Hikma's Sleep

In the 403rd Year of the Prophet, a Nuwan acolyte, physician, and chemist named Hikma el-Omar discovered that if the Nightflower plant was brewed into a tea and then distilled into an oil, it would cause deep sleep in the imbiber along with an insensibility to pain. While Nightflower had been used as a recreational drug and sleeping aid by the Runberi before, the flower was not considered to have a legitimate role in medicine before Hikma produced her oil.

As Nightflower is considered a weed and grows unbidden in most corners of the Runberi coast, making something useful of the thin purple-black leaves of the plant was a major breakthrough in Runberi medicine. These days, Runberi Houses of the Ill keep substantial stocks of this oil on hand and commonly employ idle children to pick Nightflowers and deliver them to the physicians.

Utility

The main use of Hikma's Sleep is to assist in surgery. Though contact with the Exodites and access to their advanced pharmacology have helped matters, the Houses of the Ill largely do not have access to reliable anesthetic. Consequently, the ability to put patients into such a deep sleep that even cutting them open will not wake them is very useful to the Runberi surgeons. Typically, those administered with the oil will sleep for one to three hours before waking up disoriented and with a mild headache. However, the patient will then recover, and will have been spared the trauma of being awake through their surgery. However, in some cases the patient will eventually develop Nightflower Poisoning. This condition is rarely observed in human recipients, and in the cases of human patients it is somewhat common for the dosing of Hikma's Sleep to be insufficient to keep the patient asleep for the duration of the surgery.
It is difficult to use Hikma's Sleep for other purposes, as the amount of oil required as well as its conspicuous bitter taste make its use as a poison challenging. A rare few use it as a drug, but the sleep caused by the oil does not last a full night and is not particularly restful.

Manufacturing

The process of producing Hikma's Sleep is quite simple, requiring nothing more than a basic still, a fair quantity of Nightflower petals, and a fire. Though proper preparation takes a few hours, in practice anyone with basic alchemical instruments or even improvised ones is capable of producing this oil.