RE: Monarch - Chapter 176: Lillian II

The hard part had always been the waiting.

After nearly twelve years of on-the-job experience, Lillian was an old hand at the menial preparation of alchemical ingredients, her senses largely dulled to their distinctive smells. Cutting the gem wort resulted in a sour scent of bitter lemon, the knife’s blade catching the fragrance and dripping onto the cutting board. The glass caps gave off a more pleasant aroma, like a budding flower under the sun, a sweet scent of earth and jasmine. The allium followed, with its pungent, oniony fragrance..

These were the last two of many small-printed steps listed in Gunther’s notes. If she followed the instructions to the letter, as she had the last time, all that was left to do was stew the mixture and reap the inevitable failure.

There was a reason he’d given up on this, despite the gray plague being both a catastrophic blight and a continual affront to their name: It simply did not produce the desired results in its current form.

She suspected the commonality of the name bothered her father more than he let on. It was petty, yes, but not as unreasonable as it appeared. When there were outbreaks of the gray plague, her father would find himself beset by patients and relations of patients, all looking for a cure only to find little beyond palliatives that could only treat their symptoms. And during the worst bouts, which left thousands dead and far more incapacitated or injured, many of their usual patients would give “Gray’s Apothecary” a wide berth, purely based on name.

He’d considered changing it countless times, but he was too stubborn.

And that was not the only choice Gunther’s stubbornness kept him from making.

Lillian stared at the small crystal capsule in her hand. Its many fractals and uneven surface reflected prismatic lines and geometry onto the basement laboratory’s walls, and would have been beautiful if she wasn’t so worried about being caught with it. If Gunther knew she had this, he wouldn’t scream at her, or rough her up as many parents in Whitefall did. More likely, he wouldn’t say anything at all, allowing the air of disappointment and seething unhappiness with her decision to speak for itself.

That was his way.

It didn’t help that from the moment she’d left the alchemist’s shop and throughout the lengthy walk throughout the city center, she’d felt like someone was watching her.

Probably just paranoia, but unsettling just the same.

The fact that she even had to be this worried about branching out bothered her. Lillian chafed at being mired in the past. What did it matter, if most alchemists pandered to the nobility? True, many were charlatans, marking up cheap remedies to exorbitant amounts, claiming them as universal panaceas. But if even a fraction of the tales were true, there was no shortage of good alchemists out there. It was just a matter of separating the legend from the facts.

For that matter, she disliked the thought of simply carrying on her father’s business for the rest of her life making no real contributions. She wanted to make something meaningful, something that would transform their lives and ease the burden of the surrounding folk, just as Gunther had. She knew his methods were outdated, and that even a basic understanding of alchemy lent itself to new techniques, and more importantly, a massive quantity of highly potent ingredients that could be used to make highly effective elixirs and potions.

One of which she now rolled absent-mindedly between her fingers. It had cost her dearly, three of the five silver rods old man Rin had invested in the cause. The rest had gone to procuring certain ingredients that may have invited unwanted questions if she’d asked Gunther for them directly.

As Lillian weighed the crystal capsule in her hand, she made her decision. She would use it to create something new, something that would help everyone in Topside once the gray plague returned in full force.

With a deep breath, she set to work, carefully measuring out the ingredients and following the steps in her own notes. She added the crystal to the mixture, watching as it dissolved and spread its power throughout the concoction.

The smell of the potion was unlike anything she had ever encountered before. It was dark and musky, with a hint of ozone that lingered in the air. She stirred the mixture slowly, checking the time and watching in fascination as it changed color and bubbled over the oil burner.

Gunther’s notes indicated this was the ideal outcome, but she’d never managed to get the color to shift—and she suspected, neither had he.

She tamped down her hope, refusing to claim victory before the results were definitive. But she knew she was right. The crystal capsule—a small nugget of preserved mana, harvested from a cave deep in the Everwood—acted as a catalyst, accelerating the reaction.

If it worked, she couldn’t believe how close Gunther had come to accomplishing his goal. Most of her modifications had been of a maintenance variety, balancing Gunther’s meticulous recipe with a faster reaction in mind. Had her father been more open and considered alchemical methods instead of giving up altogether, her solution could have easily been the first thing he tried.

As the potion simmered, Lillian couldn’t help but feel a sense of growing excitement.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs leading down to the basement interrupted her thoughts. Panic set in. She hastened to hide his notes.

“What dark deeds are happening here?” Gunther asked.

Lillian hesitated, unsure of how to respond. She knew her father’s views on using untested ingredients. But she also knew that she couldn’t let it go.

“Just brewing something,” she finally said, her voice a forced calm.

Her father’s eyes narrowed as he looked at her. Then he seemed to soften. He trusted her and probably concluded that she was doing the same thing all apothecaries did at one point or another. Experimenting. “Will it keep?”

“Probably.” Lillian felt a pang of guilt at his trust as she glanced at the still-bubbling concoction. Gunther’s original estimate was that the potion would need to sit on open flame for at least three hours before it reached its maximum potency, and only needed to be carefully watched for the last hour. And while she couldn’t be certain, she’d done enough research to confidently scale that estimate down to a third.

Which gave her around twenty minutes before she needed to be back.

“Good. I could use your help up front.” Gunther squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Pox is at it again. And the line’s only getting longer.”

Lillian’s spirits lifted. Where maladies were concerned, pox was relatively straightforward. With the physical symptoms—pus-filled sores that frequently grouped around the face—simple to diagnose, and last she’d checked, the curative was well-stocked. With haste, she could be back in the basement with time to spare.

“I’ll be up in a minute.”

***

It was far worse than she’d expected. The apothecary’s storefront was packed with people, some of them neighbors and friends, all utterly ridden with pox. If she was a colder person, she might have shoved the curative in their hands, taken their silver, and moved on. But she couldn’t ignore the tears in their eyes, the desperation in their voices. She felt their pain, and it fueled her to work harder, to be better.

She moved quickly, examining each patient and administering the curative with practiced ease, going over simple steps they could take to keep the sores clean and lessen their own pain. It was a relief to see the sudden calmness in their expressions as the potion took effect.

But as she worked, she couldn’t shake the feeling of anxiety. Of sands in an hourglass she couldn’t see, slowly draining away. The potion in the basement still boiled, and there was precious little time left.

Finally, when there was a lull in the barrage she rushed back down to the basement. She could hear the bubbling from the staircase, which only made her more nervous.

When she descended the basement stairs, she was met with a sight that took her breath away. The potion was no longer a murky brown, nor the intended blue, but an odd shade of purple.

No.

She rushed towards the table, removing the bowl from the burner and throwing open the drawers beneath the table, rummaging through them until she found what she was looking for.

The glass jar of seemingly innocuous pebbles rattled, bouncing as Lillian slammed them on the sideboard and pried the jar open, reaching inside to withdraw a single stone with shaking hands. The jar was filled with warder’s stones, the one holdover from alchemy that Gunther allowed, solely because of how effective they were at estimating the viability of any liquid composition. Once they were dropped into a solution, the small spark of magic within them would activate, altering the stone’s color and signaling whether the surrounding substance was fit for consumption.

Lillian held her breath, hand with the pebble hovering over the top of the mixture, and dropped the stone inside.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then the solution flared bright red, illuminating the glass from within, and fizzling to nothingness seconds later.

She gripped the edges of the dusty table, eyes watering, as she accepted the truth. She’d taken too long. The potion she was so eager to show her father as a proof of concept, was an abject failure. Because of the timing, she couldn’t even know if it would have worked at all. She’d taken old man Rin’s silver, lied to her father’s face, and had nothing to show for it.

It was over.

Suddenly, Gunther’s advice, from an evening he was drunk on ale and feeling overly chatty and sentimental, came back to her.

We live in auspicious times, my dear. Yes, the walls are drafty, and the roads beyond them are cracked and narrow, but we are truly blessed to have them. A person can become well-learned simply from reading too many books. We can visit the herbalist, and attain ingredients of a rarity and quantity that would have taken years to attain, many of them rotting away before they were put to use with methods much more primitive than our own.

For that, we are blessed.

But I encourage you to remember the old ways. If you find yourself at an impasse, lacking ingredients you can’t find or afford, they will serve you better than you expect. There is a world of bounty just outside the city walls.

Lillian hesitated. There was a time she delved into the Everwood often, as frequently as every few weeks. It was part of her early training. But if she was going to find another catalyst, like the capsule, she’d need to go deeper than she’d ever gone before, into more dangerous territory. More troubling were the many rumors and whispers that the forest had grown considerably more dangerous. A ranger who had browsed their wares recently even gossiped about a revenant.

But…

Her fists tightened at her sides. No. She couldn’t let it go. Didn’t have it in her to simply give up and move on, assume the potion would have failed regardless. Even if the chance of success was minuscule, considering the number of lives she’d save if she succeeded?

It would take time to prepare. If she truly intended to push deeper into the infamous forest, she needed to take every precaution possible.

But her resolve was firm.

Lillian would return to the old ways. To the Everwood.