Lifemagic maps to the domains of medicine and biology. The old imperial elves were advanced practitioners, bioengineers who could create new species and combine human and animal traits into peoples like the beastheads and the centaurs, or combine different animals into creatures like the flying horses and the gryphons. Little of their ancient knowledge survives in the hands of humans, only enough for medical use.

There are blurred boundaries between lifemagic and mindmagic, and between healers and mindhealers. A good healer will possess living insight, the ability to perceive the patient’s body processes, and the unseen touch, the ability to influence those processes (blood flow; cell division, growth and function; digestion; immune response; neurochemistry, to a degree, and glandular activity; and detoxification). Healers are also able to adjust their patients’ pain perception and initiate the Healer’s Sleep, a form of unconsciousness during which healing is accelerated. Non-healers can also learn to perform the Healer’s Sleep on willing patients, but full healers (and mindmages) can impose it without the patient’s cooperation.

Some of the elves’ creations, like the medicine cattle which give pharmaceutical milk, have been preserved and even improved (by selective breeding), while others, like the process for turning the sap of a certain tree into a useful polymer called hardlac, have been lost.

University-trained practitioners of lifemagic have bracelets of bone or ivory. Healers also wear a distinctive round hat.