Melaxu, unused to dealing with other people, doesn't appear to notice anything. You close your eyes for a moment to steady yourself.

An acrid, chemical reek assails you as you follow Melaxu into the temple-turned-laboratory. You are unfamiliar with true philosophy, but you know it should not smell like this. Blackened stains mar the walls and heaps of reeking slag encourage you to step carefully.

Once inside, it's immediately obvious that the temple's architects never finished their work. Its dome has no statues within or without, only a plain lacular ceiling with a semicircular balcony from which a priest could speak to gods above or mortals below. Vines cover part of the ceiling and reach almost to the floor on the northern wall.

Melaxu has pressed a half-carved rectangular altar into service as a workbench. Broken pieces of apparatus surround it, pieces of brass and wood, burned and smashed so nothing larger than a thumb remains. One black heap lies on the rosy marble steps, another beside the clay basin beneath the dome's oculus.

Melaxu regards them with an expression you do not recognize: a nymph's emotion, or a philosopher's.

"My paredroi," Melaxu says, kneeling beside a track worn smooth by their passage. "Servants. My parents created them to help me, so I could study in undisturbed peace. They served faithfully to the end." She wipes her face, leaving a smear of soot across her forehead.

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The nymph runs up the steps, then returns with dried herbs, carefully preserved and wrapped in leaves. She mixes them in the clay basin.

"You need healing. Lie down."

You manage a controlled collapse. Melaxu rips off your tattered clothes with the brusque incuriosity of a grave-robber, then starts to apply the leaf paste. Lying in the cool shadows of the eastern wall of the temple interior, you soon notice a golden glow spread across your wounds. Something tugs at your flesh, like a physician stitching a wound, or a dog worrying at a carcass to make sure it's dead, but Melaxu is already running back upstairs.

"Lie still," she says. "I must see if we have enough food for the journey." You sit up the moment Melaxu is gone to check your wounds. When you examine the paste that Melaxu applied, you discover a great wonder, or perhaps a horror: parts of your flesh have been replaced by the Oricalchum. You have never seen the Oricalchum before, but you have heard it described and seen it depicted in the mosaics, and you watch in dreadful fascination as tiny golden wheels turn inside your flesh. The edges of the wound are half wheel, half flesh, all wrapped in a kind of coppery cobweb as the philosophical medicine closes your wound faster than any herb or stitching.

Lying there, your hand spasms. You realize that without resources, your newfound sign might be your only chance of survival. The power seems to cry out for use. With the philosopher banging around upstairs, now seems as good a time as any to practice this strange gift.

The sign of Yune can create something from nothing, which, now that you think about it, sounds almost limitless in potential. You try to remember disciples of Yune throughout history and their great workings. Fortunately, Urmish has described his spiritual predecessors at great and inescapable length, and you know generally the limits of a normal disciple's power. But what are yours?