Teelia, the daughter of an apothecary, was a solitary woman. She ran her mother's shop after her mother died, prescribing medicines and ointments, setting broken bones, giving advice about how to most quickly heal oneself, and experimenting with various chemicals and concoctions. She had been a sullen child, eschewed by companions, and though she had brightened as she aged, even making an occasional friend, and was certainly well-liked, respected, and even needed now, she had learned to make the best of her own devices. She liked to go out alone and take long walks in the oak forest, conversing silently with the squirrels, the birds, and the bears; she enjoyed the after-hours silence of her shop, when she could not only experiment with different solutions, chemicals, and medicines, but could tinker with glass and metal, and plant fiber and wood and rope, trying to invent such things as wheeled mechanical horses, or fire that needed no kindling; she loved to go out on the wood porch she had built with her own hands, and play her flute, alone of a summer evening, and watch the birds fly overhead. She felt real, substantial, permanent, those evenings. She used to say she was "kissed by Existence" in those moments, not so surrounded by the fog of worry, self-absorption, and emotional egotism that so seemed to cling to everyone.

Why she so loved and so connected with children, nobody was quite sure. Perhaps, in her heart, she remembered the neglect she'd suffered as an infant, the aloneness of her very young years, that had slipped from her memory but which lived forever in her heart, the constant fear in that aloneness, of not having a mother or father to calm her down when something new and alarming happened. Perhaps she simply had a naturally protective personality. Who knows? But her heart just about burst whenever a three- or four- or five-year old boy or girl reached hesitantly up to the doorknob of her examination chambers, or looked with fear and wonder at a needle Teelia was holding, or maybe looked longingly at their mother or father. She felt this excruciating compassion every time she treated a child, not just in the beginning; and she always wished she could heal the child for good, forever.

It was perhaps the childlike aspect of Rillop that drew her to him at first. He was like a child, after all, in that he just did what he wanted to do, having never learned affectations and the like. Additionally, though he didn't connect to children in the same way she did, he talked to them as if they were adults, his equals. He never instructed them, or tried to engage them with baby talk, or silly-speak.

During the war of the Phantoms, Teelia nursed the wounded, utilizing her knowledge of medicines and herbs; and she also built camouflaged huts out in the wild, where she and other apothecaries and herbalists could tend the soldiers and other defenders of Pearthom. Rillop was a scout; he used his knowledge of the countryside to make his way safely to other villages, even sometimes Crow settlements, to steal or trade for weapons and medical supplies. He traveled unscathed through the Phantoms' forest many times, as well, collecting molgrehu snails.

It was this confluence of duties that brought them into contact with each other: She was one of the several healers he delivered medical supplies to. Though it took them awhile — a few deliveries made over the course of several weeks — to understand the nature of their connection, they connected at once. The veil that had always risen between both of them and other people came down, or maybe simply never rose up. From the first, there was an intensity about their communication, the looks between them, the smiles, that scorched both their souls with a black river that burned like darkness, a white fire that filled their beings with an ever-new feeling that cannot be named, cannot be identified, just is. When he looked into her eyes, when he listened to her, when she watched him work, eventually when they lay together, it seemed to both of them that existence was clearer even then in the moments of eternity they had both known in solitude, and that the shapes of things were sharper than they had ever noticed before, life somehow meaningful beyond measure, beyond words. They enjoyed solitude's peaceful freedom together, with the added benefit of companionship. Before long, he found himself dawdling around with her whenever he came to deliver supplies; and soon after that, he was helping her in her shop, sometimes for days while waiting for his next assignment. Eventually, he was talking with her for long hours with a garrulity he had never known, or just sitting with her, both of them content in their silence.

By the end of the war, they were always together. When he went on missions, she accompanied him and helped him. (He had become somewhat famous for eluding the Phantoms, and because of this, they were determined to catch him; so he actually needed someone to watch his back.) And when she tended the wounded, or experimented with medicines in her apothecary shop, he ran errands for her, and helped her keep the place sterile by regularly scrubbing the floors and tables and workbenches and doors. They had many narrow escapes and near misses, together; but they always survived; and what is more, enjoyed their adventures, and loved their existence, because they were together.

When the war was over, and the Phantoms, enraged by their defeat, and unready to retreat back into their dark woods quite yet, took to abducting Pearthomer children, the two heroes, as they were both considered by then, led rescue missions, saving many children. And when finally peace reigned in the valley again, they made ready to live out their lives in Pearthorn, kissed by eternity. (They had combined Rillop's "breath of eternity" with Teelia's "kiss of existence.")