*Day 43 - After the battle, when healing was needed most*
"Please," the dying soldier begged. "Please, I have children."
Ora knelt beside him, her hands hovering over the gut wound that was killing him slowly. She knew the theory—healing required compassion, pure and untainted. Feel for the wounded. Want their wholeness more than anything. Let that desire flow through you into them.
She tried.
She thought of his children, waiting for a father who might not return. She thought of his fear, his pain. She tried to feel... something. Anything other than the rage that had become her default state.
Her hands glowed—but wrong. Not the golden light of healing but a sickly grey that smelled of decay.
The soldier screamed.
Where she'd tried to heal, the wound began to... change. Not closing but transforming. The flesh knitted together, yes, but wrong—too much, too fast, growing like a tumor. She yanked her hands back, but the damage was done. The soldier's wound had "healed" into something worse—a mass of overproduced flesh that was crushing his organs from inside.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, and drew Urlo. The blade ended his suffering cleanly. At least in destruction, her emotion was pure.
"You can't heal with hate in your heart," said a voice behind her.
She turned to find Master Chen, one of the few Crysillian healing masters who'd survived. His robes were stained with blood—others', not his own. He'd been healing for twelve hours straight, and it showed in the exhaustion that made him lean on his staff.
"I don't hate him," Ora said, gesturing to the dead soldier.
"No. But you hate everything. It colors every emotion you try to feel. Your compassion is tainted with rage at the world that makes compassion necessary. Your love is poisoned by fear of loss. Every positive emotion you attempt is corrupted by the negative ones you're drowning in."
He was right. She knew he was right.
"Then I can't heal."
"Not until you can find even a moment of pure, untainted compassion. Real healing magic requires the healer to want the patient's wellbeing more than anything else in that moment. No ulterior motives, no resentment, no impatience. Just... care."
He moved to another wounded soldier, placing weathered hands on a shattered leg. His face transformed—for that moment, nothing existed except this wounded person and Chen's desire to help them. The golden light that flowed from his hands was warm, gentle, alive. The leg straightened, the bones knitting cleanly.
"How?" Ora asked. "How can you feel pure compassion after seeing so much death?"
"Because I choose to. Every time. It gets harder, yes. Some days I have to spend an hour in meditation just to find that pure emotion again. But it's there, beneath all the layers of exhaustion and cynicism. The spark of why I became a healer in the first place."
He moved to the next patient. This time, Ora watched more carefully. She could see the moment when Chen's expression flickered—frustration, maybe, or despair at the endless wounded. But he paused, breathed, and consciously pushed those feelings aside. When he touched the patient, his emotion was pure again.
"Your corruption," Chen said while working, "feeds on negative emotions. They're easier to keep pure—rage doesn't question itself, hatred doesn't doubt. But positive emotions are fragile. They require constant nurturing."
"So I'm only good for destruction."
"Currently? Yes." He finished with that patient, moved to the next. "But emotions can be cultivated. Even you, corrupted as you are, must have moments of pure feeling that isn't rage."
Ora thought of Lyra. But even that was tainted—love mixed with guilt, memory poisoned by loss.
Then she thought of something else. The child in the marketplace, clutching the wooden dragon toy. For just a moment, when she'd seen that innocent joy, she'd felt something clean. Not happiness exactly, but... appreciation? Recognition of beauty that still existed?
She moved to the next wounded soldier—a boy, really, maybe seventeen. Arrow through the shoulder, not immediately fatal but bad enough. She thought of the child with the toy. That pure moment of recognizing innocence.
Her hands glowed. Still grey, but lighter. The wound began to close—slowly, imperfectly, but without the cancerous growth of her first attempt.
The boy gasped, eyes opening. "It... it still hurts."
"But you'll live," Chen observed, examining the healing. "Imperfect but functional. You managed a moment of... not quite compassion, but at least neutral intention."
It was the best she could do. Her emotions were too tangled, too corrupted, to achieve the purity required for true healing. But she could, with enormous effort, achieve something like neutrality. Enough to do crude battlefield healing.
"The Ghul'rok," she said suddenly. "That's why they're so powerful. They don't feel conflicting emotions."
Chen nodded grimly. "Pure hunger. Pure ambition. Pure cruelty. Their magic is terrifyingly efficient because they've removed all internal conflict. They feel one thing at a time, perfectly."
"How do we fight that?"
"By being what they're not. Complex. Conflicted. Human." He paused in his healing to look at her directly. "Your corruption makes you powerful because it simplifies your emotions toward destruction. But if you let it consume all complexity, you become like them. A tool instead of a person."
That night, Ora practiced. Not healing—she wasn't ready for that. But trying to feel pure emotions. Joy was impossible. Love was tainted. Hope was laughable.
But for three seconds, watching the sunset paint the sky in colors that reminded her of Crysillia's crystal towers, she felt pure appreciation for beauty.
It wasn't much. But it was a start.
The Law of Emotional Purity meant that the strongest mages weren't necessarily the most learned or the most powerful—they were the ones who could achieve perfect emotional states. Children could sometimes cast incredibly powerful spells through pure, uncomplicated emotion. Ancient masters might struggle with simple spells if their emotions had become too complex.
And Ora, caught between human complexity and corrupted simplicity, could only cast magic that matched her broken emotional state—powerful in destruction, useless in creation, and caught forever in between.
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