The first sound was the creak of wood. Old floorboards groaned beneath the steps of Raka Grundane, the granny the village called "the steel granny." She was wide-shouldered, thick-armed, her hair now a cloud of silver tied back in a braid that swung heavy down her back. The firelight painted her with the look of a warrior—scarred, unyielding, a granny carved from stone.
Everyone knew her strength. They told stories about it. How she once carried a whole timber beam on her shoulders when people half her age couldn't budge it. How she threw drunken brawlers out of the tavern with one hand gripping their shirt collars like sacks of grain. How she wrestled a wild boar that had terrorized the farmers and dragged it back home bleeding but alive, muttering that its meat would taste better if it was taken with respect.
Strength was her skin, her mask, her weapon.
But in the quiet, when no one was watching, her body betrayed her. Her hands trembled. Not with weakness but with memory. She reached for a glass jar on her shelf—a jar of dried chamomile she had picked last summer—and her fingers lingered around the rim as though the object itself could shatter with the slightest touch.
She wasn't afraid of breaking the jar. She was afraid of remembering why she had gathered it in the first place.
The villagers thought she collected herbs for tea. They thought she enjoyed the earthy smell of them. None knew the truth. None knew that her heart still carried the fragile, impossible dream of becoming a pharmacist.
Her mind slipped back. Memory tugged her down into childhood, a time that had never been gentle.
She had been small, scrappy, clumsy, with a voice that broke too easily. Books were her enemy. Letters never lined up for her the way they did for the other children. Words looked like they were written on waves, shifting whenever she tried to pin them down. Teachers grew impatient. Their sighs cut deeper than whips.
"Not trying hard enough."
"Slow again, Raka."
"You'll never amount to anything."
The words turned into chains around her neck.
At home, her parents wore the same look of disappointment every time she failed another lesson, every time she came home bruised from being shoved into mud by classmates who mocked her. They never struck her. They didn't have to. Their silence, their turning away, their lack of pride—that was worse.
She wanted to scream at them: I am trying. I am fighting. It's just harder for me.
But she never did.
Because when she tried to speak, her voice always faltered.
The only light in that childhood darkness was her great-grandfather. Old, wrinkled, with a cough that rattled his heart, he still had an aura about him—the aura of a human who had spent a lifetime in the art of healing.
He was a pharmacist. Or he had been, back when his hands were steady and his eyes were sharper. He had stories the way others had breath. He told Raka how he had once mixed a salve from pine resin and honey to heal a farmer's infected wound. How he had once brewed a potion for a fevered child when doctors had already given up. His voice carried awe not for himself, but for the act of healing.
One day, when Raka sat crying beneath the old oak after another beating of laughter from her peers, he found her there. He lowered himself with great effort and sat beside her. His hand, spotted and brittle, reached out and rested on her rough little fingers.
"You've got strong hands, Raka," he whispered. "Hands made for holding people together."
She sniffled. "I'm... I'm not smart enough."
He shook his head. "Steel doesn't have to be quick. It just has to endure. A pharmacist needs steel inside—not just cleverness. You could be one. If you believe it."
She wanted to believe. His words lit something in her heart. For a time, she held onto that warmth. She dreamed of shelves lined with jars, of patients thanking her, of curing illnesses with the same confidence he once had.
But dreams don't survive long against cruelty.
At school, the other children mocked her even more when she spoke of wanting to become a pharmacist. "You? You can't even read your own name." "Go lift barrels, brute. That's all you're good for."
Their voices grew louder than her great-grandfather's whispers. All because of her learning disability...
And then—he died.
The candlelight of her life went out.
Her parents didn't wait long to show how little faith they had left in her. Arguments filled the house, words sharpened like knives. One winter evening, they shoved her into the street, a bundle of her clothes thrust into her arms.
"You'll never be more than a burden. Go. We're done."
Her aunt took her in—not out of kindness, but out of duty. She was strict, sour, and cold. She gave Raka a bed, food, and nothing else. No warmth. No encouragement.
Raka learned to survive by lifting. She carried crates for merchants. She hauled sacks of grain. She swung her fists when cornered. Strength became her language, her currency, her armor. If she could not be respected for her mind, then she would be feared for pure effort.
And it worked. People stopped laughing at her. They stopped mocking her. But they never saw her. Not the real her.
At night, she would clutch the single notebook she had inherited from her great-grandfather—pages filled with cramped writing and sketches of herbs. She couldn't read half of it. The words blurred and twisted. But she traced her fingers over the drawings, over the diagrams. She whispered to herself:
One day. One day, I'll do it.
She never told anyone. Her secret dream stayed locked in her heart like a fragile glass vial hidden among bricks of iron.
The present returned like the sting of winter air. Raka—old now, hair silver, back bent but unbroken—stood before her shelves again. Jars of herbs lined them. Some were common: thyme, sage, lavender. Others rarer, collected from long hikes into the mountains. She knew how to prepare teas, poultices, little remedies. She practiced in secret, teaching herself bit by bit, even though the letters still tried to run away from her.
To the folks, these were just hobbies. To her, they were her second heartbeat.
Her hands shook as she picked up the notebook—its cover cracked, its pages yellowed with age. Her great-grandfather's handwriting still lived inside. Her eyes blurred not because of her disability, but because of the tears welling up.
She whispered, to no one but herself:
"I wanted to be a pharmacist. I always did."
The words were heavy. They pulled years of silence out of her chest all at once. She had said them at last, even if no one else was there to hear.
And as she said them, she felt both broken and alive.
Her steel body could carry anything—logs, crates, any muscle brute like herself—but this truth was the heaviest thing she had ever lifted.
The lamp flickered. The night deepened. And Raka Grundane, the brute granny, sat alone with her jars, her notebook, and her unshakable truth.
The episode ended not with triumph, but with a promise. A seed that had never truly died was stirring again.
Raka Grundane would no longer bury her dream.
She would fight for it.
She would live for it.
She would become the pharmacist she had always wanted to be.
Even if it took steel. Even if it took breaking through her own chains. Even if it took starting over at the end of her life.
This first episode closes on her old, calloused hand trembling as it turns the first page of that notebook, the firelight casting her shadow across the shelves like the silhouette of a warrior-pharmacist yet to be born.
TO BE CONTINUED...