Healing isn't a miracle. It's a transaction. Malakai Vane is not a "white mage." He doesn't pray, he doesn't sparkle, and he doesn't do charity. He is a combat medic who knows the one immutable law of magic: The Tax. Every knit bone costs a steak dinner. Every regrown limb costs a week of starvation. And if you run out of calories, the magic eats you. Malakai is currently starving, addicted to painkillers, and owes a life-debt to the Reaper himself. To pay it off, he has to escort a party of incompetence-a vanity-obsessed sorcerer, a kleptomaniac rogue, and a Paladin who thinks he can seduce dragons-into the frozen North. Their target? The Well of Eternity. Their enemy? A legendary healer who claims to have cured death itself. But Malakai knows the truth: Death isn't a disease you cure. It's a bill you pay. And when the bill comes due, Malakai is the only one with the stomach to do the dirty work. House M.D. meets Dungeons & Dragons in this visceral, dark fantasy medical procedural where the magic system is based on biology, and the hero is just trying to find a vein.