Blaze picked the lock, then stopped. Did he really want to go in there without any mana? He ran out so rarely that he hadn’t really thought about it, but he was already close to entering harad, even if he hadn’t yet felt any of the warning signs. All it would take was a little danger and he’d be gone. Being low on mana only made it more risky.

Perhaps it wasn’t quite that bad; like all diehar, he was trained to deal with harad. It was still close. Harad here would make him defenseless. It was bad enough among family, where he was at least protected physically. The fact that he was weird when he was in harad, a healer rather than a killer, wouldn’t help. It might give him options to help the Priest-Healer but it wouldn’t stop her from stabbing him if she wanted to.

He didn’t really want to move forward, but this was the entire reason he’d come when everyone was overwhelmed. He loved healing, but if he just wanted to heal he could have stayed outside; on top of that, almost anyone could heal physical damage. It took mana, and it took even more mana if you didn’t have the skill, but saving the life of someone hurt was relatively easy. They were overwhelmed right now, but that wasn’t as important as this was.

This was the opportunity to learn enough about a new condition to treat it while preventing whoever imposed the condition from finding out that it was being treated. Blaze didn’t really like sneaking around like this but it seemed better than being obvious. This was deliberately imposed.

He couldn’t just leave.

Blaze left the door unlocked and moved to a nearby closet. There was enough room among the mops to stand and no one was looking for cleaning supplies right now.

A moment of digging in his apparently empty pack later, Blaze withdrew a stoppered glass vial containing a deep blue liquid. It was a nice color, which Blaze had always found deceptive. He knew what mana potion overuse did. What any use of mana potions did, actually.

He had one advantage over most people; if he took the time, he could draw in the mana concentrate instead of having to drink the potion. That would reduce the harmful side effects, but it wouldn’t eliminate them. There was something about mana potions that was simply harmful; with healing and time it wasn’t too bad, and he could probably get Serenity to clean up the aftereffects.

Blaze shook his head and chuckled. Serenity could probably clean up the potion as he drank it. That man could eat anything and be fine as far as Blaze could tell. Including rocks. He was pretty sure he’d seen Serenity eating monster cores at one point, and since that was one of the more toxic portions of a mana potion even after processing, the entire potion was almost certainly not a problem.

Blaze wasn’t that lucky. He had to worry about the results of potion toxicity. As a diehar, it was even more important to him than to many others. Poisoning was the easiest way to force an early entry into harad, after all.

This probably wouldn’t tip him over the edge, but it was riskier than Blaze liked.

Blaze tugged the stopper out of the vial then concentrated on its contents. He could feel the mana, so he pulled on it, sharpening the Intent that ruled his magic into a hand that could hold magic.

He dragged the mana into his body and mana pool. It felt refreshing but also slightly nauseating. There was something wrong with the mana. Blaze powered through the feeling and kept pulling; mana potions always felt off. The residue of everything that wasn’t mana tainted it and his Intent wasn’t sharp enough to fully separate them.

Even for a diehar, Blaze was good at Intent-based casting, but he wasn’t perfect. He didn’t know anyone who was.

When he finished, Blaze’s mana pool was about a quarter full. It ached a little from the fast refill and impurities, but he wasn’t empty. The vial was still nearly full of liquid, but it was a little lower. More obviously, it was now a pale blue, the near-white color of the sky on a bright day instead of the dark blue of near-twilight.

Blaze stuck the stopper back in the vial and tucked it into his pack. There were uses for mana potion residue, even if he didn’t approve of most of them.

A frown crossed Blaze’s face as he realized he didn’t actually know anywhere to sell it on Lyka. He hadn’t needed to sell one in years, so he hadn’t even tried to look for a buyer yet.

He was woolgathering. That wasn’t a good sign. Blaze held his hand up in front of his eyes and took a good look.

He was pretty sure he was seeing double. Possibly triple. That wasn’t a good sign at all; he was definitely going to be entering harad soon. He had to hurry; he wanted to be in a safe place with people he knew first.

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For a moment, Blaze considered abandoning this trip; it would be safer for everyone if he just went back to the Visitors’ Palace. He hadn’t used any resources other than a mana potion and while those were fairly expensive they weren’t irreplaceable. No one had caught him yet; he could leave and come back.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know when he’d have a chance that was even half as good; everyone who would normally be bothering the Priest-Healer was busy. This might be his only chance.

If only he’d found someone else who was definitely affected! He could definitely get the chance to get High Priestess Karin alone, but he didn’t want to do that until he had a treatment method.

He really should go back; he was far too close to harad. It was too risky. He should give up.

He wasn’t going to.

Blaze sighed. He’d just have to hold himself together, all too literally.

Blaze snuck back out of the closet and over to the Priest-Healer’s private area. A quick check of the door told him it was unlocked. He couldn’t hear anything, but that didn’t mean much. Blaze wasn’t a thief, spy, or assassin; he knew some of the tricks, but only the ones anyone would learn as a kid. At least, the tricks any diehar kid would learn; the prevalence of bad locks in the outside world had long since taught him that not everyone learned the same things as a kid.

Blaze pushed the door open; fortunately, it didn’t squeak or anything. He listened to the inside of the room, but all he heard was someone breathing. Blaze pushed the door open wide enough to squeeze through. He couldn’t see enough to tell where the person was, so he squeezed into the room and shut it behind himself softly.

The first room was clearly a relatively “public” room. There was a table piled high with paper and a chair that sat next to it; there was even a small trashcan near the table with several pieces of crumpled paper inside it. A stack of journals sat on the side of the table; Blaze recognized a couple of them as medical references but most of them were probably filled with patient or aid station notes. An uncomfortable-looking chair sat near the door, but other than that the only real decoration in the room was a few diagrams pinned to the walls. Blaze didn’t even see a set of awards or recognitions anywhere.

There was no one in the room.

Blaze listened for a moment. There was still only one other person’s breathing. It sounded even and steady; someone who was asleep or concentrating, probably. He hoped and expected that it was the Priest-Healer.

He had a story ready for her. He wasn’t certain if it would work, but it should last long enough for him to get a spell off. No one expected you to be able to instant-cast anything but a Skill, after all.

If she were asleep, it would be easier.

Blaze moved silently into the next room. It reminded him of childrens’ games; his favorite was Hide the Rabbit, where he had to hide a plush rabbit in another child’s room without being noticed. When he hid the toy didn’t matter, but at night was one of the better times. He got extra points for having it farther from the door and making it hard to find, but being caught was enough of a penalty that the important thing was not being caught. When he was a little older, he even got to play Hide the Rabbit against some adults.

In this case, the rabbit was himself and he needed to hide it touching the skin of Priest-Healer Tirina. That was a serious difficulty increase.

Blaze snuck past a small kitchen; it didn’t hold anything other than a small hot plate, a chillbox, some food, and some dishes sitting on a table. There wasn’t even a chair. From what Blaze could see in a quick glance, it looked like it was there simply so that Tirina would have a place to grab a snack in the middle of a long day.

The washroom was similarly minimal.

The last room was the one the noise came from. It was a light snore now; she must truly be asleep. Blaze was grateful for that. His story about needing help back at the Visitor’s Palace was paper-thin with him this far into her rooms.

Blaze crept into the room. Priest-Healer Tirinal was curled on her side in a bed that looked surprisingly comfortable; after everything else he’d seen, Blaze had expected a minimal pad but it seemed to be thick and soft. Her body made a deep dent in the mattress.

If anything, it seemed far too soft.

That also meant it wasn’t going to transmit any of the feeling from his footsteps. He didn’t have to walk as lightly as he had been, but Blaze still didn’t relax.

Blaze prepared the first spell then reached out to touch Tirina. Most of her body was hidden by the blanket, but her arm was over it. He was nervous; his tests were going to take some time, so all his first spell was going to do was hold her asleep. That way, he could try to free her without the risk of her waking up and getting him into trouble.

If he was caught in here with her by someone else … well, there was an obvious reason for a man to be in a woman’s bed with her. He planned to be fully clothed and hoped they wouldn’t be seen, but most people would assume the obvious long before they assumed he was trying to heal her.

Tirina didn’t react to the spell, but she was definitely still asleep. Blaze set his pack down at the foot of the bed then climbed in, spooning against Tirina. He’d have preferred to leave more room, but the bed, while soft, wasn’t very large.

The next thing he needed to do was ordinary diagnostics. Before he could fix anything, he needed to know what was wrong. He knew something was wrong from the way she behaved, but there were a number of possibilities.

Blaze ran through a dozen different diagnostic spells. The first few were looking for the physical effects that he didn’t expect but wanted to rule out before he went looking for more esoteric options. As expected, they came up blank. The next few spells were looking for simple things, everything from short-term persistent spells to illusions. None of them came back with anything either.

Eventually, Blaze ended up using the simplest yet most powerful diagnostic spell he had. It inverted the usual paradigm for a diagnostic spell; instead of looking for something specific, it looked at everything that was there. Blaze could then mark things as normal and ignore them. It was mana-hungry but sensitive and was the best spell for a truly unknown condition.

It also took hours. Hours in which it drained more mana than Blaze’s recovery.

By the time the spell completed, however, Blaze had found the problem. It was simple and insidiously terrifying. It would not be easy to fix.