"No, this one is only for wounds suffered under conditions of petrification," said Injimo, tossing the wand aside. She had actually gone through eight checks during the time it had taken her to speak the words; the task was independent of communication, and the mountain loomed ahead. She didn't need to think about it either, this was a rant that had been prepared for her before by...

Wands set with emeralds, orichalcum rings. Bottled moonlight and cursed paintings. Here was a feather from an phoenix's wings - these were a few of the Hero's magical things.

"In the ancient days they made healing potions," said Injimo, though the words weren't quite her own. "[i]Healing [/i]potions! The essence of health, stoppered and bottled. What did they cure? Everything! Sight to the blind, precision to the paralyzed, wakefulness to the sleeping. Miracles of an earlier era. Everybody hated them. Partly it was the cost, more fitting for a dragon's hoard than a common infirmary, but partly too because they made a [i]lot [/i]of assumptions about the essence of biological structure of the person drinking them. Sometimes you'd drink an elixir and discover that it had been made to cure a dog, and your knees are no longer in anywhere near the right places. Sometimes a 'healing potion' might transform you into a clone of the spellcaster. In one notorious case, a prolific maker of potions was unaware that she had a poor sense of taste, and so deadening of the tongue was an obliviously inflicted side effect to some huge batches of medicinal potions, ruining the culinary traditions of entire regions. Obviously this wasn't sustainable, so the White Conclave was formed to begin formalizing the discipline..."

Pick, check, sort. The work was relaxing, a thing of muscle and instinct, a rhythm that could be accelerated up to. She didn't know when she'd learned any of this. It just came out of her, like a ghost speaking through her lips.

"And so medical magic became increasingly specialized. Even a simple spell for healing a cut could produce a weird scar if it was not designed for a species with scales, or a patch of incorrectly coloured fur. Healers went from being raw conduits for white magic to broken rainbow fractals, trying to capture within their minds every hue and shade of reality. Branches of specialization opened, enchanted items became increasingly specialized, every spell was increasingly tailored for limited subsets of people, injury and status debuff. And so the formation of a collection like this becomes inevitable - what if the Hero of Ages has call to cure a," she checked the label, "rear fin laceration, mermaid, acid/fire? Or a winged oxen, stage three feather mange?"

She looked at the Stacks as they rolled out ahead endlessly, ordered and chaotic, standing and collapsed. "Do you think it was worth it? All the effort it took to do it this way, instead of just casting HEAL and letting the magic figure it out?"