CHAPTER 1 - Celeste
Celeste Silverwing was beautiful, as most males would say. She didn't see much in herself - just a trim body with a simple brown belly and thinly ruffled fur. She had two sparkling black eyes and a small pink snout which somehow accentuated her pointed ears. Her mother said she looked alot like a Brightwing, but Celeste constantly denied this.
From the beginning, Celeste only wanted to be two things - a broody and a normal newborn. Sadly, both of those, she could never grasp upon. Her mother, Aquila, was the head healer, and she believed in fate. Celeste also put her faith in fate. It was her fate to be nothing but a normal broody slash newborn, but oh-no, she just had to stay inside and study what did what, regurgitating (yes, regurgitating) pastes that soothed aching and burnt wings.
She'd much rather watch the beginning parts of a bat's life and to care for the new newborn until it's father or mother claimed it - or just goof around with her good friends than learn how to barf up medicine. But today, that would all change.
Celeste was just about to finish her set (AKA repeating medical sayings and such) of repeating 'White tips give you bloody lips' for the thousandth time when her mother barged in, with two of her assistants carrying what seemed to be an unconscious bat. The assistants laid him down on a stone slab, one of the many that encircle the rotunda that was the healer's roost. Aquila coaxed her over to the slab and asked, "Diagnose her, if you please." Her mother was already chewing on a torpid.
Celeste looked up the patient (How she loved that word; but it certainly did not describe her) up and down twice. She noticed a great deal of things - he had a broken and bleeding nose, a mangled right wing, some skull or spine damage, and he wasn't at all likely to live. She rattled off the list and looked at the large gaping ceiling of the Healer's Roost. The Roost was located all the way at the top of the sugar maple, and Scorpio, the head elder, said that the hole was there because if a poor, unfortunate soul were to die here, it would rise up to the sky. Celeste certainly did not believe this, though.
She looked around while her mother consulted with her assistants. The sights were not old, yet were they new. Celeste had spent most of her healer training out in the field. The roost was circular and vast. Around the perimeter were large chunks of stone which, serving as operating tables, many males worked to haul up here. In the middle, a larger and more rectangular chunk was centered, and on it were medicinal ingredients wrapped in leaves. Many of the flotsam and jetsam tables were not inhabited, thankfully, but during the male's retreat to Hibernaculum, it would be full of ready females - that's usually why only females work in the roost.
"What would you have us do, Miss Celeste?", an assistant asked, a peculiar specimen, with light tan fur and dull gray eyes. "Yes, tell us what you think, Celeste." Her mother was at the foot of the slab, Celeste was standing near the head, and the dull gray eyed one was near the torn wing, quietly tending to it. Despite wanting to be anything else but a healer, she loved the study of medicines, and went over her list once before repeating it. "A mix of the blue leaf, some redberry, and a dash of lemongrass for his wing, a compress of ice and something aromatic, for his head, and bit of menthol for his back issues."
As the assistant rushed out of the roost, looking for something aromatic and some menthol, Celeste and Aquila worked on the rest of him in relative quiet, rarely breaking the silence by asking to pass one thing or another.
After the assistants had came in with a pound of menthol and some mint and her mother finished making a small concoction for when he woke up, Aquila left Celeste there, beside the bat, who's apparent name was Cedric - thanks to a hunter named Archer - until he woke up. And so she did, sitting on a slab, watching the muscular, tan bat, until she fell asleep, under the soft wings of someone. She had a good idea of who she was sleeping on, and didn't resist.
