6. Chapter Six
Chapter Six
Rhazgar
The next morning, I stand in my kitchen preparing Julia’s healing broth, my hands moving through familiar motions while my mind wrestles with unfamiliar territory.
Eight days of this now. Eight days of bringing her carefully prepared meals, watching her eyes light up when I explain the cultural significance behind each ingredient, hearing her ask questions that show genuine understanding rather than surface-level curiosity.
Eight days of the wall between our worlds growing thinner with each shared moment.
I crush silver thistle between my palms, releasing its sharp, savory scent into the steam rising from the pot. Among WarmHearth plants, it is the most versatile, used in celebration, deep healing, and bonding ceremonies alike, its purpose shaped by intention rather than bound by nature.
Today, my intention is healing. The second-stage broth requires precise timing: bone-strengthening minerals must be added at the right intervals to achieve proper integration.
My grandmother’s voice echoes through my memory as I work: “Healing food is more than nourishment, little warrior. It’s connection. It’s hope made tangible.”
But she also taught me to conscientiously guard our traditions. “What took generations to preserve can be lost in a moment of carelessness,” she’d warned. “Share only with those who will honor what they receive.”
The question that’s haunted me since yesterday returns with fresh urgency: is Julia one of those people?
I know what the cautious voices say. I’ve been hearing them for eight years. But those voices haven’t spent a week watching her face when she makes the connections. They don’t know about her notebook.
I add the final herbs to the broth: seven precise pinches, counterclockwise around the pot’s edge. The ritual grounds me, connects me to every WarmHearth healer who came before, all the way back to ancestors on a world I’ll never see again.
“What remains hidden eventually fades away,” she used to say. “What is shared wisely lives forever.” She never meant the sacred preparations, the ones that take years to earn. She meant the rest of it: the celebration foods, the seasonal dishes, the food that exists to be eaten together.
Julia, with her notebook and her questions that go past the ingredients to the reasons for them, is exactly who that wisdom was for.
I pour the healing broth into a ceramic container, the steam carrying scents of earth and mountain herbs that shouldn’t exist on this world but somehow do. I seal the container.
I will participate in her exhibition. Not to please her, though her pleasure matters more than I’m comfortable admitting, and not only to honor my grandmother, though that’s part of it too.
I’ll do it because a tradition kept perfectly and shown to no one is just a thing dying slowly instead of quickly.
I gather the container and the small bundle of moon willow leaves I’ve prepared for her continued pain management. Through the wall, I can hear Julia’s morning routine: soft, uneven footsteps, the gentle clink of a mug being set down, that unconscious humming she slips into when she’s distracted.
I’ve learned the rhythm of her mornings as well as I know my own recipes. The thought of returning to meals alone in my condo, without her questions and observations and that laugh that makes her ribs hurt that she can’t seem to help, feels wrong in a way I’m not ready to examine too closely.
I take a breath and head for the door. Time to tell Julia Whitaker that WarmHearth will be honored to participate in her exhibition. Time to take another step on this path I didn’t plan to walk but can’t seem to turn away from.
The traditions will continue. And perhaps, in the process, something new will begin.