Healing magic

Table of Contents

The miracles healing magic can do, and what is unfortunately beyond a miracle...

— Isabelle

Isabelle

Isabelle is a young French woman who was brought through a magical portal to Sérannie, hit with translation magic, and told to help the Séranniens beat their Dark Lord. Only, once the questing party triumphed, she was forced back to the normal world. She is rather bitter about that.

While looking for a way to go back, she writes journal entries about her time in Sérannie to not forget what happened and to prepare for her return, illustrating her notebook by sticking postits with emojis scribbles, drawing, or printing photos.

Healing

How healing magic works

Just like all magic in Sérannie, healing magic works by visualising complex runic diagrams and forcing your magic through them for it to take the right shape to accomplish what you want. There is nothing like a magical formula and the sweep of a wand to accelerate things; you have to understand exactly what you want and the path to accomplish it. This means that the Séranniens have a fantastic understanding of biology and the human body and work what, by the standards of the normal world, would appear to be miracles.

Healing magic works by manipulating and enhancing actual physiological processes. Healers mostly adjust the working of the coagulation, immune and regenerative systems to have them react just the perfect amount when required and directed at just the right target. This makes healing magic super good at things that are still beyond the medicine of the normal word: healing battle injuries, infections, vascular and cardiac diseases, and even cancers.

Healing by Whitesession on Pixabay

Medications

Medications are used, but far less than in the normal world since it is so much easier to just have a quick session with a low-grade healer. Those medications will only be for small everyday problems such as headaches, digestion problems, period pain, and back and muscle aches.
They mostly consist of herbal remedies and are home-made with plants cultivated in people's own garden, although healers can also advise on what to use and how to prepare them. They mostly work ok, but it really depends on the quality of the plants and skills of the one who made the medication. And there is still a non-negligeable risk of poisoning by overdose.

In addition, all Séranniens actually use very efficient skincare and haircare products which I'm pretty sure have some magic inside them.

They also have the habit of drinking an herbal infusion that has digestive properties at the end of big festive meals. Disgusting like all kind of teas, but it's actually effective so there is no avoiding them.

Miracle balm by AmélieIS with the Collections du Musée du Louvre

Limitations

Nobles vs commoners

Healing magic, unfortunately, cannot work out actual miracles.

The biggest limitations to healing magic is, of course, money.

Many of the so-called limitations of healing magic can actually be overcome if you have tons of money to throw away and dozens of healers at your disposal for months or even years on end. This way, rich Séranniens have even managed to considerably extend their lifespan to two or even three centuries!

For common people, however, things are not so bright.

They can still have a session with a healer from time to time to superficially regenerate their body and ensure that they age well, but they cannot actually stop aging to the same degree. In addition, while a full team of dedicated healers can somewhat bypass our bodies' natural limitations, this is not available to most people. They will be unable to regenerate limbs after amputations, and organs that are damaged enough will not be able to be repaired.

When the Dark Lord caught me and tortured me to make me tell him where the rest of the Questing Party was, he probably went beyond what I could have had healed—though I still naively had hope that the King would take a very sudden liking to me and would both allow me to marry Prince Calendre and order a full team of healers to attend me.

Being sent back to the normal world made my body revert back to how it was before I left, so I've been fully "healed", but I find very little cause to rejoice in this...

Medical examination by KaiMiano on Pixabay

Other limitations

Another thing Sérannian healers struggle with is genetical diseases. This is an intense field of research where all healers compete against each other and attempt to invent real cures rather than just be able to treat symptoms.

By what I've heard, there has been very little success so far, as while magic can manipulate DNA, reaching the trillions of cells we have in our body is a bit much...

Of course, the logical next step is to look at embryos. And of course, terrible experiments have been done on babies in the wombs in the past.

Thankfully, such experiments have been declared taboo a long time ago. There has been rumours that the Dark Lord was up to some horrible things in his fortress, but I've seen no reason to believe that this was anything other than people's wild imagination...
But the most common problem is probably a lack of good nutrition. If your body doesn't have the right building materials, there is little a healer will be able to do to help you. So we go back to money again...

Lariche fruits by Annie Stein