A world that needed both.

You want to help others but all of the paths to being a Healer either require vows you refuse, sacrifices too great, or are too narrow in scope.

They've been telling you, for years, that if you want to help others without being a Healer your best bet was to become strong and defend them, that every real path available to you involves destruction or might of arms.

What good is defending someone if when you leave, their bodies are still broken or their homes are still destroyed?

It's the last year before you begin your Life Path everyone else has long ago decided the broad strokes of their life, what God they would worship, and have been preparing for it.

Defiantly refusing to settle for either path, searching for something more, it's all that consumes you.

Everyday when your responsibilities and learning are done, you go searching through the archives.

Joining the service of a god without followers here, seems to be your only choice, you would not have any of the prerequisites to gain power beyond the basics that come with making the pact, unless you journeyed far, but it feels more important to you to find the right answer than worry about difficulties of gaining rank in a foreign temple.

Father begged you to pick a path by now, he would have preferred you followed in his footsteps, those he walked now, rather than from when he had ventured, he wants for you the peaceful life of a blacksmith.

Mother, before she died, having seen your gentle soul, tried to direct you away from your chosen desire.

She had seen the death that Healers deal with, both in her own adventuring time and when she had settled down to run the local hospital.

She had also seen the hardships your father and his brothers went through.

She too wanted you to live the peaceful life of a craftsman, in service to a god that calls not for war.

Father was a good blacksmith for having none of the right blessings for it, you walking the path from the start would grant you advantages he lacked.

However stubbornness runs on both sides of the family and apparently you got a double helping of it.

You desired to be like both your parents, in the stories they used to tell you as a child, you wanted to be able to heal and help like your mother and you wanted to be able to defend and protect like your father.

There were no paths here that will let you do both, they told you time and again.

The only one to take you seriously was your only surviving uncle, when your doubt ran high you would go and talk to him at the farm he maintained, having also retired like your father and mother.

He sadly made it out less unscathed, but through determination still managed to run the farm with one arm.

He's the one that set you on this desperate dig through the archives, 'kid I don't know if what you're looking for is out there, but I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't tell you to at least give your all, to try before you give up, if it is out there the only place you'd find it here is in the archives in the deepest sections full of all the gods that have abandoned this place after the wars, but still have temples in other lands you could visit. '

So that's what you were doing, digging through the archives, and you'd found plenty of Forgotten gods that you could still make a pact with.

But none of them could give you what you're looking for, there were great gods of healing or God's that had aspects of healing and there are gods of fighting in defense but none of the ones you found would give you both.

You almost gave up and took the advice of your one friend here, 'just pick up the warhammers of your family and learn mundane unpowered medicine on the side.'

When time truly ran out if you found nothing that's what you would do, but you would stubbornly spend every moment until the last, looking.

That attribute was one of the few blessings your family had, no sacred bloodline or super natural blessings, the war songs and stories that included your family called it willpower, everyone else called it thick-headed stubbornness.

It paid off on the last day, when the halls of the archives would soon be closed off to you as a student and you'd have to pay for entry like everyone else, that's when you found it.

In a corner you swore you had searched before, between books you know you've read cover to cover before, there was a book covered in ash and dust.

A/N: I know, I know I should be working on LAL, but y-you don't understand, these plot bunnies broken to my house and held my stuffed animals Ransom.

But for real, send help or coffee because instead of sleeping I wrote all 20k of this and counting.

AN: skip to ch7 if you are just here for the type of stuff I normally write.

Let me know if you like this type of story, was aiming for a slower burn but still full of the kink people read my stuff for.