Yilda: Healer of Drakkensund

Few in Drakkensund speak her name without a hush of reverence. Yilda, in the old tongue, carries the sense of sacrifice and strength through offering. Some say it means “one who yields and yet endures.” It suits her. She bends like the river’s current, but she doesn’t break. To those who have sat at her hearth, the name itself feels like a charm, a syllable that steadies the breath.

The Adornments of Her Hair

Her frost-white hair is never left plain. It rises in braids threaded with beads, sigils, and slender sticks. Each one means something.
Beads of bone and Riverstone mark the lives she has healed and the lives she has buried. Carved wooden sticks are cut from trees struck by lightning, their charred ends still carrying something of the storm’s force. Sigils etched in copper and tin are charms against sickness, gifted by those who once sought her aid.
To most, they look like ornaments. To Yilda, they are a living record. A crown of memory and protection that grows heavier each year.

Origins and Rumour

She has lived in Drakkensund since she was young, but her speech carries inflexions not native to the settlement. Some say she crossed the river as a girl, guided by mist, and that the Eldertrees (those vast, ancient trees beyond the ravines) only released her because she bore their blessing. Others whisper she was sent as a keeper of forgotten knowledge, to guard the settlement against what lies beyond the snow.
Yilda has never confirmed or denied any of it. Her silence speaks louder than the stories.

Remedies and Craft

Her hut is lined with jars, bundles hanging from rafters, tinctures arranged with a precision that suggests ritual. Among her remedies:
Wintermint and yarrow steeped into bitter-sweet teas that ease fever and cleanse the blood. Frostroot resin, thick as honey, pressed into wounds to draw out infection. Moonberry tincture for grief and restless dreams. Pine-seed poultice ground with honey for aching joints and tired bones.
She gathers everything from the land itself. Riverbanks, forest edges, high slopes where snow lingers. Some ingredients she trades for. Others, she only takes under ritual: cutting herbs at dawn, never dusk, always leaving something behind. Bread, salt, or song.

Rituals and Favour

Yilda’s healing isn’t only of the body. She has her rituals:
A bowl of water by the door. Each visitor must breathe into it before entering, leaving their burdens in the surface’s shiver.
Knots of Tidelace cord, woven as she listens. Each knot binds a fragment of pain. When she’s done, she casts the cord into the river.
Three lamps lit: one for the wound, one for the story, one for the unseen.Simple acts. Profound ones. They remind people that healing is as much spirit as flesh, that bodies remember what minds try to forget.

The Mystery of Yilda

To the people of Drakkensund, Yilda is both familiar and unknowable. She binds wounds, feeds the hungry, and listens more than she speaks. But she also walks into the mist without fear, knows the names of herbs no one else remembers, and carries the storm and river in her grey eyes.
Some call her a healer. Some call her a witch. Most simply call her necessary.
When the snow falls heavily and the wolves draw close, when fever or injury strikes, they come to her door. They breathe into her bowl. They watch her weave their pain into knots. They leave with remedies that smell of earth and survival.
They don’t ask questions she won’t answer.
Yilda endures. Drakkensund endures with her.