“Some view time spent in the pursuit of a goal which one never attained to be a failure, a waste of time. For those of us freed from the bondage of time, however, it was more of a worthwhile endeavor. After all, you always learn more from your failures than your successes.” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

In the end, Aideen and Celia’s stay in Alfheim turned out to be a rather extended stay, as they two remained in the city and its vicinity for the next decade. The main reason was because Aideen wanted to see if she could get a chance to go into the Great Emerald Forest from the city, though over their decade of stay that approach bore them no fruit.

For Aideen, the time spent was not wasted, though, as it also allowed her to get a better grasp of the Alfheim elves and the other locals. She just viewed it as a bit of an extended vacation instead, and enjoyed her time there to the most. Celia was at first somewhat surprised by Aideen’s Laissez-Faire attitude, but then she recalled the decades they spent with the orcs and just ran with it as well.

Even without their relative lack of need for sustenance and shelter due to their unliving nature, neither women would have found it difficult to sustain themselves for long periods of time in any area. Aideen’s healing ability alone would mean that she would be sought after regardless of where she went, as healers of her caliber were few and far between, much less one so inclined to freely dispense with their healing like her.

Celia herself had learned a lot of the more mundane ways of healing from Aideen in the decades they had traveled together. The younger woman lacked Aideen’s blessing with magic, but even more mundane healing methods were plenty effective for most needs, and Celia had mastered multiple varieties of it, both from knowledge Aideen taught her and what she learned from the orcs in the prairie.

In the world, regardless of where one went to, healers were prized and welcomed, due to the salvation they brought with them. That applied more so to regions with high activity from wild beasts and monsters, where altercations between the people living there and the creatures around them were almost a daily necessity. Injuries in such areas were naturally common, and as such they were in particular need of healers, of any kind.

Needless to say, both Aideen and Celia built up a rapport of understanding and a lot of goodwill with the locals during their decade-long stay in the region. Aideen especially drew attention – and likely caused some bards to add some lines to songs they already sung about her – with her usual all-white outfit and how she often brought people back to perfect health from injuries that would have otherwise killed them within the day.

Compared to Aideen, Celia’s work was far less flashy, but she helped take care of most minor injuries, with herbal remedies and treatments that proved to be highly effective and efficient. The work doubled as practice for her, and Aideen encouraged her to trade her knowledge with the local healers as well, as she was always a proponent of spreading the knowledge of healing as widely as she could.

The local healers were at first slightly wary about the new healers in town, but after a few meetings and exchanges where they traded knowledge with each other freely, they embraced Aideen and Celia’s arrival happily. In a rare show of humility, even the elderly elven healers – some of whom were many times older than even Aideen – came and exchanged knowledge with them.

Those older healers proved to be a treasure trove of knowledge in regards to traditional elvish remedies and the useful flora and fauna of the region. Unlike many elders who were often stubborn and refused to adapt to new information, they were as eager for new knowledge as little children seeing candies dangled before them.

Aideen guessed that these elders were likely the ones who had been more accepting of changes in the first place, considering that they stayed in Alfheim during and through the revolution that took place there. She held nothing back and freely consulted with those elders, trading knowledge she learned from the different lands for theirs, a trade that pleased both sides greatly.

In fact, the local elders had liked Aideen and Celia so much that they were the ones who argued the most vehemently to get them to stay longer when the two declared their imminent departure. It was almost like watching a group of doting grandparents about to be separated from their favorite grandchildren, in some ways. Probably some of the elders even considered them that way for real, for all they knew.

When they finally departed – a couple weeks later than their original plan – on a caravan headed south to the Kingdom Down Under, many of those elders bid them farewell, a gesture that Aideen and Celia returned in kind. In some ways, their stay in Alfheim was not only to learn more about the land, but also to sow some seeds which could be harvested in the future.

While some of the eldest locals were unlikely to still be around the next time Aideen came over, she figured that some of the younger ones, like their apprentices, youths still in their first or second century, were likely to still remember them somewhat. That alone could ease relations in many ways, especially if she went through with her plan to found an independent city in the continent.

The decade she spent to foster good relations with the locals was in many ways, an investment for the future. Like all other investments, its returns were uncertain, but given the longevity and often good memories of both elves and their hybrid descendants, Aideen was quite sure that her stay was by no means a waste of time.

Besides, even if it was, time was the one thing she had plenty of anyway.