a later chapter from Esme the Great’s primer for her soul healer descendants

Although soul-healing is a complicated process, most occur within a heartbeat or two. Soul healers can only heal one patient at a time because we must alter our souls to match our patient’s to heal them. When healing, we first read our patient’s aura. Then we remove energy from our aura until our base color matches. And if our patient has magic, we add energy back to create motes matching our patient’s. (Our own electrum motes remain as well.) Once our soul matches our patient’s, we envelope our patient’s soul, and our electrum motes help mesh the two. Tingling sweeps through us while meshing souls, although our patient feels nothing.

After our souls are meshed, soul healers absorb our patient’s wound or ailment, and pain attacks us where our patient felt it, but our pain is tripled. (Healing fatal wounds or ailments is excrutiating.) When that pain has faded (because we’ve absorbed it all), we weave the energy in our patient’s aura back together in a pattern that matches the rest of their aura (the right pattern feels perfect.) Once our patient’s soul is whole again, we separate our soul from their’s, and tingling sweeps through us once more. However, the first time we heal an intelligent creature’s fatal wound or ailment, we create a lifelong soulbond and can never separate our souls from our soulbond’s.

Be very, very careful when weaving your patient’s aura back together. Weaving a patient’s soul wrong soon kills our patient and forever warps our powers. We can never heal again, and our broken powers turn inward and destroy us. We sicken and die within a month, not even ambrosia can save us. (Although one Longnight the Goddess intervened and saved a soul healer who inadvertently wove wrong.) So never attempt a soul-healing until your powers fully develop and you understand the entire process.

Although witch healers also heal through magic, their powers are very different. They use spells to heal, while we use our souls, so we can heal wounds or ailments far beyond them. Also, reading auras is nothing like a witch healer’s healing sight. We require no spell to invoke reading auras (indeed, we must shield ourselves not to see them), and healing sight focuses on physical details to determine the problem, while reading auras just knows what to fix. Also, unless we train as witch healers (which we rarely do), we can’t use healing sight.