I was a girl of seven, my bare feet slipping on wet stone as I scrambled up the treacherous paths of Mount Caelestis-Sol—the Heavenly Sun. My dress was thin, threadbare in places, faded from countless washings to a grey that might once have been blue or brown—it was impossible to tell anymore. The fabric snagged on sharp rocks as I climbed, tearing new holes alongside the old ones my mother never bothered to mend. It was too large for me, a hand-me-down from some village girl I'd never met, and the cold wind slipped through its gaps like icy fingers against my skin. The hem was already torn from a dozen other climbs, dragging behind me as I pulled myself higher. But I didn't care about the cold, or the tears, or what my mother would say when she saw the fresh damage.

  I was running.

  Running from the grief that shackled our hovel like a living thing, wrapping itself around the doorframe and seeping through the cracks in the walls. Running from the spectre of my three older siblings—the ones I never met, the ones who never saw their first year, whose names my mother only spoke in her sleep when the nightmares took her. Running from my father's bedridden form, a breathing corpse who stared at the ceiling with eyes that hadn't seen anything in years. Running from my mother's weary eyes and her sick mind, from the rages that came without warning and the silences that stretched for days.

  I was running to the only place that felt like hope.

  They called him the Slànachadair—the Healer, the one who makes whole. He had arrived in our village the winter my mother carried me, a tall, silent presence who ensured I drew breath when every child before me had not. He asked no payment for his tending. He gave freely to the poor. And his touch could mend flesh and quiet fevers with equal ease, as if illness itself recognized its master and retreated in shame.

  That day, I found him not among the hovels of the village, but at the mountain's crown. He stood at the edge of a precipice, gazing out over the world of men he secretly guarded, and the sight of him stopped me cold.

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  He hadn't heard me approach. For one breathless moment, I simply watched him: the way the wind played with his dark hair, the way his shoulders seemed to carry a weight no mortal should bear, the way he stood so still he might have been carved from the mountain itself.

  He appeared as an ordinary man to anyone else who might have seen him. But to my child’s eyes, he was a god.

  Hair as black as a raven's wing tumbled over shoulders that seemed to hold up the sky. His eyes were not like sparkling stars; they were stars, holding the cold, ancient fire of distant constellations in their depths. His skin was pale as the mountain's peak, and his build was lean and tall—a blade of honed grace rather than brute strength. I remember the strange stillness that surrounded him, a bubble of silence in the chattering world. It was as if no one else truly saw him, his unearthly beauty just a ripple in the periphery of their vision, something they registered without truly perceiving.

  Then he turned.

  And his eyes—those impossible, star-flecked eyes that held the light of a thousand skies—found mine.

  I saw him. I always saw him. Even then, at seven years old, with scraped knees and a pounding heart and lungs that burned from the thin air—I saw him. Not the healer. Not the stranger. Not the myth that the elders whispered about when they thought children weren't listening. I saw him.

  And he saw me seeing him.

  For a long, frozen moment, neither of us moved. I remember thinking, with the strange clarity that comes to children in moments of crisis, that his eyes were the most beautiful and terrible things I had ever witnessed. They held centuries—millennia—of loneliness, of watching, of waiting for something that never came. They held the weight of a duty so immense it would have crushed any mortal soul. And beneath all of that, they held something else: wonder. As if I were the mystery, not him.

  Then I ran.

  I turned and scrambled down that mountain so fast I left skin on the rocks, my heart hammering against my ribs, my breath coming in sobs I couldn't control. I didn't stop running until I reached the tree line, and then I kept running, through the village, past the staring neighbours, all the way to our hovel, where I collapsed on my pallet and shook for hours while my mother raged at something in the corner that wasn't there.

  I never forgot those eyes.