Tomasolle Nahahl

Tomasolle Nahahl is the director of the School of Living Creatures at the Academy of Deeper Learning and a researcher whose work joins close attention to animals with practical medical inquiry. His role in investigating Black Wolf Fever is defined by a disciplined willingness to test explanations: he recognizes that the dead pups of the Ahfal Oma do not support an initially plausible theory, yet asks to investigate the connection rather than claim the mystery settled.

Identity and Work

The School of Living Creatures occupies the academy’s most extensive grounds: three ponds, wetlands, a riding track, a beast stable, and a tower for its scholars. Animal experiments required for admission to the School of Medicine are conducted there. Some scholars at the School of Living Creatures jokingly call it the Other School of Medicine, reflecting the prestige of medicine at the academy, but Tomasolle takes no interest in the comparison. His priorities are the creatures under study, not the status of his institution.

His animal room makes that orientation tangible. Cages and baskets line the walls; the space is dim so sick animals can rest, and its human visitors must pick their way carefully through it. At the back, a gas lantern lights a work area where Tomasolle studies a mouse swimming in a basin of diluted milk. Comfort for the animals takes precedence over comfort for people, while the room’s experiments serve a wider medical purpose. His work therefore crosses a boundary between animal study and human treatment without treating either as merely incidental.

Partnership with Hohsalle

Tomasolle’s scientific relationship with Hohsalle is both collegial and warmly personal. When Hohsalle visits, Tomasolle greets him with delight and draws him close to inspect an experiment before asking about other matters. The medicine Hohsalle had brought on an earlier visit is working in the mouse experiment, and Tomasolle reports that Shikan continued the work while he was away. The striking results prompt him to return and see them for himself. His enthusiasm rests on observation and repeated work, not on a claim made at a distance.

The partnership also extends to investigating the disease among people. When Hohsalle comes to discuss the cases, Tomasolle offers him tea and invites him to begin, then joins the inquiry by organizing evidence gathered with Cheehana. A large map, carried on a scroll and marked with red dots, shows cases scattered across the territory of the former Kingdom of Aquafa. The distribution changes the scale of the question: cases existed before the disaster at the salt mine, so the illness cannot be understood only through that later incident.

Investigation of the Disease

Tomasolle helps examine whether contagion might occur independently of human intention. He does not begin by assuming that the proposed process is true; he asks the group to consider whether it is possible, then presents the map as evidence gathered with Cheehana. The exchange places his contribution within a collaborative investigation, with Shikan assisting by holding the chart and Hohsalle scrutinizing its implications.

The group also considers a possible connection between the first known case of mittsual and the poisoned-rye incident involving the Ahfal Oma. Tomasolle recounts that after horses died from eating the rye, the Ahfal Oma buried them in a mound and fed them to pregnant bitches. The idea that their pups might have become carriers would explain some of the disease’s history. But Tomasolle personally confirmed that the bitches bore no pups: they suffered and died. That observation removes a tempting explanation rather than confirming it.

He consequently keeps two conclusions distinct. The absence of pups means that this proposed carrier route was not what happened; it does not establish that the poisoned rye had no relation to the first case of mittsual. Tomasolle acknowledges that he cannot determine the connection with certainty and asks permission to investigate. His restraint is a defining feature of his method: a plausible account remains a question until the evidence can support it.

Character and Narrative Role

The brief domestic conversation that precedes Hohsalle’s visit offers another glimpse of Tomasolle through the perspectives of his family. Hohsalle asks whether he has returned; Luliya says that he arrived the previous day, or perhaps the day before. Hohsalle jokes that Tomasolle should take better care of himself and find someone else to care for their mother, or he might acquire a lover. Luliya replies that he already has one, that his feelings are serious, and that the object of his affection is not a woman. The exchange establishes a personal dimension without identifying the beloved or elaborating on the relationship.

In the disease inquiry, Tomasolle’s significance lies less in delivering a final answer than in showing how an answer must be earned. He brings animal experiments, field observations, and a mapped record of earlier cases into conversation with Hohsalle’s account. When one theory fails against the fact that the bitches died without bearing pups, he neither hides the failure nor mistakes it for proof that all connection is impossible. His request to investigate leaves the question open, but it gives the next stage of the inquiry a concrete direction.