Chrysalis (Book 1.5 in the Wolfen Brethren Series)

Breath

21 Years old
Novem - Septem

                 

It had been one year, one crazy hell of a year. It had been the most tiring, trying but rewarding year of my life.

I had done so much and through it I had grown. I didn't even feel like the same person anymore. I was different, changed. I had seen so much but I had also done so much good, I had helped the world and though it was still decaying, it was a little bit better.

Meeting Simeon had been one of the best things to happen to me because though he was cold, unfeeling and straight up rude, he helped me live out my calling. I was a healer and not one that belonged behind secluded walls. I was meant to be free. Free to help everyone that needed.

It had been a difficult year. I couldn't pretend it hadn't. The first month had been the hardest, I hadn't been slowly eased into anything and my naive mind had somehow thought I would have been.

Well no, he had taken me 2 days North, to some coastal city that had became a demolition site. The putrid smell of burnt flesh and rot had scored the fine hairs of my nostrils before I had seen anything. They had been bedraggled, sizzled, slithers of human beings. Chunks of flesh missing, cheeks gaunt, bones protruding through limbs as they withered away in their own squalor.

Bile had struggled through my lips as burning tears trailed from my eyes. That first month I had cried copious amounts of tears because the amount of young bodies we had to burn to stop any infections from spreading had turned my stomach. My heart felt battered, my soul withered because there had been a ridiculous amount of rape victims I'd had to scrape from the floor as they threw their bodies from the top of whatever rubble that had once housed them. Men and women alike, who would rather die than live with the memory of all the ways they had been defiled, the horrors they had seen.

There had been so many victims, too many victims just waiting to die, even when food was offered to them they had no desire to eat. That first month was the hardest because no one method could be employed to heal the masses. They were suffering individually and it wasn't until we saw them as such could we really help them.

That first month was more of a trial run, but the second month, things began to change. More lives were being saved and though we were still burying more people than we had in the infirmaries, at least the beds were beginning to fill up. The makeshift tents that housed those we could find beneath the rubble were expanding, there were more of them.

The men under Simeon moved out every few days heading in different directions and taking a few healers at a time. Every time they returned in those large trucks, they always came with bodies, limbless, sightless, charred bodies but they were alive and we were helping them.

It wasn't until the 6th month that I actually began to notice the change in people's countenance. I couldn't put it all down to me because I imagine having food and home would provide security, but my daily prayers helped.

I had a meditation class first thing in the morning and one late at night, at first I had received insults and one of Simeon's men had stop guard when I prayed. These people had been no god lovers because they believed that the gods had forsaken them.

I didn't know how to explain to them that it wasn't the gods that had forsaken them but that man had. We had forsaken humanity and so our lives and been plunged into dismal desolation. I didn't want to start arguments and so I just meditated, and bit by bit people became curious. They wanted to know what I knew, to feel what I felt.

Simeon hated that I took up so much time by meditating but he couldn't stop me because he too had noticed the slight shift in people's morale. The 6th month had definitely been a better month. We had saved so many lives and placed so many people back onto the right track, slowly luring them away from the darkness and into the light.