Mild Curative

Ingredients:

Mild Curative by Velka

Stinging Nettles
Dandelion Heads
Apples
Water (Clear spring water works best)
Poppy Seeds
Angus Roots
Clampberries

Instructions:

Fill a cooking pot with the water of your choice and place it over a lit and roaring fire until the water begins to boil.
Meanwhile, carefully take your Stinging Nettles and roughly chop them, before crushing them in a mortar and pestle alongside your Dandelion Heads, Poppy Seeds, and Clampberries, and then grind until you are left with a sickly green paste.
Once your paste is combined, slice your Angus Root (each slice should be a finger’s breadth wide) and peel and slice your Apples. Once the water in the pot is boiling, add your Angus Root and Apple slices to the pot and cover with a lid, leaving them to boil for an hour.
Once boiled, remove the lid from the pot once more. The water will have turned bright red because of the Angus Root. Now, add the paste from your mortar and pestle. Stir until the paste is fully combined, and you will be able to tell when the water turns from bright red to a darker, clay red.
Bring down the heat of your fire, replace the lid back onto your pot, and leave the mixture to simmer overnight. Come morning, the Mild Curative will be complete and ready for you to ladle the solution into containers of your choice and take as needed. The leftover Angus Root and Apple Slices can then be eaten as a very healthy snack.
*Measurements for the ingredients vary depending on the strength and quantity of Mild Curatives that you require.
**The apple peel can be chopped up and added to the solution for no change in effectiveness, but will provide a bittier consistency should you prefer.

Background:

The Mild Curative, as the name suggests, is a potion that heals small injuries, such as bumps, bruises, scrapes, headaches etc. This potion can be found in every household throughout the world and is so easy to make that many housewives/husbands, or those in professions with a higher chance of injury will have learned how to make it. Many households will even have their own “family recipe” for the Mild Curative, increasing or decreasing all or some of the ingredients to heighten or weaken the effects of the potion. It is not uncommon to hear of the local drunkard brewing a batch of Mild Curative to cure his hangover that is so strong that it leaves him vomiting, but feeling as fit as a fiddle moments later. Parents will also purposefully brew weaker curatives for young children to help them work through teething issues or to heal their latest bruises.
Despite it’s usefulness, the Mild Curative does have it’s limits. It is unable to cure any major injuries or illnesses, such as a broken limb or disease, and you will need to see a healer in order to treat these ailments correctly. The best that the Mild Curative could do in these situations would be to ease the pain enough for you to make it to the healer, or they may make use of it to kickstart the healing process and supplement any healing magicks that they use.
The Mild Curative has been around for so long that most have no idea where it originally came from, or who made it. Even the vast libraries kept by the Sorcerers of the Sorcerer’s Collective have no information on this long forgotten alchemist. In my travels amongst the Witch Covens, however, I have heard whispers of an ancient and powerful Witch who was uncommonly kindhearted and equally as chaotic in their potion-making.
The story goes that while walking and gathering ingredients they came across a child, dressed in spoiled rags, who was gaunt and clearly sick. The Witches heart broke at the sorry state of this child and they resolved to take the child home and to safety. Upon reaching the child’s home, however, the Witch found their parents, bedridden and wasting away. It seems that a sickness had hit the entire village and, without a local healer available, everyone would surely perish.
The Witch immediately set about trying to find a cure for this sickness, so determined were they to help these people, even risking their own health in the process. Grabbing a pot from the families kitchen and using their magic to light a fire, they began experimenting, first making use of the herbs that they had been gathering on their walk until those were spent without any results to speak of. Eventually, becoming desperate and beginning to feel the effects of the sickness themselves, the Witch went out to the village to grab whatever was readily available to try and concoct anything that might aid these people.
Finally, after several days of experimentation, and a combination of sheer dumb luck and the Witch’s expertise in alchemy, they were able to create a potion that aided the villagers in recovering from their sickness. Making sure to note down each ingredient used and the methods required to brew the potion, the Witch went on to administer the Curative to as many as they could and intended to give their notes to the child they met so that they could always make more.
Unfortunately, like most of the stories told by the Witches, this one does not have a happy ending. Sadly, the discovery of the Mild Curative had not come soon enough and many in the village had already passed away to the sickness, the child’s parents amongst them. Once the surviving villagers had recovered, they accused the Witch of using their dark magicks to inflict the sickness upon them in the first place and that they then arrived to finish the job, stating that the Witch’s earlier attempts at a cure were in fact poisons.
Capturing the Witch and tying them to a pyre built in the centre of the village. The Witch pleaded with the villagers, declaring her innocence and that they only wished to help, but these pleas soon died in their throat as they looked down to see the child again, this time with a torch in hand as they lit the pyre. As the flames licked the Witch’s skin, warping and melting it on their body, the Witch cried out, tears evaporating on their face, and called on their magic.The fire turned white and became so bright that the villagers were forced to look away or risk going blind. When the light died down, the villager looked back towards the pyre to see that the Witch had vanished, leaving nothing behind except their notes on the Mild Curative and the kind heart that had driven them to make it.