By Seren Aldrath, Senior Fellow of the Natural Sciences, Quelavar College Submitted simultaneously to the Quelavar Academic Register and the Thessavar Journal of Applied Arcana Year 2040 of the Continuous Calendar
To the Scholars and Statesmen of Aethermark:
It is a truth acknowledged by any serious student of the arcane arts that the Vitae rift has, since the earliest recorded contact between mortal hands and its radiance, conferred upon those who approach it a restoration of the body so complete and so immediate as to admit of no serious dispute. The wounded are healed. The exhausted are renewed. The starving are satisfied. These properties have been documented without interruption since Year 1050 of the Continuous Calendar, when the first recorded mortal encounter with the rift was preserved in the oral tradition of Rootwarden Elder Veth, and they require no further argument from me here. To rehearse what is already universally accepted would be to waste the reader's time, and I have too much to say to afford that indulgence.
What has not been documented — what has, in the estimation of this author, been systematically overlooked for reasons that reflect more upon the scholarly community's incuriosity than upon the difficulty of the inquiry — is what the Vitae does not to the body, but to the practitioner of the arcane arts who inhabits that body. This is the subject of the present paper. I submit my findings with full documentation, with the methodology laid out in sufficient detail that any competent scholar may replicate or refute them, and with the frank acknowledgment that the conclusions I have reached are not comfortable ones. Comfortable conclusions rarely require fourteen years of work.
