To this day I will swear to you that he is an angel.  Now granted, most angels don’t have wavy red hair or honey brown eyes that you could just melt in, but he did.  He was a quiet man, one who you might not notice if you weren’t paying attention.  It is said that he is one of the best healers the world has ever seen.  I’m quite willing to believe that, considering what I have seen him do during the relatively short time I have had the privilege of watching him.  Some people claim that he uses magic to heal his patients, but as of yet I haven’t seen him use anything more than a bandage or a bundle of herbs to treat me.  He often bows his head, but it is a common practice for healers to pray to Ovven for guidance.  No, during the entire time he treated me, I never once saw him use anything that was definitively ‘magical’, and that is saying something.  Theron is quite possibly the only man other than my fellow soldiers that I have ever observed for a long period of time, and I have seen many men do magic.  I know what you are thinking, and no, I wasn’t spying on him, in fact I really didn’t have all that much of a choice but to watch him.  I was the patient, and he the doctor whose job it was to save my life.

I was just like any other case when I was brought into the Hall, just another warrior who had been wounded in battle.  The fact that I was female didn’t even appear to register to him as he quickly assessed my wounds and set about treating them.  The speed and efficiency with which he sewed up the deep gashes on my legs told me that he had seen many wounded before me, and expected to see many, many more after.  If not for the infection that set in two days later he probably wouldn’t ever have seen or remembered me again.  When he heard that one of the patients he had treated had become ill, however, nothing could have kept him away.  I think it was pride more than anything else that made him come back.  He wasn’t about to let one of the patients slip through the cracks, especially not one of the patients he had treated.  He’d worked too hard to give me up now.

Part of the oath he had sworn to become healer stated that he would try to help every person who needed him.  I definitely needed someone, not him specifically, but he did nicely.  He nursed me back to health, one agonizing day at a time.  My illness didn’t relent for him willingly, either; it threw new symptoms, new emergencies at him as fast as he could fix them, growing and changing with each passing day.  I am sure I should have died many times, but he miraculously kept me among the living despite enough maladies to kill a small army.  I would at times be burning up with fever, then at others so cold many were sure I had already died.  He never stopped believing that he would save me, though.  He never gave up hope that he would find a cure for the mysterious plague that wracked my body and sapped me of even the strength to speak.  All I could do was watch him.

Being unable to speak was a horrifying experience.  I couldn’t tell anyone when I felt another wave of the disease about to wash over me.  I couldn’t tell them what was wrong with me, or even when something was terribly wrong.  All I could do was plead silently with my eyes, my tears, and hope that someone would understand what I was trying to say.  He always understood.  Many times he was the one who first saw that there was something not quite right, and many more he was the one who made it right.  Nothing made him loose that calm demeanor that seemed to be his trademark, not hysterical nurses, nor seriously ill patients.  Not even the unexpected death of one of the patients he had thought was recovering well could make him do more than sigh.  I lay on that bed for months, and not once did I see him anything but professional.  The only time I ever saw him even slightly flustered was on the day I was finally strong enough to sit up on my own.  I hugged him as I thanked him for taking care of me.  I think it was only then that it finally sank into him that I was a girl.  His slightly red tinged face could have been from something else entirely, though.  Maybe he was allergic to the soap they washed me with.

I’m writing now, five years later, to try to say thank you.  I want to say thank you to the Hall for giving up the best healer the world has ever seen to a common foot soldier.  I cherish every day he is with me, both in my heart and physically.  After he left he worked in the field until the end of the war; always there to treat my regiment first when we came in from a day’s hard won battle.  The war has been over three years now, and we have spent that time together.  He is a wonderful father; he never gets flustered by anything the children do, even the twins, who can be quite a handful.  He’s usually the first one to see a problem, and most of the time he fixes it before if can get out of hand.  And he always knows what to do for a scraped knee.  There’s never a time that he is anything but wonderful.  He is my angel.