Three days north of the capital, the lowland forests gave way to silver grass plains and craggy, wind-worn ridges. The training grounds of the Church of the Holy Mother were built into one such ridge, its white-stone arches nestled among pine groves and wild lavender. There were no high walls, no towers for war. The camp was open to the sky, as if the healers within had nothing to hide and nothing to fear.
But Maia knew better.
The first weeks had been exhausting.
Routines were rigid, broken only by the bells that rang six times daily—from the soft call of morning reflection to the long toll after final prayer. Days began with silence, not speech. A full hour was spent in quiet reflection while the sun climbed over the eastern slope. After that: drills, lectures, focus exercises, trauma recovery protocols. Then, repetition. And repetition again.
To learn to heal, they were told, one must first learn to feel without flinching.
She did not flinch.
She remembered the children in the orphanage. The goblin screams. The way her body had moved without thought, light blooming from her ribs to her fingertips. She had not called it. She had only answered it. Sanctuary had always been waiting.
The others weren't like her.
They tried to mold their divine gift through memorization and discipline. They channeled their healing like light through glass: structured, angled, carefully filtered. Maia's was different. Her light bent around suffering, soaked into wounds, listened to pain.
By the end of her first month, she could already tell the Sisters were divided.
Some admired her. Others feared her.
No one knew what to call what she did.
Sanctuary didn't pulse like the others' healing spells. It settled. It comforted. Her classmates repaired flesh and mended bones with glowing hands and chants of doctrine. Maia's presence alone could slow bleeding. Her touch could still seizures. Her voice could draw grief out like poison.
And she knew it wasn't just divine favor.
It was Koda.
Every night, when the bells rang final prayer and the Sisters filed to their cells, Maia would lie beneath the narrow window of her dormitory and close her eyes, trying not to think of him. But she always did.
Sometimes it was the sound of his voice—low and steady, saying something half serious and half teasing. Sometimes it was the memory of the scar along his collarbone, the one he always forgot to guard. And sometimes it was the heat of his hands on hers.
She hadn't seen him in months now.
She had written, but there was little she could do to ease her heart.
So instead, she worked. She healed. She excelled.
And quietly, she began to feel something the others hadn't yet earned.
Reverence.
Not toward the Church. Not toward doctrine.
But toward the wounded.
There was a lesson early on: to treat a patient's body with care, but to keep emotional distance. Attachment, they said, could compromise decisions.
Maia failed that lesson constantly.
She remembered the boy who wouldn't speak. The girl who screamed in her sleep. The elderly Sister who forgot her own name when the pain flared too hot. Maia didn't back away from them. She sat at their side. She held hands. She sang quietly when words failed. And her Sanctuary spread without command—gentle, constant, answering a truth unspoken.
The instructors noticed. They stopped correcting her.
Some even began to observe.
Once, after a recovery session that left an entire triage ward blanketed in light, the head instructor approached her. Sister Alis, a sharp-jawed woman known for discipline and distance, waited until the others had gone.
"What are you channeling?" she asked, not with accusation, but curiosity.
Maia didn't know how to answer. She almost said, the Holy Mother. But it felt like a lie.
"I'm not channeling anything," she finally said. "I'm just… remembering how to care."
Sister Alis said nothing. But the next day, she did not correct Maia when she laid hands on a child without gloves, or when she held a soldier's head and wept with him as he died.
Sanctuary didn't follow rules.
It followed hearts.
The further Maia progressed in her training, the more isolated she became.
Not in the physical sense—she shared meals, bunked with six others, attended lectures, and assisted with care rotations just like every novice—but the distance was there. Not hostility. Not jealousy. Just a quiet sense that she was not meant to be among them.
Sanctuary changed things.
It spread without prompting. It lingered in her wake. Sometimes a room felt lighter after she'd left it, as though grief forgot to follow her out. During prayer, it would rise unbidden—not as a flare, but a tide—leaving those around her too calm, too still. She noticed patients smiled more in her presence, even if they didn't know why.
And the Sisters?
They watched. Carefully.
Sister Alis rarely spoke to Maia directly now, but Maia often felt her presence just beyond sight—observing, studying, recording. There was respect in it. But also wariness. The Church had no doctrine for Sanctuary. It had no scripture to shape it, no channeling stones to regulate it. It didn't come from a litany or ritual. It came from Maia.
And Maia had not been forged by the Church.
She had been forged by fire. By blood. By him.
Every few days, late at night when the halls were quiet and the fire in the common hearth burned low, Maia would sit at her writing desk beneath the high, narrow window. She would unstop her ink, dip her pen, and write.
The letters weren't addressed. She never sealed them. She never read them back.
She just wrote.
Sometimes with her hand pressed over her chest, feeling the flutter that came when she remembered the way Koda had looked at her that day—just before she left for training. Sometimes, tears would hit the paper before the ink did. Sometimes, she would pause halfway through a sentence and just close her eyes, pretending the silence between them wasn't so wide.
She only rarely asked the Church to send the letters.
They had mail days–trainees would write their families.
But those days were rare, they feared entanglement. Distraction. Vulnerability.
But Maia had learned something they hadn't.
Sanctuary is not the absence of pain.
It is the presence of someone who doesn't flee from it.
And Koda had never fled.
The days turned colder as training went on. The wind through the northern ridge picked up in winter's approach. Snow crept down from the peaks in the west. The triage tents were expanded, and the Sisters wore fur-trimmed robes over their linen now. Maia didn't mind the cold. Her magic burned steadily beneath her skin.
One evening, during a group healing session with badly burned pilgrims, she placed her hand on a man's arm—and Sanctuary exploded.
Not in violence. Not in force.
But in magnitude.
The tent filled with golden light so thick it seemed to drip from the seams. For a moment, no one could speak. Wounds sealed. Scars faded. Even the smell of charred flesh turned to sweet myrrh. And when it passed, when the light faded and the air cleared—
Maia was glowing.
Her skin. Her eyes. Her presence.
She had not cast a spell. She had not spoken a prayer.
She had simply felt too much.
The instructor dismissed the session early.
Later that night, Alis summoned her.
"Do you know what you are becoming?" the Sister asked, not with fear—but with awe barely held in check.
Maia didn't answer.
Not because she was uncertain.
But because deep down, she did know.
She had seen what people became when they let sin define them. She had seen how Koda had fought back not by power alone, but by holding onto something pure in himself.
That was what Sanctuary was.
Not a shield.
Not a spell.
But a reminder.
That hope wasn't weakness. That love was not a liability. That care, even in horror, even in ruin, was sacred.
The next morning, she burned one of her letters.
The parchment curled in the brazier as she watched the edges blacken, words to vulnerable to share now lost to ash. But the warmth that rose from it didn't sting her. It comforted.
Because even if Koda never saw the words—
She believed he would feel them.
Just as she felt him, out there, somewhere, doing the same.