Rio Vite

Healing potions are brewed from the water of the Rio Vite, and that is very nearly all anyone east of it can tell you. It runs in the west. The merchants who carry the potions east call it the Rio Valal; the faithful who brew their own, and the Elder in the cursed keeps, say Rio Vite. It is one river.

Its water works because of what is in it. What a potion puts back into a body is positive energy, the pole all living force is drawn from, and the Rio Vite is where that reaches the world in a form a person can carry in a vial. It is not the only way to make one. Yara, of Vroga Waruk’s faithful, handed Koa two potions of her own order’s brewing and said plainly that the water is not required: three of them praying together can make the same thing, and it comes out stronger in the hands of a believer.

The distance shows in the price. Four gold apiece is the going rate in Loshev, and the merchant who quoted it said the only way to do better was to find a shop standing on the river itself, which is a good deal further west than anyone in Idir intends to go.

At the Twisted Grove the Elder was asked whether enough potions would strip the death-tree’s aura, and answered that with roots that deep and that wide it would more likely take the Rio Vite itself. He was asked where the Rio was kept, as though it were held somewhere in trust, and had to say that it is a river.