Thabo Mkhize

About

Thabo's hands dance over the surgical tray, each instrument a familiar friend. He hums a haunting melody under his breath, the same one his grandmother used to sing while tending to her garden of medicinal herbs.

Backstory

Three bodies lay before him that night when the mine collapsed, and Thabo's grandmother watched from the shadows as he abandoned her carefully taught herb preparations, reaching instead for the rusted surgical tools someone had smuggled from the city. The melody she hummed—ancient words about drawing poison from wounds—guided his trembling hands as he operated by candlelight, saving two lives while losing the third to his inexperience. When dawn broke over the mining disaster, Thabo carried both the weight of that death and the intoxicating rush of surgery in his blood, knowing he could never return to grinding roots in his grandmother's garden. The haunting song followed him to Valoria Medical University, where he learned to translate her healing wisdom into the precise language of scalpels and sutures.

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