The darkness gave him a healer’s hands, but he used them to embrace someone who would never turn back.
He spent his whole life practicing medicine in the dark.
Though he couldn’t see the colors of herbs, he could tell their flavors apart. Though he couldn’t see how deep a wound was, he could feel a pulse beating. His master told him that a healer must have a benevolent heart: blindness of the eyes need not mean blindness of the heart. He believed him. So he saved countless people, but never asked anyone to see him. Not until he met her, the first person he ever wished he could see.
She could never belong to him, so he became the shadow at her back. Later, even that shadow could barely hold on. An old illness gnawed at him like a bone-deep parasite, already devouring his life. When she was struck by a cursed poison, he opened the last page of an ancient text and saw a line repeatedly crossed out by those who came before him: “Use your body as the vessel, your life as the cure.”
It turned out a healer’s final destiny wasn’t to save the world, but to grind himself into one last ingredient for a single person. The darkness gave him a healer’s hands, but he used them to embrace someone who would never turn back.
