed to honor those small, hard mercies.
Mira watched him from the corner of her eyes. For the first time since she’d first seen him at the fountain, she spoke about the past — not fully, not in confession, but in fragments that were not meant for company.
“Once, I knew a man who would not move from the center of a burning hut because if he left, someone would die,” she murmured, addressing the empty air as much as Arjun. “He became a protection. He became stubborn. He became convinced that the only way to protect was to take and to punish. I thought taking a life then was the end of cruelty. I did not see the long winter that followed his choice.”
Arjun did not ask who she meant. He did not need to.
They shared the night’s first watch at the edge of a reconstructed shelter where a few families toasted thin bread over a micro-fire. Arjun ate in silence, tasting the warmth of bread and the more complicated warmth of choosing mercy over the easy sword. Mira hummed under her breath, a tune without words that somehow held both grief and a promise.
When the night tightened and stars — such as they were in a neon-smeared sky — blinked through the gaps, Arjun asked the question he had not yet allowed himself to voice.
“What happens when compassion fails? When being merciful allows a greater harm to grow?”
Mira paused. The crinkle at the corners of her eyes deepened. “Then you learn,” she said. “Compassion is not a shield from consequence. It is the ground you stand on while you fight. You will fail, sometimes. You will be betrayed. But it is better to fail having tried to heal than to succeed by becoming the thing you hated.”
Arjun turned his palm so that the mark caught the dim light. It glowed like a private star. “And if the thing you hate is inside the one you would protect?”
That silence stretched, heavy and honest. Mira’s fingers tightened around her own satchel as if a memory lurked there.
“You hold on,” she said finally. “You hold on to the memory that the person once did a small kindness. You never let that memory be buried. You tell the story. You pray. You look for ways to undo what was done. If a sword took them, you look for a balm. If the world made them cruel, you look for a bridge.”
Arjun nodded, uncertain if he was ready for bridges so soon. But a path had begun and the first step, he felt, was no longer solitary. He had found a companion who mended wounds and carried silence like a second cloak.
They slept that night under a tarpaulin stitched from a dozen colors and blessings. Somewhere beyond the sleeping city, a distant pulse flared — a heartbeat that answered his palm — and in a place Arjun could not see, a double-edged blade whispered when it felt the rise of an opposite force. The world settled, for now, between breaths.
Morning would bring the next small right, the next test, the next whisper. For now, the road lay ahead, and Arjun had decided that he would walk it without carrying a sword in his hand more than necessary.