His healing aura reaches farther every day. The radius cleared two and a half miles last week; if he keeps pushing, maybe he'll make it to three before the year is out.

So four times a day, at every stop on the tour, he stands still and closes his eyes and focuses his whole self on extending the light of his soul as far as it will reach.

Golden light floods the city, wall to wall, basement to tower-top, spilling out past the gates and streaming up into the sky to make jewelry of the clouds. The light is threaded with delicate spiderweb strands of silver, woven with misty curls of pale blue; all together, it lends an exquisite beauty to everything it touches. Within its range, it chases shadows around corners and blooms like billowing smoke, finding its way under closed doors and between drawn curtains, until after only a few seconds every part of the city from the open streets to the remotest of closets is covered in a blanket of light. It's nearly tangible, felt as much as seen, a warm and comforting presence.

And everywhere it goes, it carries a message, an offer, a gift. Health: stand straighter, breathe easier, let the years fall away. It soothes pain, heals injury, cures disease, brings strength and grace to all who want them. Lost limbs grow anew. Scars fade away. Different people have different ideas of what it means to be perfectly healthy; some people find that the light makes their skin clearer and their teeth straighter, while others keep scars or wrinkles. No one is ever changed in a way they truly don't want.

Where Taliar stands, on a balcony overlooking a crowded market square, the light swirls around him in an intricate dance of blue and silver and gold. Proximity has hardly any effect on the strength of the healing, but it does make the lightshow even prettier; and of course, where most people within the aura's range get only a vague sense of its owner's personality, anyone with a direct line of sight to the shining pendant in his hands gets the full force of it.

Some people have subtle souls, that broadcast their personality shyly, gradually, piece by hesitant piece. Taliar is not one of those people. With his aura at full strength, his soul blazes like the sun.

Here is a person whose fondest ambition is to bring life and health and joy and safety and knowledge and fulfillment to everyone he can possibly reach. A person who lives by extremes, intervals of boundless energy alternating with intervals of helpless depression. A person who takes well-deserved pride in his ability to go over, under, around, or through any obstacle that stands between him and his goals, and immense joy in using that skill to help others, when he finds someone faced with a problem they can't overcome on their own. A person of unshakeable integrity, who abhors malicious deception, who will move mountains to keep his word. Clever, charming, intelligent, insightful, occasionally even wise. Irreplaceable as a friend, and not bad even as an enemy; he believes very strongly in mercy and second chances and finding a way for all sides to come out of a conflict better off than they went in. But when it's really necessary, when no combination of charisma and lateral thinking and raw cosmic power can convince someone to stop causing harm, he is willing to go to war if that's what it takes.

He's so caught up in the magic, he doesn't even notice when the world shifts around him and a different one takes its place. It's a little disorienting, and it takes another half-second or so to expand his aura back out to full range, but at first it just feels like he got dizzy and lost concentration for a moment. Not worth opening his eyes over, not when he can take back his focus and push the edges of the light out a little farther, then a little farther than that...