The chief stood over them—massive, fuming, his shadow stretching across the dusty clearing.

  Aester sat beside Mizzle on a rough stump. She didn’t flinch. Mizzle, on the other hand, had gone quiet—hands folded neatly in her lap, eyes closed, bracing for the storm.

  “You dishonor our blood!” the chief roared at his daughter, each word like a stone thrown.

  Mizzle didn’t respond. Not out of defiance, but defeat. She looked ready to cry.

  Meanwhile, the priest (who Aester learned was actually a shaman)—his robes caked in soil and bone charms—focused on Aester like a spear-tip.

  His voice was low but sharp. “What is a human like you doing here?” He nearly spat the word.

  “I’m lost,” Aester replied, voice calm, flat. “I came to help. To pray.”

  “Pray?” the shaman sneered. “To who? You already have your gods.”

  Aester gestured slightly toward Mizzle. “I came for her sister. Terra, I believe—”

  “YOU MAY NOT!” the shaman snapped, slamming his staff into the ground.

  “She is marked! I will not let her curse spread to my people!”

  “Superstition wears a rosary and speaks in tongues. Give it a gun, and it calls itself righteous.” Pride whisperd with experience in heart

  He leaned in, showing rows of sharp, yellowed teeth—a crude intimidation display. Aester didn’t move.

  She merely raised an eyebrow, unimpressed, though her hand subtly shifted toward the cane on her thigh.

  "Keep ready, they may strike for all we know," Pride warned again.

  “I’m not a medic,” she said slowly, “but I’ve seen alot of things. Across the sands, the rivers, the skies. I’ve treated men cursed by worse—if you’d just let me try—”

  “NO.” The shaman’s voice cracked through the air. “She is not sick. She has been judged by Moab. Her soul is rotting, not her flesh.”

  Aester knew this tune. She’d heard it in different tongues across warzones—superstition dressed as divine wisdom. But she also knew something else: zealots like him rarely acted out of hatred.

  They acted out of fear.

  She took a breath. Then a gamble.

  “Are you so sure?” she said, lowering her voice. “Because I’ve seen curses… broken. Forgiven.”

  The final word hung in the air like a loaded gun.

  “GET OUT,” the shaman thundered. “Leave, human, before Moab curses you too!”

  A voice rang softly in her head. “That was strange,” Love murmured.

  Even for Aester, this felt off.

  She had seen many zealots who hated the very skin color she had, and refusing help was one thing—but refusing free help? That smelled more like politics than piety to her.

  “WHAT PART OF ‘MARKED’ DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?” the shaman barked.

  "Nothing," Greed chuckled.

  Aester didn’t blink. She didn’t believe in curses. Or magic.

  She’d seen men die because they trusted talismans instead of trauma kits.

  But she’d also seen things—things she couldn't explain.

  Shaytan. Deathless eyes in the dark. A child who whispered in five languages at once.

  Maybe magic was real. Maybe not. But she wasn’t about to let an innocent girl die to find out.

  "Make your stand, take initiative," Pride remarked.

  “I’ve… lifted curses before,” she said slowly. “When the conditions were right.”

  “NOT THIS ONE!” the shaman barked. “This is Moab’s curse! A punishment for her betrayal—for consorting with your joke of a god!”

  Aester frowned. That was new. Her god? What god?

  “Interesting,” Pride mused. “Do they think he believes us to worship one?”

  Aester had no answers. Only questions.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  But then, a third voice cut in—the chief.

  “Wait…” he said, eyes narrowing. “You can cure… curses?”

  A flicker of hope. Weak, but there in his eyes.

  He was Mizzle’s father, therefore Terra had to be his other daughter.

  Aester met his gaze. “I’ve seen a lot of wars. A lot of marks. Some were man-made. Some worse.

  And a few… a few curses I made go away.”

  She hated saying the word curse. It tasted like rust and blood.

  She had seen men die believing things like that.

  But she’d learned something long ago on the front lines:

  Sometimes superstition was the only medicine some people trusted.

  “If the conditions are right,” Aester answered without a hint of emotion. She didn’t want this goblin to think she was some kind of miracle doctor—especially not when failure was still on the table.

  “Th-then please, see to her. Just once,” the goblin pleaded, urgency creeping into his voice.

  “NO! THIS IS NOT WHAT MOAB WOULD WA—” the shaman tried to protest.

  “SILENCE.” The chief's voice boomed like thunder through the tents, setting the shaman to a bitter silance.

  Behind the chief, Aester spotted Mizzle peeking out, curiosity lingering in her eyes. Faint lines where tears had dried still marked her face.

  "We made her cry we should take responsibility" love said in a slow and soft voice

  “lead the way,” Aester said, looking to the chief—much to the shaman’s growing displeasure.

  Without a word, the chief began a brisk jog, like a man eager to end a bad memory before it could set in. Aester groaned and limped behind.

  “You want me to grow a new leg for this?” she muttered bitterly, protesting the strain on her ruined limb.

  The chief slowed his pace, saying nothing. Not that they had far to go—just a few paces from where they stood.

  ---

  The large yellow tent looked plain from the outside, but inside was more colorful. The ceiling was covered in patterns: a horse here, a horned humanoid creature there—perhaps a demon, Aester thought.

  Each shape filtered soft beams of sunlight through thin fabric, painting the interior with shifting colors like stained glass on the desert floor.

  A massive jar stood near the back—large enough to fit a small child.

  It glowed with warm, pulsing light, filled to the top with what appeared to be fireflies. Or at least, that’s what Aester assumed.

  Beside the jar sat a woman in white on a wooden chair, about Aester’s height, but much thinner. She was green, like the other goblins, but her skin was faded and jaundiced. Her limbs trembled. She curled around herself, arms wrapped tightly around her knees like a child bracing for the next wave of a nightmare.

  But this nightmare didn’t end with morning. It clung to her skin—yellowed, loose, too thin to be called flesh—and devoured her in silence.

  Aester froze mid-step. Her breath caught—not from shock, but memory. She had seen this before. Too many times.

  "Ohh, this is easy," Greed remarked at the fact they had already figured the cause of the curse.

  The woman’s gums were swollen, raw violet masses pushing out between her teeth. Blood stained the corners of her mouth. She had likely tried to eat something dry.

  When she attempted to smile, her cracked lips split open like aged leather, and she winced.

  The bruises on her arms weren’t from a beating. They were from life itself giving up on her.

  Her legs shook as she tried to rise.

  “Don’t,” Aester said gently, crouching beside her. “You stand, you’ll fall.”

  “A human? Here?” the woman asked—not in fear or anger, but with innocent curiosity. Like a child spotting something out of place.

  Aester ignored her question. She had answers to a different question. “Hmm. I am not a medic, but I can tell that what you have here—is what we call scurvy.”

  “Have you ever seen this sort of curse, human?” the shaman remarked, a smirk emerging on his face.

  "More then we could ever bare to see again" love commented

  She had—matter of fact—seen these sorts of wounds before in the Middle East, not only on her men but also the civilians that surrounded them, 100s of them if not more.

  Scurvy ate a person from the inside out—slowly, cruelly.

  At first, it’s just fatigue. The kind that covers itself over the bones like wet cloth. Then the gums start to swell, turning purple, bleeding at the smallest touch. Teeth grow loose. Old scars reopen as if the body forgets how to heal.

  New wounds don’t close—they rot.

  Bruises bloom like ink beneath the skin from the lightest tap. Joints ache as cartilage breaks down. Even the heart grows weaker.

  In children or the malnourished, it turns deadly fast.

  “Can you help her?” the chief asked in whispers.

  The cure was actually quite simple.

  A lemon. A handful of berries. A few leaves of something green, something sour.

  Yet in the wrong place, at the wrong time—those might as well be gold.

  “Lucky for us we know someone carrying just that sort of gold,” Greed commented.

  “Mizzle, could you be a dear and let me see your satchel?” she called out to the goblin hidden behind a drape of curtains. She was well hidden due to her small profile—Aester almost didn’t see her.

  Almost.

  The shaman and chief turned around and were suprized of seeing her.

  The little creature twitched at the idea of being found and slowly walked up to Aester, avoiding her fathers gaze.

  “Mizzle doesn’t have much. Only something sister Terra wanted to taste,”

  she said, opening her bag.

  One thing Aester noticed was Mizzle always spoke in third person for some reason. At first, she thought it was due to her lack of English skills, but the other goblins didn’t seem to have that sort of problem.

  Inside the satchel, however, was her making up for her bad English in the form of:

  Some dandelion greens and some strands of nettles.

  “Isn’t that just perfect,” Greed remarked in joy.

  Aester picked up the sour plants and looked around.

  “NO, YOU MUST NOT OR—OR—MOAB WIL—” the shaman tried to protest, only to be met with Aester’s stare, silenced by the unflinching gaze.

  It was clear:

  Terra’s death would benefit him. He was doing this not out of superstition and fear, but out of ulterior motives.

  “Another chicken shit in holy robes. He hides behind a god because he's too scared to face truth,”

  Pride remarked with great spite

  "Superstition wears a rosary and speaks in tongues. Give it a gun, and it calls itself righteous.”

  Aester hated these sort of people—

  People whose primary job was to protect something, but instead hurt it in order to gain for themselves, especially if these monsters were using religion or their military rank in order to do so.

  She decided to deal with the shaman later.

  She looked around and found what seemed to be a cup made of stone, placed on top of the armrest of the chair, filled with clear water.

  “Is that clean?” she asked the goblin in white.

  “I drank from that just recently,” she replied, passing it gently toward Aester. It seemed every movement she made gave her pain and cramps, her bruises protesting every small action she made, and her body crying every time she turned a joint.

  She poured the ingredients into the cup, her hands shaking, forcing her to concentrate harder. Her arms had been like that since Afghanistan. Khort, to be exact.

  She was part of a terrible accident that led to her lose of legs and nerve damage.

  She then used her thumb to break the plants down to their raw liquid form.

  “What are you going to do with that? Will that help her fight off her cold?” the chief questioned, out of concern for his daughter’s safety.

  “Vitamin C’s vital for more than just fighting off a cold. It’s the body’s first line of defense.... Helps your immune system work harder, keeps your skin from falling apart, and repairs tissue damage. In a place where infection's a constant threat, it’s not just good—it’s essential. Without it, you're looking at scurvy, and that's one fight your daughter is fighting."

  Aester could see it in the old mans eyes he didn't understand half the word she spat out but he was trying his absolute best to do so.

  "So it helps her heal and protects her from disease" it seemed he had gotten the proper idea of it

  "Yes...pretty much" she replied slowly handing the cup of herbs and flowers to the sick woman her hands shaking equally as hers but due to complete different reasons.

  "Drink this up it should help after a while"

  In the conner of her eye she could see shaman biting his lower lip, she had to confront him.

  But who was she to accuse him ? She was a outsider she needed more proof that he was doing something

  "And why the hell do we even remotely care?" Greeds voice pirched up

  Aester wasn't sure why she went all the way here to help these people who she had no affiliation to no debt to or any need for.

  She just understood that they needed help so she did just that perhaps it was her need for it, perhaps she just missed being responsible for something.

  For being more then just a woman in her mid 30s rotting in a apartment in Detroit

  Or was it just her sence of duty? Courge honor and duty thoes were the bullsh#t she was taught in the many wars in the middle east.

  Ofcourse she believed in non of them