Page 62 of Soar

“I expect them to be back to walking and working next week,” Sora finished with something like a smirk.

All thoughts crashed, rather in an ugly dogpile, right into each other. Salem made a croaking sound, tone tilting upward in something like a question, but he couldn’t begin to formulate words to go along with it. A week. A week?! They should have been in a cast and physical therapy for a good year!

“Between healing potions, noninvasive surgery, and our own version of immobilization spells, they’ll make a full recovery in very little time. In fact, let me show you a small piece of what I can do.”

Sora turned his head and said, “Hey, come here for a second.”

“What need, Papa?”

“You, munchkin.”

Sora reached down and picked up an atrociously cute child. Thick, curly black hair, big brown eyes—the absolute epitome of a child model given life. This must be one of his twins, who Salem had seen from a distance when he was in Brazil. Damn, Sora and Ravi made cute kids.

“Setz dich bitte,” Sora directed.

The child plopped himself right on the edge of the desk at this direction, given in German from the sounds of it.

Sora lifted a hand and spoke a spell, most of which went right over Salem’s head, but the second he finished, a thin red line flew out of his hands and drew itself in interesting lines all around his child. In fact—oh my god, it was drawing out the child’s skeletal structure, then major organs, and hooo, there were numbers showing blood pressure, heartbeat, oxygen intake, the works. Like a magical monitor. But better. He could see in a glance everything he needed without taking x-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds, any of it.

Salem whimpered. “Please, please tell me you can teach me this spell.”

“It’s a little hard to do over distance,” Sora admitted. “Takes some practice to get the right hang of it. But I’ll do my best.”

He released the spell, kissed his child on the head, and then turned him loose.

As the child ran off, he instructed, “Do not go flying without either me or your father!”

There was a giggle of pure mischief but notably no agreement.

Sora sighed. “He’s already thinking of what to get into. I’m doomed. Why did I agree to two of them at once?”

“I can’t help you there.”

Salem rubbed his head, feeling like his brain was going to leak out of his ears at this rate. “Sora, you did that so easily. Is it a basic spell for you?”

“It is. Takes no prep and only captured sunlight. As you just saw. Now, let me fully explain what all you can do.”

Sora launched into something of a Basics 101 lecture of everything, sometimes only giving an overview as he admitted it wasn’t his specialty, but this was what he knew about it. Just the summary was enough to blow Salem’s mind. What Sora explained meant a wholly different approach to medicine, one where Salem could defeat chronic illnesses, conditions, and injuries he could do precious little about with modern medicine.

Dammit, this wasn’t fair. Sora held all of the knowledge Salem would give a limb to possess and here he was on a wholly different continent.

Salem fired off one question after another, trying to find magic’s limitations and received basically this answer in return: While there were limitations, they didn’t begin to compare to the limitations Salem already labored under. Salem could dovastlymore with magic.

When Sora wound down from his lecture, Salem felt like crying. From frustration and envy, mostly.

“Sora.” Salem huffed out a breath, already knowing the answer, but needing to ask it anyway. “Last week I had a situation where a little girl almost died on the surgery table. It should have been a routine appendectomy, but her grandmother slipped her food before the surgery, and she crashed on thetable. We barely saved her. If I was trained like you are, would that have happened?”

“No,” Sora answered decisively. “For one thing, appendectomies are a very, very rare occurrence for us. All of the normal causes for appendicitis are things we can cure. Parasites, bacterial infection—all of those things we have potions for. The only time I’ve ever seen an appendectomy done was when the woman in question had blunt force trauma to her rib cage, and it was so bad it ruptured the appendix. We chose not to save it as there was already so much damaged, and we focused on the other organs.”

“So an extreme outlier.”

“Pretty much. Your patient would never have needed surgery to begin with.”

Shit. Salem had just known that would be the answer.

He had lamented only days ago how he wished his magic could help save a child. Now, he was told it could. That all the information he needed existed right here in front of him. What else could he do but grasp it with both hands?

“Sora? Any chance you take apprentices?”

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