There were bodies everywhere. The only direction where there were not bleeding bodies was above her and Aeotha could not look at the sky without seeing blasts of magic. The blasts of magic ruffled the hair hanging around her face, like sudden warm summer breezes, except that it was night and it was winter. Unnatural, she would have thought, if she hadn't known what was going on. Aeotha knew what was happening around them. Elves were dying, and it strung on every string of her heart. She was not out there with them. She should have been out there with them. Aeotha had forgotten what this felt like. Watching and waiting, healing the dying and passing them on to the next girl for more treatment. Of course, Aeotha did little healing herself. She was saving her magic. Or trying to. There were enough Priestesses running back and forth between the bodies. When one was spent they went off to the temple with a body, and another one replaced them.
It was like clockwork, and even Aeotha had never been in a campaign like this one. The last time she'd been close to one like this she'd been much younger and with the heat of the desert beating down on her face as she leaned over bodies and tried to ease suffering. None of those priestesses were here, were they? Those that remembered the last battle of Lord Eibhear. Even Iluvatar had not been there, though he'd gone after she'd returned. When she shut her eyes she could see it. Blood being sucked down into the depths of the sands even as she tried to stop an Elf from bleeding out. Painting the tans, whites, and blacks with that heavy red.
Though she wore the robes of a normal temple priestess the heavy white robes were marked around her high collar, and down the length of her arm. Whereas the other girls wore nothing but the white. Aeotha would have been happy with just the white. She was in charge of them though. But she needed no marking for them to tell that. There was a glow about her, that kind that hardly needed any more encouragement. Elves were dying. Those lives which she kept inside of her, those thoughts that were not her own seemed to pull her further and further towards the wall. It was like they wanted her to go and stand beside him. Aeotha had her place. She belonged here. She'd just forgotten what it was to be a Temple Priestess, and not a wandering one. Too many years at the front of battles. Too many impossibilities made possible.
All of their robes were gathering blood at the ankles, catching the white fabric and making it even heavier. Some girls were coated in it, others were coming from the temple fresh and pristine only to have the ends of their robe drag through another puddle of it. Every now and then someone would slosh a bucket of water against the ground to clear the freshest away. The stone and marble underneath them would always be red, Aeotha thought, no matter what they did later. If their ankles were not wet from blood, they were wet from the water they kept throwing down.
Aeotha kept turning to look at the wall, even as she instructed more priestesses to move around the bodies. Their names fell so quickly from her lips. Aeotha knew them all, and Fiaethe was learning quickly enough. The ones that dealt with the worst wounds had their tobes tied with a certain knot, the ones that knew field medics were tied with another. Girls just barely old enough to know how to heal minor cuts and wounds were as plain as they could be. Still there were more things to learn as one went. Aeotha's silver dagger was hanging from the tie to her robe by a golden tie, she knew both field medics, and practical healing. The dagger was used to cut away skin so that others could work and Aeotha kept finding herself dragged down to bodies. She would whisper to them with care before she did what she could do for them. Some litters had a handful of priestesses around it, not just one. Grave wounds.