Essential World Context
It was a world now known as Astray—the final destination of those who have lost their way.
Its level of technology roughly resembles that of Europe in the 1920s. Steam power has not yet faded into history, while electricity, internal-combustion engines, and modern industry are expanding at a rapid pace. Cities, telegraph networks, and railways are becoming increasingly integral to everyday life. What sets Astray apart, however, is the existence of magic—a phenomenon that can be studied, understood, and put to practical use, giving rise to creations impossible elsewhere.
The people of Astray have already established the heliocentric model and know that the world they inhabit is spherical. Ocean voyages and geographical expeditions continue to push back the boundaries of the known world, yet vast regions still remain unexplored and poorly understood.
Orphan, Beggar
Eden was born on December 23, 215, in a mining city on the Empire’s northern frontier.
Her mother died of postpartum hemorrhage. Blaming the attending obstetrician for her death, her father murdered the doctor and was himself sentenced to death. Left an orphan, Eden was sent to a privately contracted orphanage.
It is not difficult to imagine what kind of place it was. Funds intended for the children were routinely embezzled; abuse was commonplace; the children received only the bare minimum of food and care needed to keep them from dying outright. By the time she was five, chronic malnutrition had left Eden noticeably smaller and thinner than other children her age. Life in the orphanage had also taught her to regard beatings, hunger, and death as ordinary facts of existence.
In early 221, she fell victim to a human-trafficking scheme. Gang members took her from the orphanage and trained her to beg, forcing her to bring in whatever money she could for the gang.
By the end of that same year, a major outbreak of poliomyelitis had swept through the city, extinguishing Eden’s hope of saving enough money to escape. Shops closed. Food and medicine grew scarce. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and the child beggars began to fall ill one after another.
Drawing on the little medical knowledge she had picked up while working at an apothecary, Eden tried to care for them. Yet she could do little more than delay death. In the end, she too contracted the disease.
The epidemic also shattered what remained of the gang’s internal order. With nowhere left to turn, one of its enforcers, drunk and desperate, broke into the dilapidated shack where the children lived and tried to kill them in a fit of rage.
Disease, bitter cold, starvation, and violence destroyed everything within that shack. The children who fought back were beaten to death by the enforcer. Unassuming as she was, Eden in turn stabbed him to death with a knife.
And Eden herself—
she sat among the corpses and the snow, waiting to die.
EXCERPTWinterreise: Die KräheRead excerptClose excerpt
Winterreise: Die Krähe
Eine Krähe war mit mir Aus der Stadt gezogen, Ist bis heute für und für Um mein Haupt geflogen.
Krähe, wunderliches Thier, Willst mich nicht verlassen? Meinst wohl bald als Beute hier Meinen Leib zu fassen?
Nun, es wird nicht weit mehr gehn An dem Wanderstabe. Krähe, laß mich endlich sehn Treue bis zum Grabe!
Eden eventually came under the protection of Doctors Without Borders. Luo Ze, the physician leading the team, found her barely alive while clearing out a gang hideout alongside the military police.
EXCERPT“Sir, kind sir… please, kill me…”Read excerptClose excerpt
“Sir, kind sir… please, kill me…”
Luo Ze refused her plea. Instead, he chose to save a child already deemed “no longer worth treating.”
EXCERPTAt night, the weary crow rested by the bed, waiting for the nightingale lying there to die.Read excerptClose excerpt
At night, the weary crow rested by the bed, waiting for the nightingale lying there to die.
At night, the dying nightingale lay sleepless, watching the crow by her bed until dawn.
Who was watching over whom? And who was saving whom?
Luo Ze kept Eden alive through measures that verged on recklessness. In the end, he resolved to do more than secure her immediate survival: he would take responsibility for the life that lay ahead of her.
He adopted her as his daughter, brought her back with him to his homeland in the East, and began teaching her how to heal the sick and save lives.
Apprentice, Daughter
After Luo Ze adopted her, Eden was finally able to receive proper, sustained medical care. Even so, nothing could reverse the paralysis of her lower body.
She was bright, quick to learn, and keenly aware of all she owed those who had helped her. Even Luo Ze—a cantankerous old physician who was hardly easy to please—could find little fault with her. Medicine gradually became the focus of her education, and Luo Ze naturally became her teacher as well as her guardian.
For the first time in her life, Eden began to understand what it meant to have a home—even if that home was far from gentle.
EXCERPTLuo Ze gave Eden her first anatomy lesson when she was eight.Read excerptClose excerpt
Luo Ze gave Eden her first anatomy lesson when she was eight.
It was a bright, mild day in early spring. It should have been a day for a father to take his daughter to a meadow to fly a kite—to watch it rise into the sky, their laughter ringing across the fields.
But the simple happiness of ordinary life had never had much to do with Luo Ze, and now his apprentice had to suffer for it too. In the clinic’s basement, the only light came through a narrow skylight, falling across the cold dissection table before them.
Luo Ze hid his concern behind demands and reprimands; Eden had long since learned to obey.
EXCERPTI remember an old man who used to sell ice pops from a pushcart beside Father’s clinic when I was little. His…Read excerptClose excerpt
I remember an old man who used to sell ice pops from a pushcart beside Father’s clinic when I was little. His cart had a bell, and whenever it rang, children would gather around. They would buy their ice pops and sit on the steps outside the clinic to eat them.
And me? I would watch them from the second floor.
I envied them terribly, but Father would never let me have one. He was a stern man from the East, and he would not let children eat anything cold or “cooling.”
In the winter of 227, Luo Ze prepared to leave for an epidemic-stricken region on his own. Eden, however, insisted on accompanying him. She was driven partly by her attachment to him, but even more by a desire to prove that she was ready to become a physician in her own right.
In the epidemic zones, entire towns had been sealed off. The dead could not be buried quickly enough. Medical supplies were desperately scarce, and patients had to be triaged according to prognosis. Again and again, doctors were forced to decide who should receive the scarce resources still available: medicine, beds, and hours of care.
In other words, they were being asked to pass judgment on the value of a life.
EXCERPT“Teacher, even if all these patients are destined to die, I don’t want to simply give up on them. At the very…Read excerptClose excerpt
“Teacher, even if all these patients are destined to die, I don’t want to simply give up on them. At the very least, I want them to have the right to choose whether to go on living. And if we cannot give them even that, we should at least let them die in peace.”
Eden could not accept such cold calculations. After all, years earlier, her own teacher had saved her precisely by defying that same logic—by choosing to treat a child already deemed “no longer worth treating.”
So she learned to push herself to the limits of endurance, again and again, simply to give her patients a few more choices than they would otherwise have had.
And somewhere along the way, beyond medicine and apprenticeship, the two became father and daughter in every sense that mattered.
Time flowed ceaselessly on. It could dry up seas and wear stone to dust. It could also turn a frail little girl into a beautiful young woman and bend a stubborn father’s back beneath the weight of age.
The old man had once taken that child into his arms—a child who could not walk—and pushed her wheelchair through streets and hospital wards. Now that child was grown. She reached out and drew her aging father into her arms.
EXCERPT“Dad.”Read excerptClose excerpt
“Dad.”
Her embrace was as warm and fierce as the first light of a newly risen sun.
Doctor, Scholar
That life came to an abrupt end when Eden was seventeen.
Luo Ze was killed instantly in an accident, and his death dealt Eden a devastating blow. In the end, she left the East and returned to the Empire where she had been born, continuing her medical career there. Partly, she did so to carry on the work her father had left unfinished. Partly, she hoped that by burying herself in her work, she might dull the grief that remained.
By the age of eighteen, her outstanding contributions to microscopic medicine and emergency care had already earned her a seat on the standing council of the Continental Academy. In a sense, she had taken up the place once occupied by her adoptive father. She now stood at the forefront of medical science, ready to take another step into territory still unknown.
When she was nineteen, an unfamiliar plague began spreading across the southern reaches of the continent.
Once again, Eden set out without hesitation.
What lay ahead?