By Loren Elias



A healer’s duty is to sustain life, not take it. It seems a fact irrefutable. But when a mark is upon his head the healer must choose; hide in the safety of the fortress he has built around himself or venture out to aid his embattled people while sacrificing the lives of those who seek to deter him and---even more troubling---those who would protect him with their lives.

But when did life’s choices get this hard for the healer raised, as he was, in the ancient way of Five Virtues? It was about the time a young girl named Ren’ai joined the elite guard that protects him. After the wrongful execution of her father, he took the twelve-year-old in, saw to the training of both body and mind but, despite his mentoring, the one thing he could never seem to help the girl understand---the destructive power of a vengeful spirit.

As each new harvest waxes and wanes and that scared little girl becomes a woman, What will it take for the virtuous healer to go from forbidding revenge to actually laying the way for her? When one of his own is brutally murdered by a tyrannical king and a dark prophecy seems ripe to unfold, he will make such a choice and their world will never be the same.