Tomorrow she would walk again.And she knew now that she could carry whatever the road gave her.Morning did not rush her awake. It arrived in a slow pale wash of light spreading across the valley. The wind that had moved constantly through the night softened as if the land itself were pausing between breaths. She opened her eyes to that stillness and remained where she was for a while, looking upward at a sky slowly clearing of its last stars.Her body was tired, but it was a known kind of tired. The ache lived deep in muscle and bone, not as injury, not as warning. It was the result of distance honestly traveled. She let that feeling settle before she moved, acknowledging it instead of pushing it away. Endurance, she was learning, was not built by ignoring strain. It was built by understanding it.She stood, brushed the grass from her clothes, and began walking again without ceremony.The valley stretched wide before her, but the ground here held subtle rises and dips that revealed
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