Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”
((How do you respond?))
"Oh!" As she moves to sit, Miraeth casts her eyes around curiously at the different talismans and herb sachets hanging in the wise-woman's tent. "Well, any fortune-teller worth their salt has to get good at predicting visitors, I suppose."
She moves to sit with her legs beneath her on the cushion, pausing briefly to smooth out her skirt with a gloved hand. "By birth you can count me one of the Númenedain, if you've heard of them... but it's been a long time on the road. I'm winding my way back to the city, but most of what I remember from it is when I was a child: my father's garden, my mother's books. When I was young they sent me away-- it was a coming-of-age rite, but they were running out of coin, too, and I think they didn't want me to have to see it."
She pauses, to take a breath and consider her words, before continuing. "I was apprenticed to a healer, at nine or ten years. She wasn't the kind to stay long in any one place; not while there are folk suffering everywhere. So we walked until my legs ached, and on the way I gathered herbs, and read and was tested from her enormous medical tomes. She wasn't unkind, but she was a strict teacher. I was one in a long line of apprentices to her. But I learned to splint a limb, and drain a cyst, and pull a rotten rooth, and remove an arrow without making any more damage.
"...She passed, about a year ago." Her voice wavers slightly, making the admission. "I walked on for a time, but I learned what she must've, with her long line of students; it's lonely to be a traveler alone. So I'm winding back towards home, and there I hope to be licensed for my work. In all these years traveling I've learned there's never a lack of need for it."
A pause, and then she smiles sheepishly. "It's why I'm here, of course. I heard a flu passed through the village lately. Do you have sick here still? I'd tend to them before i move on, if you let me."
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