He did not try to use it immediately.
The temptation was there — he had found healing magic, it was real, and Lyra was across the room. He resisted it. Applying an untested tool to a delicate problem was one of the more reliable ways to make the problem worse. He needed to understand what he had before he used it on what mattered most.
He thought of his old world, new medicine was never performed on humans first. The scientists would always test it on mice before moving up.
He needed a test subject.
◆ ◆ ◆
The first subject was a Bark Lizard.
He had thought this through carefully. Shadow could approach them without triggering a flight response. They were small enough that a failed attempt would not cause serious harm. And their territorial fights produced regular injuries — he did not need to create one. He had Shadow wait at the edge of the territory for a natural opportunity.
Twenty minutes in, a candidate appeared: a mid-sized adult with a fresh bite wound at the base of its tail, still bleeding, still moving normally.
Shadow collected it and brought it to the research hollow.
◆ ◆ ◆
The lizard was approximately eight inches long and extremely unhappy about being held.
Arthur assessed the wound through Shadow's eyes. Bite at the tail base, deep enough to expose the tissue beneath the scales. He had seen dozens of these injuries over months of observation. He knew exactly what healthy healing looked like on this species at every stage. If his intervention worked, he would be able to measure it.
He reached for the healing affinity.
It came slightly easier than the night before — not easily, but the path to it was marginally more worn. He directed it toward the wound.
What happened next was not elegant.
The healing energy arrived and did approximately what a first-time painter does with a brush — applied itself in an unfocused, general way that was more enthusiasm than precision. The wound area responded with the tissue-repair equivalent of being told do something without being told what. The lizard pulled sharply against Shadow's hold. Something was happening, and it was not entirely comfortable.
He pulled back. Tried again with more precision. Directed the energy to the deepest part of the wound and worked outward in layers, the way biological healing actually worked — deep tissue first, surface last.
The lizard calmed. The wound began to close.
Slowly. Clumsily. The tissue knit in an irregular sequence rather than the smooth progressive closure he had seen from the village healer. The surface was uneven afterward — sealed, but textured differently than the surrounding scales. Fully functional. Not pretty.
It took three hours.
When he released the lizard it disappeared under the oak roots with the offended speed of a creature that has had quite enough of today.
Arthur stared at the ceiling.
He could heal. He could not yet heal well. He had work to do.
◆ ◆ ◆
He practiced the same way he had practiced everything else: methodically, with patience, tracking his progress numerically.
Three hours for that first surface wound. Two hours and twenty minutes by the end of the first week. Ninety minutes at the end of the second. Forty minutes. Twenty. He noted the rate of improvement, noted the asymptote approaching in the low single digits for moderate surface wounds, and moved to the next category.
Internal injuries.
This was not simply a matter of going deeper. He had expected depth to be the main variable. He was wrong. Internal healing required a different orientation entirely — not the outward push of surface work but an inward-listening quality, extending the healing sense into the body rather than applying it to the exterior.
He could not see what he was healing. Not with eyes, not through Shadow's perception. He had to feel it.
This was the real challenge, and also the most interesting part. Developing the internal healing sense was less like learning a technique and more like developing a faculty — training a sense he hadn't fully had. Each session extended the range and resolution of it a small but real amount.
He healed a Stone Boar cub with a rib fracture, identified through observation rather than caused by him. He healed a Vine Serpent with an internal bruising injury, working through nightly sessions from Shadow's position in the branches above its resting site, maintaining the connection across thirty feet of vertical gap.
He healed a Thornback Boar with a deep abdominal injury — the most complex internal work he had attempted — and learned something in the process he had not expected: deep healing in large creatures required structural guidance. Not just providing energy and letting the body do the rest, but telling the body's repair processes what to rebuild toward.
He had learned this because his first attempt got it wrong. The wound closed but closed badly, scar tissue forming in a pattern that would have impaired function over time. He caught it through a follow-up diagnostic pulse and spent three more sessions correcting it — which took longer than the original healing because he was working with tissue that had already organized itself incorrectly.
He filed this under: mistakes worth making because they taught things success would not have.