One month later

  “How does it feel to finally get rid of that stuff?” Rehema asked as I finally managed to purge the last lingering bit of energy from my wings. I took a moment to savor the lack of feeling like something was gnawing on me. Stretching my back out, I smiled at her.

  “A lot better. Thanks for walking me through it.”

  “No problem.” She started, before someone came rushing in.

  “Rehema! Thank the gods! It’s Chuma!” Without wasting a moment, Rehema was in motion following the guy who had barged in. Not knowing the situation, I followed right on her heels. We came into the main hall where two people were holding up a third that was coughing up blood. His chin was covered, but what was worse was his emaciated body.

  “Rehema.” He rasped out as she ran and placed her hands on his chest, glowing with what I had picked up was her diagnostic abilities. “It’s my time.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it!” She snarled, the rage in her voice causing the other two to flinch. He gently put his hand on her wrist, not intimidated in the slightest.

  “It’s ok.” Rather than keep eavesdropping on their conversation, I headed back to the room where we had started. Needing a distraction, I started doing the switching exercises Ras had me working on during the mornings. Even with all this practice, I was still having a hard time switching to the few I had decided to work on. I had gotten light down to about 10 seconds per switch, that was with nothing else distracting me. While it would work if I had time to prepare, it was woefully inadequate for anything resembling combat. We had actually tried that a few times when I had insisted that learning through combat would be better. Instead it took me nearly 50% longer, and had no signs that a full day of practice was helping.

  Eventually the door creaked open, and Rasa poked his head in. “Mind if I come in?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He dropped into a spare chair, exhaling in exhaustion. Not the physical kind, the mental kind. We sat there in silence, while I quietly worked. Eventually Ras worked up the motivation to talk. “Sean. I know you have a limited time to deal with You Know Who, but I have a major favor to ask. For Rehema.”

  “I can’t promise that I can do anything,” I started.

  “I know.” He said, holding up a hand. “I just. I can’t see her keep taking every death like this personally.”

  “So what did he do that made her so mad?”

  “Nearby is a mine. The lifeblood of our town. Long ago, when we refused to worship Him, he declared the mine cursed. Our miners would weaken and constantly become sick. Healing would do the opposite, hastening their deaths. Hundreds of shamans, magic experts, and anyone we could bribe to take a look have gone down there and tested things. No matter what they do, nothing helps. All agree there is a strange energy below, but no cleansing spell or ritual is enough to clear it out. And for decades Rehema has been fighting the sickness, trying to keep them alive just a little longer. But no matter what she does, they all perish in the end. And each death breaks her a little more each time. I worry that soon, there won’t be enough of her left.”

  I thought back over what I had learned of Rehema in the past month, and things started clicking into place. Her brash responses, charging headlong into each problem, but the sudden flashes of pain I could see in her eyes on occasion. Her elation at even minor victories. “I’ll try, but to be honest I’ve never actually had to deal with a curse before.”

  “I know, but our experts could do nothing to deal with it. I’m hoping that you can at least come up with something new.”

  “Well let’s start with the basics. What’s in the mine?”

  “Precious metals. We’ve got a good bit of copper, some silver and gold. A bit of nickel and lead.”

  “Ok, nothing strange with those. Have you looked at the metals after they come out?”

  “Perfectly fine. Easy to separate from the yellow dust after we grind down the ores. No trace of that strange energy.” Something started niggling at the back of my mind at the mention of yellow dust, but he kept going, “Several clairvoyants were consulted, rare as they are, and they couldn’t point to anything either.”

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  I sat back, trying to put the pieces together. Mysterious illness that gets worse with healing magic and a cursed mine. Rehema’s intensity, and how I was rapidly seeing that she was a healer that was stretching herself to an inadvisable tightness. Unfortunately, it felt like putting together a puzzle with the lights off where all the pieces were the same shape. If the mine was nearby, and Apophis had really cursed it, why hadn’t I felt his divine power? It wasn’t like he was the subtle with things.

  “I hate to ask this, but can I talk to Rehema about the sicknesses?” I asked.

  “No.” He immediately replied. “She’s. She’s not in a good place right now. Chuma was a friend of hers growing up.”

  “I see.” I said. “Can you explain how her healing magic works then? Something is telling me that might be the key to everything.”

  “From what she has told me, it boosts the body. Infections get wiped out by a more powerful immune system, though a bit of her magic will be able to identify things as intruders and eliminate or at least weaken them. Trauma is healed by drastically increasing the body’s natural healing. But when she heals this sickness, the curse directs it to certain areas instead of letting it flow to all parts naturally.”

  “So if it can’t find anything that isn’t the body, it simply boosts the body’s response?” I muttered to myself, trying to figure it out. Oh. Oh no. If it wasn’t recognizing a foreign influence, something must be causing the body to act strange. Something that got worse when it was supercharged into rapidly healing itself. Cancer. Lung cancer and a yellow dust with strange energies? I looked to my right, at the yellowish glass in the window. Focusing, I started with a magelight spell after concentrating for a bit.

  “Sean?”

  Ignoring Ras, I slowly modified the spell, pushing the output to higher energies and into the blue, then ultraviolet range. As the light changed, the glass started to glow in a pale green color.

  “What did you do to the glass?” Ras asked.

  “Nothing.” I answered, letting the spell drop. “This is a natural reaction from the compound that you made the glass out of, and it’s the source of the ‘curse’ on your mine.” I said, making air quotes around the word curse.

  “You can reverse it?” He asked, hope shining in his eyes.

  “No.” I said sadly. “At least, there is nothing I know of that can reverse it.”

  “Then what is it?” He asked, sitting back down.

  “The dust. The yellow dust from crushing the rocks? That stuff releases your strange energy. Normal skin will block it, but if it is inhaled, it can do bad things to the lungs. Cause it to grow strangely, and in ways bad to the body. And it grows much faster than normal.”

  “So when she healed them…” He trailed off.

  “Yeah.” I said quietly. “That’s why it was making things worse. The cancer was stealing the healing energy and using it to make itself bigger. Then parts can break off and move to other parts of the body. Weakening everything further.”

  “It can cause the other symptoms too?”

  “It can.” I nodded. “Weakened body, fatigue, increased infections. It all adds up.”

  “Is there nothing we can do?”

  “Stop them from breathing it in.” I said. “That’s the cause of everything.”

  “They all wear cloth over their faces though.” Ras said. “Surely that should be good enough, right?”

  “Not if the dust is fine enough.” I said. “And if the dust is everywhere in the air, they would need to constantly keep a cover on.”

  “So we need to enchant a pure air shield.” He immediately said, straightening as he came up with a plan. “Keep the entrance and ore processing at higher moisture to keep the dust down. All mine clothes need to be sprayed off before letting the miners go home.”

  “That.” I started, then stopped to think. “Yeah, that would work pretty well. Especially if you were able to keep the really fine particles out of the air. But it won’t do anything for the ones currently affected.”

  “Can you show Rehema anything about how your people fought this curse?”

  “I’m sorry.” I said. “I was never one to study things like that. I could possibly give her a few pointers on what to look for, but actually curing it? That’s beyond me. Especially since this is one of those things that if you don’t actually get all of it the first time, it can come back. Or sometimes you do get it all, and other parts of the body decide that they are going to go through the same change and bring the issues back.”

  “That. That.” He stuttered for a second, staring off into space. “That has to be one of the cruelest things. To give hope like that, only to snatch it away.”

  “It is.” I agreed. “It’s devastated families and friends. Broken the strongest spirits and wills.”

  “I can’t do it to her.” He whispered. “How can we tell her about this, about how we can fix it for the future but that those already affected we can do nothing about? She’ll blame herself all the more.”

  I said nothing, just looked off into the distance. I was making plans of my own, and not just about how in the coming days I would need to start working out my wings. I was going to start hunting down temples of Apophis and making examples of them. And eventually I would work my way to the capital, where his main temple was located in the middle of a nearby mountain. If a divine core was made of faith, I would erode all the faith placed in Apophis. Too bad that I would have to abandon the last 9 days required to upgrade my bag of holding to C grade. Then again, a holding space of 2 m on each side was probably going to be enough. While Ras was distracted with thoughts of Rehema, I was starting to work on air magic. While a fine particulate filter from it was out of my abilities at the moment, I could hopefully use it to purify air in an enclosed space.