[Settle in for a story, Kurloz, because she's doing a little more than just reciting the Botanical Compendium from memory.]
In a country to the east of my homeland, a noble lord's daughter fell ill. It was a sickness of the lungs, and breathing became more and more difficult for her every day. Their healers tried to cure her, but to no avail. Sorrowfully resigning themselves to their child's death, her parents surrounded her with the most beautiful, brightest flowers they could find, hoping to make her comfortable in her last days.
But the girl didn't die. Instead, the illness began to subside, and she grew stronger by the day. The lord and lady could easily have called it only a miracle, and rejoiced in it and nothing more. But their joy came, too, with curiosity, and the healers investigated the girl's recovery. They found one of the flowers surrounding the girl, a lovely warm-colored lotus called embrium, had medicinal effects - the fragrance of so many around her had treated the illness. They set to work on distilling it into a more potent medicine.
Without this discovery, they might not have known what cured their daughter at all. They might have simply thought it a gift from the Maker, and anyone else who fell ill with the same sickness would die. The healers might have singled out the embrium and left it there, and it would take dozens of flowers to cure a single person.
But because they worked to understand this miracle, they enabled themselves to create something even more miraculous - a distilled version. Where dozens of flowers might be needed to cure one person over a matter of days, a potion brewed from one or two might cure the afflicted in half the time it would take for the flowers alone. Embrium extract has also been found to stabilize potions that protect the body from injury or muscles from strain - without the pursuit of understanding that first miracle, these would not be possible, either.
I will end this story with a question: Did the discovery of how the girl survived make her survival any less wondrous?
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In a country to the east of my homeland, a noble lord's daughter fell ill. It was a sickness of the lungs, and breathing became more and more difficult for her every day. Their healers tried to cure her, but to no avail. Sorrowfully resigning themselves to their child's death, her parents surrounded her with the most beautiful, brightest flowers they could find, hoping to make her comfortable in her last days.
But the girl didn't die. Instead, the illness began to subside, and she grew stronger by the day. The lord and lady could easily have called it only a miracle, and rejoiced in it and nothing more. But their joy came, too, with curiosity, and the healers investigated the girl's recovery. They found one of the flowers surrounding the girl, a lovely warm-colored lotus called embrium, had medicinal effects - the fragrance of so many around her had treated the illness. They set to work on distilling it into a more potent medicine.
Without this discovery, they might not have known what cured their daughter at all. They might have simply thought it a gift from the Maker, and anyone else who fell ill with the same sickness would die. The healers might have singled out the embrium and left it there, and it would take dozens of flowers to cure a single person.
But because they worked to understand this miracle, they enabled themselves to create something even more miraculous - a distilled version. Where dozens of flowers might be needed to cure one person over a matter of days, a potion brewed from one or two might cure the afflicted in half the time it would take for the flowers alone. Embrium extract has also been found to stabilize potions that protect the body from injury or muscles from strain - without the pursuit of understanding that first miracle, these would not be possible, either.
I will end this story with a question: Did the discovery of how the girl survived make her survival any less wondrous?