It started as a whisper.
A child too weak to wake.
An elder coughing through the night.
A goat refusing water, lying limp in the mud.
At first, it was brushed off as rain chill—common enough this time of year. The air was damp, the winds cold at dusk. But as the sun rose the next morning, three more villagers fell ill. Then five. All with the same symptoms:
Fevers that came in waves.
A dry, unrelenting thirst.
And a strange, dull ache just beneath the ribs, as if something unseen had settled deep in the gut.
Charlisa heard the word first from a worried mother: "It's crawling under their skin."
---
Elders gathered quickly. Herbal broths were boiled, steam tents assembled, prayers whispered at sunrise. But nothing eased the symptoms.
Even Elder Duma, the midwife whose fingers had delivered half the village, grew pale and bedridden by the third day.
Panic hovered like a shadow, thickening with each passing hour.
That's when Charlisa stepped forward.
She didn't raise her voice. Didn't ask for permission. She simply began.
---
First, she checked the water.
Not the main river—it ran clear, swift from the rains—but the smaller pools and stone basins scattered through the village. Many were full of fallen leaves, debris, and tiny larvae, unnoticed during weeks of rain.
Then, the food stores.
In one of the elder's root baskets, she found mold—soft, greenish, and too subtle for the untrained eye. It had spread beneath the surface of the tubers, invisible until cut open.
She moved fast, her mind a blend of training from her mother and grandmother, and instinct born of living with the land. She remembered how certain mushrooms, once wet too long, grew invisible toxins. She remembered her father's notes on waterborne pathogens in animal systems.
But above all, she remembered one thing:
> Illness never begins where the body feels it.
It begins where something is ignored.
---
Charlisa took charge—not as a leader, but as a healer.
She called for boiled water for everything. Set up cleansing baths with astringent plants. Burned fever-reducing resins in sick huts and ordered all food to be steamed with disinfecting herbs.
From her satchel, she pulled dried strips of bark and black-stemmed moss she'd harvested weeks ago from the forest. Boiled correctly, they flushed the toxins from the stomach and cooled the liver—an old recipe from her grandmother's notes.
She showed the herbalists how to brew it.
She even visited the sick, one by one—listening, not just treating. Touching their foreheads. Asking about their dreams. And always speaking softly:
> "You are not being punished. Your body is asking to be heard."
---
By the fourth day, the fevers broke.
The elder who had stopped speaking whispered her first word again: "Water."
The child who could not wake, opened her eyes and smiled at the ceiling.
A wave of relief moved through the village. Kael watched Charlisa from a distance that night, pride woven through every quiet glance.
"You were never just meant to live here," he told her as they sat by the fire, his fingers brushing hers. "You were meant to become part of this place. Its breath. Its healer."
Charlisa felt a soft weight settle in her chest. A truth.
Not just of her role. But of who she was becoming.
She didn't need to prove herself anymore.
She was already rooted.