More than sixty Turns ago, a brownrider fathered a son and named him Kantesyne. He didn't have very much more than that to do with it, admittedly, but Kantesyne grew up fine and strong even without much direct paternal influence, and — not so long after reaching his majority — decided to leave the Weyr and head off to the Great Unknown, which — in the course of things — came to be Sea Cliff Hold, beholden to Ista. There it was that he joined the ranks of fishermen, and there it was that he fell in love with his captain's daughter, and even persuaded his captain to let him marry the girl — one Xandrimi by name.
Not very long after they were wed, Kantesyne and Xandrimi gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and named her Remisyne, after the style of Kantesyne's experience with Weyr life, and because they agreed that Remisyne was a beautiful name that suited the beautiful blond girl. By the time she was three, she had a baby brother by the name of Xantes, and another two Turns later brought the third of these children, called Kander in turn. And the three of them grew up with their father and mother at Sea Cliff Hold, and they loved their parents and each other and their life there very well. (For the most part, at least; they were siblings close in age, and so there was always a small degree of squabbling that was just inevitable.)
By the time Xantes was eight or so, he'd already established for himself fine sea legs, regardless of the size of his craft — whether it be his grandfather's fishing ship, the king of a tiny fleet, or the smallest and meekest of coracles, or even just a slender board between him and the surf — no matter the size, he was steady and cheerful aboard it. And it was that slender board he loved best of all, as he ambled along the crests and barrels of the waves off Ista's shores whenever he could get away with it — or thought he could, whether or not that was wise.
So it was, when he was merely twelve Turns old, and liable to follow his father and grandfather into the fishermen's ranks, that a chance encounter on a stormy day — when the surf was fine and choppy and tall, and wonderful to play on — would change his life for good. The storm bested him, sending him and his board to crash on the rocks. The board splintered; his leg broke — and off he was sent, as his mother insisted that the sea air would leave him with a mangled leg and a miserable outlook on life, and thus he should spend his time healing at Fort and the Healercraft Hall. If nothing else, she reasoned, he'd be far enough away from the shore that he wouldn't jeopardize his healing by going out on the waves too early; at best, perhaps he'd actually learn something from the Healers, and keep from breaking his other leg in time.
Much sooner than anyone might have expected, however, Xantes was writing home with a request: Could he, in fact, /apprentice/ at the Healer's Hall? Stranger still, one of the Healers, Master Pollux, had sent along his /own/ letter, stating in no uncertain terms that he'd be happy to have the lad apprentice to him. After that, it was just a matter of paperwork and crutches, and then Xantes was in the midst of all the other just-turned-thirteen-years-old apprentices set to learning heaping piles of the absolute basics of Healing. As it happened, he wasn't too bad at it — once he got used to reading vast quantities quickly, that is.
One of the other apprentices, a waif of a girl by the name of Nahia, took pity on him. Whether it was his continually-bewildered expression or the cast and crutches, Xantes didn't know — but without her help, he probably never would have gotten through that first year. She was the one who helped him improve his reading, until he was good enough to follow along on time with the rest of the class. She was the one who kept him laughing when frustration with his work would have had him in tears instead. And in the end, it didn't matter that their pet interests weren't the same — that she was interested in the mind, and he was interested in the body as it recovered from injury — they became, and stayed, fast friends, throughout their apprenticeship.
Suddenly, then, it was time to walk the tables — as was frequently the tradition, Xantes got walked without any warning at all, and without much more than that as a by-your-leave got cheerfully sent out of the Hall on his first posting. Luck was at least halfway with him, though; despite not having the stability and support of Nahia by his side, or any of the other means whereby he could get help or advice as needed in his chosen career field, he /did/ get sent back to someplace he could understand — to Ista Hold, in a lifestyle he knew, treating the sort of trauma-related aftereffects he'd always been fascinated by, and balancing that by continuing to monitor the health and healing of those who were sent to the island Hold to recuperate from illnesses made worse by harsher climes.
The best part of being back at Ista, of course, was the opportunity to pick up surfing again. It took him a little while to get the hang of it once more, and he was certainly more cautious than he'd been as a child, but the reduction in sense-of-immortality was more than matched by the increase in body awareness he'd cultivated throughout his apprenticeship. He had much more of an innate understanding of just where his board was, in relation to his feet and the rest of his body, than he'd ever had as a boy — and his form showed that. He was far less worried about how his form was judged, now, than he was with how much fun he was having, though — something else his mother could be proud of, for all that she'd never quite understood why he was so fascinated with paddling out into choppy waters with nothing but a little piece of wood to see him safely home again.
What was more, he developed a chance to persuade others around him — friends, coworkers, patients — to take to the waves, in one form or another, in order to study how they responded to the exercise. While most of his patients weren't interested in surfing unless they'd experienced it before becoming patients, to be sure, most were willing to try swimming — and those who had suffered from broken bones or lacerations were the ones most pleased by the rapid improvement in their strength, as warm salt water and mild exertion seemed to improve their healing rates many times over. Sailors who suffered the many strains and injuries of a sailor's life, under Xantes' guidance, found themselves healing with their limbs straight, and not gnarled and sea-worn as they'd expected. Xandrimi, of course, was justifiably proud (and a little bit smug).
This was the shape that Xantes' life was taking: wake up early, surf the dawn tides, come back ashore to have breakfast, tend to his patients, have lunch, tend to his patients and take them swimming, discuss their health with them (and with those around the Hold who weren't /injured/, precisely, but who nonetheless weren't quite in the state of health they most desired), have dinner, read assorted Healer texts, listen to the Hold's harper sing something, and go to bed, in more-or-less that order, most days. And, as far as he was concerned, it was a good shape for a life to have. Sometimes, he'd get visits from his family — a chance to learn what his parents were like from an adult's perspective, a chance to coo over his older sister's young children, a chance to be fully dismayed once again over his younger brother's tendencies toward a semi-chaotic life, full of scandal — just often enough, and not /too/ often. Sometimes there were Gathers. Sometimes other Healers visited, and there were enough other dignitaries and rotating patients to keep life just interesting enough, without being /too/ interesting.
This, of course, was the cue for Nahia to show up in his life again. Despite the frequency of the letters they'd shared back-and-forth over the past couple of turns, she gave him absolutely no inkling whatsoever of the change in her plans — until he entered his quarters one day and found her sitting there, bags strewn around the room, smirking cheerfully at him. Once he was done hugging the stuffing out of her, she explained that she'd given a great deal of thought to it, and decided that as Ista had no Mindhealer and yet was considered a prime site for recovery from injuries of all sorts, Ista clearly /needed/ a Mindhealer… and she was the best person for the job. She'd gone to a great deal of trouble to persuade the Master Mindhealers of this, along with the rest of the Craftmasters, and so he'd /better/ be happy to see her, or /else/.
Less than two months later, they'd agreed to wed each other, of course.
They built a life together at Ista from that point on: not so dissimilar from the life he'd led alone, but with her life paralleling it, and dozens of moments scattered throughout the days when they could simply /be/ together. Neither were too prone to over-think the times they shared, instead of simply enjoying those times. Tragedy brushed their lives, as tragedy brushes most lives; the first two times Nahia became pregnant, she was unable to keep her babies, and they mourned those losses as any parent would. When Xantes was twenty-five, Nahia finally gave birth to their first child: a beautiful daughter, who they named Nadrimi, in clear acknowledgment of how important Xandrimi had been to their first meeting each other. Other children followed in time, as both Xantes and Nahia were granted recognition for their work in the Healercraft and granted their masteries: their sons, Synan and his younger brother Karden, and eventually another baby girl, Xinnai.
As Masterhealers in Ista, they had plenty of work, and discovered as time passed that some fair amount of that was going to include teaching — either through finding youngsters who had a talent for the craft and ought to be fully trained at the Hall, through offering additional training to those journeymen posted at Ista's various holds, or through teaching the occasional class to Ista Weyr's riders when they did something egregiously stupid and needed to be reminded how to take care of /themselves/ and not just their dragons.
But no matter how satisfying their work was, there was always the sense that something was, maybe, just a little tiny bit, missing from their lives. When troubling rumors about Eastern Weyr started circulating within Xantes' earshot, he wondered if, perhaps, this was what he'd been waiting for. As the rumors developed more of a body, and he learned of many people — riders and non-riders alike — who had suffered from injury or insult, with no particular /healing/ to speak of, left to mend more-or-less on their own, he was troubled indeed, and wondered if perhaps this wasn't a time when he and Nahia needed to step forward and volunteer their services. Only the fact that he hadn't had a chance to discuss it with her held him back.
When the Healer Hall sent out the call to the Master Healers scattered throughout Pern, asking for volunteers to uproot themselves and head to Eastern Weyr, to help those who had been more-or-less abandoned out there, Xantes turned to Nahia to ask her what she thought — at just about the exact same moment she turned to /him/, to ask what /he/ thought, for after all, they suited each other very well and neither was likely to turn away from a person or place in need.
And so, curious and uncertain, not knowing what they'd find, Xantes and Nahia and their two youngest children packed up their things and headed out to their newest posting: Eastern Weyr.