The train pulled up at the station in Drenlin city. He disembarked with a small throng of people. Many passengers still on the train were going on to other towns and cities farther ahead.

Sellers loitered between the crowds, hawking their goods and shouting prices above the hubbub.

The air in the city was not as clean as the thin and hilly air of Beslin. The mixing smells of baked goods and trash bins were always jarring.

The roads were divided into paved lanes for rickshaws and carriages with sidewalks for pedestrians. Caen made his way down to the tri-clinic where he volunteered as a healing auxiliary thrice a week.

A large, lusterless marble structure came into view. A large mirror shaped like a vertical eye was hewn on all its sides. It was made of speculous glass, a Planar material, and had been angled in such a way as to reflect the sky above. The temple of the Edict.

The tri-clinic was a one-storied and very unassuming building connected to the side of the temple. Long queues of people stood outside waiting their turns as a pair of auxiliaries saw to them.

He entered the clinic through the back door in order to avoid the crowd. Cooling wards within provided blessed reprieve from the hot weather, but for only an instant. The cooling wards didn’t usually bother anyone else, but Caen was already starting to feel a slight chill. The cooling wards at home were worse than this, so he could bear it, but not for long. He took a second temperature regulation pill that helped in retaining body heat; it would do a far better job at keeping him warm than his coat could.

The tri-clinic was quaint on the inside with white walls, white tiles and a white ceiling overhead. It was partitioned into three sections for each healing department: Spirit-healing, Blood-healing and Dream-guarding.

Caen's mother had started bringing him into the tri-clinic at the age of six to observe some practical healing. She'd been working here for over three decades now, with his father volunteering for just as long.

A row of light green, sleeveless, knee-length vests hung from hooks on the wall of the Helpers’ lounge. These vests distinctly marked healers in the tri-clinic. Caen was an auxiliary, so he just grabbed a badge.

He headed over to the Spirit-healing section, walking past an empty waiting room.

“Caen, how's it going?” Healer Dodri greeted, waving him over as she briskly walked towards an examination room. She was a middle-aged woman wearing a healer's vest over her clothes.

Two teenagers from the Beslin commune walked beside her. They were younger than him by a few years and had only recently begun their apprenticeship here. Their spirit tendrils grazed his spirit, but Caen kept his tendrils folded. Joining their procession, he gave them a respectful nod instead, and they hesitantly returned it.

“I was just reminding these two,” Dodri said, “about how short-staffed we are today. I don’t want to see anyone taking overly lengthy breaks. It's going to be a long day.”

Caen's cousin, Tuni, had complained about this last night at the commune saloon. The number of patients in the tri-clinic hadn't increased, there were just fewer hands to help. There'd been an unpublicized summons some days ago. The Chancellery had quietly transported a large number of healers to the location of a recent Planar break. Caen's parents had been summoned as well.

“How many hours do I have you for?” Dodri asked him.

“I’ll be here till evening,” he said. “But I can start under you before I circle around to Blood. I heard that Healer naMoon is coming in today.”

“Excellent!” She pushed the double doors open and sent him and one of the teenagers out front to help with triage.

An older acolyte of the temple was already there sorting the crowd with a younger healing auxiliary. Caen joined them, and together, they spent the next hour listening to complaints and sending patients to the right department. Most people needed spirit treatments. Bodily ailments were fewer today than usual though. The girl sorted emergencies and occasionally asked Caen for clarifications since she was still new to this.

It was drudgery and he didn't need his mana quite yet, so he kept a hand in his coat pocket where the whorl-gem sat and continued channeling his mana into it.

After an hour of this, the other teenager he'd seen earlier and another auxiliary came over to relieve Caen of desk duty.

He headed down to Examination Hall 4, where Healer Dodri was attending to patients.

A man who looked to be in his fifties sat in an armchair across from her. Dodri's arms were crossed as she scanned his spirit, scowling. “Caen,” she said without turning away. “Give the others a look over, will you?”

The others, in question, were two middle-aged women sitting on a bench behind her.

Caen beckoned to the one on the right and led her over to another pair of armchairs in the examination room. He assumed she was older than she looked, considering how slowly she walked. He took off his weighted coat and hung it over the back of the chair. He wore a sleeveless shirt underneath that bared his muscular arms.

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“When does the healer finish with that man so I can get examined?” the woman demanded.

“Healer Dodri is busy right now. I'll be attending to you.”

She eyed him uncertainly, glancing at his arms. “Are you even a healer? You look like a brute!”

Caen had worked very hard to put on muscle because it served as a very effective deterrent to troublemakers. Most people associated a muscular frame with high affinity ratings in Body-enhancement.

“You have nothing to worry about, madam.” He sat down. “I'm only going to inspect your spirit and if it's anything too serious, Healer Dodri will handle it. Please, take a seat.”

She reluctantly took the seat across from him. “My youngest has to be as old as you. I hope this is not a learning opportunity for you. Taking advantage of the sick so that you youngsters can train your magic potential is very uncouth. I even—”

Caen tuned her out and probed her spirit with a projection. Spirit-healing probes often took the form of extensions or projections. The latter was more of a diagnostic tool and had a longer range, and so he used that. The Ereshta'al bloodline gifted him with permanent spirit tendrils that he’d learned to move as easily as his own limbs. These tendrils could interact lightly with other spirits and spirit tendrils, but when he used them for Spirit-healing specifically, his abjection made itself known. His tendrils moved sluggishly and acted frail when performing Spirit-healing spells, but then moved just fine when simply flailing around him.

Caen had never fully adapted a spell in his life and thus couldn't reliably cast any spells. This naturally resulted in magical workings taking far too long, failing and sometimes causing him injury. But in spite of all this, Spirit-healing remained the discipline of magic Caen was most versed at, which honestly wasn't saying much.

He couldn't actually see into her spirit. More than anything, he got a strong ‘feel’ for its topography, and his imagination filled in the rest. As always with diagnostics, there was a lot of arcane information that necessarily needed to be interpreted correctly. He traversed folds and crevices till he located large clumps of a dense substance. Each one was very heavily embedded into the material of her spirit. Slag. Spiritual residue. It encumbered the spirit and could affect the mind and body if left unattended.

This wasn't a severe case in the slightest, but the fact that it had progressed to this extent meant that this woman hadn't come in for a spiritual scan in a while.

Caen retracted his probe, frowning.

“—people your age, these days, don't even know how to show respect,” she was saying.

Had she been speaking all this time?

“Whenever I—”

“Your slag buildup is quite extensive,” he said, cutting her off. “I'll attempt to remove a portion of it, but we won't be able to get through all that today.”

“So what you're saying is that I need a more experienced healer,” the woman retorted.

Caen watched her quietly for several long seconds. “There are many respectable private clinics in the Province. If you want more experienced healers, I'll be more than happy to write you a recommendation.”

It always baffled him when people treated the temple’s completely free healing aid as a privilege.

“I was only asking a question,” the woman backpedalled.

“Right. Keep your spirit still. And try not to make any sounds too. Vibrations from your body can cause slag flare-up.” He gestured to a sign on the wall that said, ‘No noise, please. Healers at work’. Healer Dodri had personally hung that sign all around the tri-clinic.

The woman closed her mouth with an audible clamp. She'd actually been about to continue speaking. Unbelievable.

Of course, sound vibrations had as much to do with spirits as whorl-gems had to do with stomach aches, which was to say, nothing.

This time, Caen delved into her spirit with an extension. This was a stronger probe that allowed him to interact with her spirit directly, though its range was much shorter.

Scouring the slag from her spirit required all his attention. His fingers adroitly moved through gestures, as he labourously contorted his own spirit into specific patterns. He held complex layers of visualizations in his mind, working slowly and carefully as he muttered incantations beneath his breath.

On more than one occasion, he distantly heard the woman say something, but one effect of Spirit-healing spells was their tendency to dull the physical senses to a significant degree. He could listen easily enough if he bothered to spare the attention, but his mind was fixed on his task.

He stripped away the residue, layer by layer, the process steadily draining his own mana.

Extensive slag buildup had effects on the mind and body. Caen had tested this for himself by going a whole month without cleansing his spirit. His mind had slowed to a crawl and his muscles had grown unnaturally stiff and ached, each movement requiring more effort than should have been necessary. And as far as magic was concerned, even the simplest visualizations were impossible for him. Of course, the slag had built up so quickly because he'd exerted his spirit extensively for that entire month.

After thirty minutes of scouring the woman's spirit, Caen was breathing a little heavily. He retracted the tendril of his spirit from hers, and, slowly, sound and sight returned to him. Even after so many years of practice, it still took him a moment to adjust to the sensory transition.

The woman looked drowsy, her eyelids drooping, but her skin had lost some of its pallor.

Caen woke her up and gave firm instructions to come back the next day so that the procedure could be completed.

That working had drained about a fifth of his reserves. Dodri was attending to a little boy who hadn't even been in the examination room when Caen had come in. There were two new people seated on the bench by the door.

Caen beckoned a woman over and scanned her spirit. It was more of the same, though the build up was not nearly as severe as his first patient of the day.

He spent the next few hours attending to patients with Dodri. One older woman had what seemed to his senses like a small tear in her spirit. Caen knew of the perfect spell for patching it up. He’d barely practiced it to avoid serious injury to his spirit. More often than not, even first elevation spells failed after he'd managed to cast them. It was the curse of a low affinity. He handed her over to Dodri, who instantly halted her session to attend to the woman. The man whose session had been interrupted kept giving Caen the stink eye till Dodri called him back.

Several patients later, Caen's reserves were empty: they weren't even halfway full this morning. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead, in spite of the cooling wards within the tri-clinic.

Dodri wasn't in the examination room anymore. Occupying her seat was a bespectacled, greying man who Caen didn't recognize.

Exchanging a nod with the man, Caen left for his break.