Name: ysabetwordsmith
Title: "An Impetuous Presence"
Colors: Sunlight #10 Impetuous
Supplies and Styles: None.
Word Count: 764
Rating: G
Warnings: No standard warnings apply.

The following poem belongs to my series Path of the Paladins. This is spiritual fantasy about the followers of a deposed goddess. Themes include faith, perseverance, recovery from trauma, nonsexual love, and making the world a better place.


"An Impetuous Presence"


Johan found himself surrounded
by children, very much not
his usual state or nature.

They made an impetuous presence,
wild and quick though not careless,
their fluting voices a background noise
as ubiquitous as birdsong in a forest.

Althey's huge eyes and his soft
"How are you?" greeting
always reminded Johan of an owl.
The boy was gentle and patient
about tending the wounds
that Johan had acquired
defending their little band.
He honestly tried not to
make a nuisance of himself

The problem was that
it was impossible to hide anything.
The children got into and around
and over everything.

If Johan winced on the way to the privy
because the slice along his hip still hurt,
someone was there to duck under his arm
before he could take another step.

If the deep gouge in this shoulder
twinged during a meal,
the girls twittered over whose turn
it was to feed him by hand.

Althey was the worst, though,
Althey with his clear owl-eyes
and his tender healer's fingers,
made all the more perceptive
by the lucent jewel that Gailah
had dropped into his innocent grasp.

When Johan woke gasping in the night,
choking on terror from the dreams
of what he had seen and had done,
Althey was there with a warm hand
on his forehead to soothe him back to sleep.

When Johan woke weeping in the night,
wracked with memories of his goddess,
missing her all the more after
a fleeting glimpse in this dream or that one,
Althey was there with a broadening shoulder
for him to cry on for as long as it took.

It was that, more than anything,
which began to revive Johan's faith,
a process as insidious and painful
as life returning to a numbed arm
that had been slept on for too long.

Althey learned, though Johan
did not try to teach him anything.
It was just there, this thing,
growing between them like
the slow light of an autumn sunrise.

One morning Johan nicked his finger
peeling potatoes for the soup.
Althey closed an impetuous hand over it,
and when he let go, the small cut
was gone as if it had never been.
"That's new," Althey murmured,
but made no more fuss over it than that.

Johan was learning from Althey, too,
although he never meant it.
One evening Althey caught him
fingering the fallen star
set into the hilt of his sword,
still as dark as the day he regained it.

"Blow on it," Althey said.
"What?" Johan said, startled.

"It's like a coal, in the hearth?"
Althey said. "You have to blow
a little to make it light up."
He cupped his hands around
his own star-gem and breathed
over the clear sphere of it.
Light blossomed in his cupped hands.

This wasn't how Johan
had learned to do it before,
but he did it anyway,
and it worked anyway.

For the first time in decades
he held the light of Gailah in his palms,
and then he was crying, quite openly,
so someone had to bring him a handkerchief,
and oh, he didn't care.

It was like that, all the time,
being pried out of his shell
one piece after another.
It never stopped hurting,
never stopped feeling as if
he was going about naked
with no skin over the raw meat of him,
but Johan began to grow used to it.

If he'd lost his inner armor,
well, he'd gotten back
some things he thought
were lost forevermore.
He'd make that trade,
nevermind the pain of it.

By the time Johan healed enough
to travel, it was early winter.
"Where are we going?"
Althey asked him,
quite out of the blue.

"We?" Johan said, because
he hadn't thought of that at all,
but of course it would be we now
since Althey was his novice and
they couldn't leave the others behind.

Johan wracked his mind for ideas
and recalled what Shahana and Ari
had said about Ari's village --
they'd lost a lot of people there,
but Ari's brother still held onto
the family farm. It might do.

"I know of a village," Johan said.
"They may have room there
for a few more people."

Rakel gathered the little ones
around her, though really,
she wasn't all that much older.
"What about you and Althey?"
she asked, with a glance
at the twin stars they held.
This time the children were mindful
instead of impetuous.

"Althey and I," said Johan,
"have a longer path ahead of us."