Healing potions / alchemical reagents

A potion mends a wound about as fast as a wound can be mended: a deep open gash gone to a shallow cut in the time it takes to swallow, as if a god had put a hand on you, and the rest healing over the next few days on its own. Take too many too close together and they leave you weary. Four gold is the going rate in Loshev, four or five in Ridh, and the Loshev brew is made from the water of a river out to the west.

Potion is what everyone calls them. Alchemical reagent is what a man says when he wants you to feel the weight of what he is handing over, which is how Phil Nye put it to Koa, with the offer of a second on completion, and a third besides that keeps the mind sharp however tired the man holding it is. Better than coffee, he said, and he served coffee. Nobody has seen that one since.

There are two ways to make one, and they do not depend on the same thing. An alchemist’s brew works on the innate property of that western water and does not work without it. A cleric’s does not need the river at all, because what does the healing is the divine magic worked into it; Orsk made his band’s draughts over prayer rather than over a river.

Not all of them are alike. The cheap sort closes a little and does nothing whatever for an older injury; Koa learned as much from his leg, which the potion he drank left exactly as it was.