Healer Tera's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Tera set the butterfly in a bare room off the hall and shut the door. By morning she knew she had made a mistake. The creature clung to the cold stone wall, wings folded tight. It had not touched the mushroom cap she left. When she stepped close, she saw the real trouble. One wing bent wrong at the joint, torn near the base. The butterfly was not just a thief. It was hurt, and a bare room would kill it. She had medicine for burns and broken bones in people. She had nothing for a wounded thing this small and strange. First it had to survive. A healer could not treat a patient already dying of a cold, empty cage. So she decided to build it a home. Not a cage, but the forest it came from. She studied the butterfly's pink and gold wings, its small scaled body and curved horns, and thought about where such a creature would live. Damp shade. Soft light. Mushrooms to feed on. She worked all day. She hauled moss and laid it thick across the floor. She carried in a fallen log and pressed fresh mushrooms into the wood, bright caps in every color. She hung ivy from the beams and fitted a tall glass pane in the wall so morning sun came through soft and warm. She left half the room open. If her garden drew more of these creatures, they would have space to land. When she finished, she carried the butterfly inside on her open palm. For a long moment it did not move. Then it crept off her hand onto the mossy log. Its tongue uncurled. It began to feed on a red-capped mushroom, slow at first, then steady. Tera did not relax yet. She watched the torn wing. She ground comfrey and spiderwort into a thin paste, the same herbs she used to close a wound. With one fingertip she dabbed it along the tear. The butterfly flinched, then held still, as if it understood. By dusk the wing had stopped drooping. It lifted, trembling, and stretched to its full span. The creature was going to live. Her first resident had a home, and her hall had its first true habitat, ready for others like it. But as she cleaned her hands, a new worry settled in. The butterfly was feeding fast. It had already stripped two mushroom caps bare. These mushrooms were the same ones growing in her garden, the ones that had drawn the creature out of the woods in the first place. If it ate this much, she would need far more. And if her garden kept calling wounded beasts in, one healed room would not be enough. She looked down the long dark hall, at all the empty doors waiting, and understood how much more she had to build and grow!