To say that I got a bit obsessed with my research would be like saying water was wet or that the surface of the sun was a tiny bit warm.

Every free moment I had was spent pouring over various medical records and interoga– interviewing the healers that had worked with Oromis, often turning into multiple all-nighters trying to figure out what was useful and why.

Unsurprisingly, about ninety-nine percent of everything I looked at was useless to me.

Most of the cures and remedies were things that had either been used for years, centuries in some cases, and were well documented but I needed to check just in-case and others were costly remedies that were only used because it was important that Oromis returned to the fight, or at least survived to train the next generation of Riders when it became clear his participation would change little. And I had to test each and every single one of them individually and then in combinations based on what had been administered to Oromis just to see if they created a result that none of the healers had known how to look for.

And after a hundred years or so of ongoing treatments…there was quite a bit to go over. And that didn’t even include the thousands of spells the elven healers used.

I just hoped that the cause of what allowed the bit of recovery in Oromis wasn’t one of the plant based cures. Trying to keep a consistent supply growing for myself sounded hard and annoying now, not to mention what I would need to do when I finished up and needed to head back to the Horizon. I hadn’t exactly designed the thing with a large hydroponics bay in mind.

But I digress…

I spent so much time researching medical notes and hunting down properties of plants and reading dictionaries to determine exactly what words made up certain spells that often I was only kept from accidental starvation thanks to Arya sending someone to check up on me every so often.

Arya herself stopped by a couple times and usually managed to drag me out to look around the city a bit or for a bit of exercise.

That was my life in Ellesméra with little variation for weeks. Though it wasn’t without some results.

While I hadn’t found what I was looking for, I had noticed some additional benefits and applications to several existing remedies and shared them as thanks with the elven Healers. After a few tests to prove the discoveries worked as advertised many of them were starting to join me once in a while. This was their passion afterall.

Too bad they weren’t fully focused on the same thing I was.

No. The Agaetí Blödhren, or Blood-Oath Celebration, had caused many of them to focus on what new discovery they could present at the ceremony instead of searching for the perfect condition needed to heal their crippled Dragon Rider. In a way it made sense, the elves were so used to their long lives and the lack of urgency that came with it that it made no difference to them if they found the cure today or ten years later. The knowledge that something was effective in the first place reinforcing that mindset even more. And none of them were going to listen to me otherwise anyway. Not on the day that marked the end of the elf-dragon war and created the Riders in the first place.

I had actually planned to skip the celebration, but Arya wouldn’t hear it and dragged me along. My feeble protests of not having a place there overruled due to the amount of unintentional breakthroughs I had caused in their medical practices. One or two would have been overlooked, three might have been commented on but nothing special, sixteen new applications had forced even Islanzadí to recognize my contributions and she spent every effort to pretend like I never existed.

So I was forced to spend a night watching the elves lose their collective minds thanks to the amount of enchantments in the air, the rivers of alcohol, and the festive atmosphere. Pretty sure there were some drugs being passed around as well, I doubted it was just tobacco in those pipes.

Not my idea of a good time, but at least the art presentation time was interesting.

What really stole the show was when two identical elvish dancers summoned a giant flaming spectral dragon that rose up into the air and roared.

It was magic on a scale I hadn’t seen in this universe before and I doubted I would come across many other examples elsewhere.

Why?

It was a manifestation of Time magic.

When it touched Eragon it started to accelerate the change every human Rider experienced over the course of decades into a few seconds. The young Rider’s features sharpened and smoothed out until he looked very similar to the rest of the elves, small cuts and scars from a lifetime as a farmhand and later his journey across the Empire fading away as we watched.

In a beautiful twist of irony, the manifested dragon was using Durza’s curse to fuel the changes. The remnants of the Shade’s spirits that had latched onto Eragon losing energy until they were subsumed by the rest of the magic running through him and leaving him free of the curse that had plagued him for months now.

At last I wouldn’t have to spend time healing the results of his attacks anymore even if it pricked at my newly developing pride as a healer that I wasn’t able to fix the issue even when I knew the cause.

But a small injury to my pride was worth Eragon finally being able to fully commit to the training he needed even as I knew our time in Ellesméra was ending. The Varden would need him back soon and I had almost exhausted the available records. Which meant I was hopefully close to the discovery I was…

I paused at the spell I was on.

At first glance it was just a general ‘feel better’ spell similar to the one Eragon learned early on. But the more I looked at it, it was less about repairing the body as it was about soothing the pathways in the body. Sure the caster probably literally meant the veins or arteries, but if the intention to heal the connection to a person’s inner magic was added…

Holy shit, I think I just found the spell I was after!

I needed someone to help me test this, now!