The next three people with the flu are presumably cured without any more trouble than these. The man with dysentery, though, lives alone and people have been avoiding his house for fear of catching it. They had an epidemic three decades ago that killed half the village.

Well. What happens when they go and visit him?

No one answers the door.

...She tries to use her lightshaping sense to figure out what's going on inside the house by tracing the light.

There is no one inside the house.

There is someone in the little building behind the house.

...oh. Well.

She tries to see if her healing magic can reach that far - she's only ever done it from line of sight, but maybe lightshaping range is close enough -

It does reach.

—and he's healed.

"What happens to the cause of the things you heal?"

"When a good Light mage heals someone of an illness, they get even the parts of the illness that are outside the person's body - you're a Wood mage, you should be able to tell with lifeshaping if you try, although only some people have the skill to sense disease and I don't know how hard it is to learn..."

"'Sense disease'? Disease is living things?"

"Yeah, I read a book about it once, Wood mages who are really good with lifeshaping can sense some kinds of illness as a lot of tiny living things, and that's how you catch those illnesses, the tiny living things get on you and breed a lot and then you're sick too. But they're so tiny it's impossible to see them and you have to practice looking at really really tiny details with lifeshaping in order to sense them that way."

(The man leaves the little building, feeling rather confused.)

"Huh. I wanna figure that out." She knocks on the door again.

"Oh, I healed him already, turns out I can do that. He was, uh, behind the house."

"Be—oh. Right. ...should we maybe explain to him why he suddenly started glowing and stopped, ah..."

"I don't know, should we?"

"Yeah probably. I mean the rest of the people in town will eventually tell him, I expect, but."

"Okay."

So they do! The man is befuddled but thankful and doesn't know what to offer to repay them.

Ruava cheerfully assures him that it's fine, and off they go.

"I feel all accomplished."

"Me, too! This is the best magic."

"It's pretty great!"

"Now I kinda wanna figure out how to use my magic to help people like that."

"Like how?"

"I'm not sure! The only real limitation in what this world's kind of magic can do is mana, we don't really have things that are in principle impossible. What kinds of things that aren't horrible are possible with Wood magic?"

"...I mostly know about the horrible things," she admits. "You can do a lot with lifeshaping, it's probably the most versatile of the basic elemental powers... you can do anything a Light or Earth mage can do, so healing yourself or others... you can give people magic powers, like make someone permanently able to fly, but that's on the powerful end... and Wood's own specialties are mostly about life or people or both - like, magic that does things to minds, for example. But, again, most of the things I know can be done to minds are horrible."

"Can I do healing as a primitive action like you did?"