Kirana Daerlian sat quietly in her modest kitchen. The table was tidy without even a cloth covering it, and the rest of the counter space in the room was very well kept. The hearth by the fireplace was littered with an odd assortment of blankets, and from the tired circles under her eyes, one could tell that Kirana was the one who had been using the hearth as a bed for quite some time. The rest of the room was for the most part normal, the cups and plates in the open cupboard were neatly arranged and everything seemed to be in a good state of clean.

Kira however, was a wreck. Her hands shook slightly as she grasped a mug of homemade tea, a testament to how much sleep she had been missing. She stared at the wall beyond her mug, the steam obscuring her vision, almost like she was trying to see her future in the swirling mist from the warm cup. She was tired. Certainly the dark circles under her eyes could have said as much, but far more telling were her eyes themselves. Her deep green eyes were of a shade of emerald that took you into them. It seemed as though you were about to tumble headlong into the secrets that they possessed every time that you so much as glanced at them. But they wore a cloudy expression now. They seemed weary, perhaps they had just seen too much. Her thick auburn hair was swept back into a simple thick braid at the nape of her neck, which reached about, halfway down her back. She wore a simple gray shift, cut off at the waist and tied in various places to have the simple look of a peasant blouse. She also wore men's breeches, never having found dresses practical for working clothes. On her small feet she wore boots that seemed to be from a military operation. Her clothes were not typical garments for a woman on Gaea; but then again Kira wasn't from Gaea. She took a deep breath and her troubled thoughts consumed her. Lost in memory, as though she was having a conversation with someone, Kira closed her eyes and thought about home.

How long has it been? I wonder if these people know how odd it is to see your world in the night sky. No, not your world, your home. Yes that's better.

A memory invaded her mind before she could shut it out.

It was a small village like thousands of others in the Scottish countryside. A young girl sat sewing quietly, unable to see the sandy blonde boy behind her bearing a very mischievous expression.

'Give that BACK Eric! It's mine!'

Eric laughed as he danced around, his height keeping the needlework just out of the furious redhead's reach. This continued for several minutes until the redhead, having had just about enough of this, punched him square in the face. Eric immediately dropped to the ground, bleeding like a stuck pig from his nose. When he discovered the blood on his shirt, Eric began howling for his mother in addition to sobbing from the pain. The girl bit back a very unladylike curse as she dropped to her knees beside him.

'Eric . . . Eric I didn' mean it. I only wanted t' . . . Y' shouldn' ha' taken my work! It took me days to do!'

She scowled as she saw the flecks of blood now adorning her stitches. She sighed; realizing how she had overreacted. She put her hand on the side of his face trying to ascertain how much damage had been done. That was when it happened.

'Kira! Ow! Don' touch it! It hurts, Kira!'

Suddenly Kira's face went completely blank and turned a paler shade of white. Her hand glowed a soft shade of pink where it touched Eric's face. Before her eyes, Kira watched the bleeding stop and the purpling bruise on his face fade to nothing. As Eric's mother ran up to scold him she watched Kira's eyes roll back into her head as Kira slumped over unconscious, her nose bleeding a very little bit and the greenish yellow of a mostly healed bruise on her face.

A much older wiser Kira now sat in the kitchen of the tiny hut. She sighed softly at her own memories.

Oh little girl . . . you should have known better then to do that. Bad enough to be a sassenach* child, worse still to be a witch.

A tear curved its way down her cheek as she thought of her past. She shook her head, snapping herself out of her self-made mental prison.

I should know better. It shouldn't hurt so much, certainly not after all these years.

She finished her tea and set the mug down with a determined expression. She stood up, pushing herself away from the table. Time to check in on the invalid.

She made her way into the only other room of her small home, and walked over to the bed where the patient slept uneasily. His eyes flickered back and forth and he moaned occasionally, clearly having a nightmare. Kira refrained from waking him, even though she wanted to. People did their best healing while they slept. Anyway, she would heal him the rest of the way now. Another week had gone by since the man first regained consciousness, and if he had woken since then, he hadn't let her know.

She gazed down at the sleeping man, drinking his appearance in once more. He had a long face, it made him seem older then the twenty-two or twenty-three that he probably was. He seemed to have a generous mouth, but there were frown lines beside the corners.

He's way to young to have frown lines, and those creases between his eyebrows didn't get there by accident . . . What has he been through? I wonder if he'll tell me . . .

The purple tear tattoo underneath his right eye had caught her eyes right away. She still wondered what had caused him to put it there. The other thing that had first caught her eye was his right arm or lack thereof. In its place there was a metal monstrosity, that she supposed one could term as an arm, but she found it to be more like a claw then anything else.

I wonder if he can use it like a hand? I couldn't sense anything organic beneath the metal, but maybe I missed something. Oh well, he looks better than he did when I found him. That much is certain.

She had been out in the woods hunting, her bow slung across her back. Closing her eyes, Kira relived the day in her mind.

A sudden rustle in the bushes caught her attention as she drew a white fletched arrow onto her bow. She crept closer, hoping that she had found a game bird to flush out. As she walked to the other side of the bush, she realized that she'd found something altogether different. She'd found a mess. Black feathers mixed with blood pooled just on the other side of the huge shrub and they led off on a very noticeable trail deeper into the woods. Thinking that she may have found her game bird, she headed off into a run after the creature that had made the trail.

What a humanitarian I am, thinking more about my own stomach then that this trail might have been made by one of the wounded in this damnable war.

She followed the trail for about another 100 meters before she stopped short. Before her lay a man pooled in his own blood and what appeared to be thousands of black feathers.

The feathers. . . that still makes no sense. I just can't stop wondering where they came from.

She let her memory blur over the next several weeks. She had dragged the man home, and days of surgery with sleepless nights had followed, as she watched over the fitfully restless man. She remembered the final sense of relief when she realized that he was going to survive despite his injuries. Now he had regained consciousness, and finally she wouldn't have to wait for him to heal any longer. He was at a point where she could take him the rest of the way.

"Well Kira, it's time that you stopped putting this off and just heal the poor man."

With that she placed her hand atop the stitches in the center of Folken's chest. She shut her eyes and with that her hand began to glow.

Folken awoke with a start at the pain the moment that her hand touched his chest. This time he didn't hesitate to open his eyes, but they widened when he realized that the pain was ebbing. In less than a minute the intense pain was completely gone, leaving not so much as an ache to show where it once was. He raised his left arm to touch his chest, half-afraid of what he may find, and found that he was . . .

"Healed? That wound should have killed me . . ."

An answer of sorts came what he turned to look at the woman beside him. She pulled her glowing…glowing?! What's going on?… hand away from him, and then winced and walked out of the room, but not before he noticed blood soaking through the front of her shirt. He immediately leapt up and grasped the edge of the bed before he fell over.

"I don't know who you are, but I'm too weak to walk and I'm going to need your help, so you may as well come back in here. If you went to all this trouble to heal me, there is no point in abandoning me now."

In the next room Kira struggled to wrap up her bleeding chest so the man wouldn't notice. She ignored the urge to growl at him and tell him to wait, a realized that he must be extremely confused at this point. She finished the layers of bandages across her chest and changed her shirt quickly. She grimaced at the new pain in her chest, but shook her head and smiled through it as she walked back into the bedroom, sporting a simple white peasant blouse.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have just left you in here like this. I guess I was just surprised to see you conscious again."

All right, it was a terrible excuse. She knew that, but what else was she going to tell him? Wordlessly she helped him back to a sitting position on the bed. If the man was massive while he was prone, he was still more so when he was up and about. Still, hard living had strengthened Kira past the point of traditional feminine weaknesses. She was incredibly wiry for her lithe 165 cm** frame. As she helped him lower himself to the bed, her mind began racing for things to feed this incredibly…well…huge man. Just about the time that she finished helping him sit down, she had finally settled on the soup that she'd made just the day before.

"I'm a bit confused right now… if you could…"

"One moment!"

As Kira took off for the kitchen again, ignoring the pangs of pain in her chest, Folken was beginning to get a bit frustrated. You don't seem to be able to get a word in edge wise with this one! As he finished his thought, the girl…no…woman…hurried back into the room carrying a comically large bowl of soup and what appeared to be a ladle in place of a spoon. The pangs of hunger that he had been experiencing suddenly became a primary concern to Folken.

"Sorry, we can talk while you eat. You need food right now."

Rather than argue with this irritating statement of fact, Folken resigned himself to his fate. At least the soup is good, he thought grimly to himself.

Pleased to see that he was eating without any argument, Kira began to take in more of his physical appearance that she hadn't noticed before. His hair was absolutely stunning. When she had first brought him in, it had been almost a sky blue color and had stuck almost straight up in spikes, but in the weeks that had passed, it had grown out more and was now a silvery shade that hung down to about the top of his ears. It looked amazingly soft. He wasn't exactly pasty but his complexion was clearly a very light color. Even eating he didn't smile. Kira wondered when the last time was that he had attempted to. He was thin and extremely well muscled. The muscle had ebbed while he recovered from his injuries, but she was certain that he would see to its speedy return. As she thought about that, the image of his rather well defined chest popped into her mind and she thought with some satisfaction that thanks to her, he wouldn't have even a scar to show for it. He had well-defined and very high cheekbones, but part of that was probably from being malnourished. Well, by the time that he left her company, she'd see to it that he was very well fed. He wore no shirt, and hadn't had one when she had found him. His only article of clothing was a rather interesting black wrap about his waist that fell about his ankles. It had been horribly bloody when she had found him, but the blood had come out after a rather hard scrubbing. His eyes, ah that was something that she'd longed to see, and she wasn't disappointed. They were a dark deep red black. She had never seen anything so intriguing before. She didn't realize that she was staring until the man's deep calming voice interrupted her thought process.

"See something that you like?"

Her eyes widened as she took in what he had just said, and then quickly narrowed. She was not accustomed to living with people, and this stranger making assumptions about her…that was just too much.

"Don't you think that you'd better identify yourself, sir? It was kind enough of me to bring you into my home when I didn't know who you were, but I want to know now. I'm sure that if you were in my place you would ask for nothing less. I would rather not be harboring a nameless entity."

His eyelids closed halfway as she asked the question.

"You do know who you are, don't you?"

"I am well aware of who I am."

I'm just worried about the response that my identity may elicit from you.

"Then tell me."

That much clearly was not a request. Folken refrained from sighing, and obliged his hostess.

"My name is Folken Lakur de Fanel, called by Strategos by some."

Her eyes widened with the shock of recognition and she shrank back with fear. The claw arm, the tear tattoo, it made sense now. How many posters had she seen with his picture, certainly she gave her heart out to a harmed man and now she'd let the devil himself into her home. Overwhelmed, she forced the words over her fear-paralyzed tongue.

"F…Folken of Zaibach?"

He would have said formerly of Zaibach, but he didn't get the chance as she fainted dead away.

*Outlander or foreigner

**about 5'5''

Author's note it's all well and good to be writing a story like this. I love doing it, however, I don't like writing to nameless entities. So please review. Just let me know that someone is reading this thing!

~Cassie~