Solo Of Salves and Solutions

[Alses]

Timestamp: 11th Day of Winter, 512 A.V. Alses hummed happily as she strolled along the skyglass corridors of the Towers Respite. Things were looking up. When the day had begun, just a few bells ago, she had been resigned to her fate. The garden was all shut down for winter (she couldn't excuse any further pottering about out there, not with the snows piling higher and higher) and so she was forced to face up to the unpalatable reality. Cleaning was, whether she liked it or not, going to become a feature of her existence in the Respite. There was nothing else she could really do; she couldn't cook (since she had no real need of food, learning had never exactly been a high priority), helping with the administration of the Respite itself a task best left to those paid to do it, and the garden needed nothing major and/or critical done to it for a good two, two and a half months. This morning, it had been a glumly tired Alses who had plodded up the stairs to the bright and cheery office where Tahala Chinsta and her small team spent their days amid groaning desks, bulging mahogany filing cabinets and seemingly-endless reams of paperwork, all held down with jolly little paperweights and, when things were really busy, any old rock that came to hand. How they could all be so relentlessly cheerful was an abiding mystery to Alses, and perhaps one better answered by an anthropologist of some kind, possibly one with an interest in complex society subgroups or something similar. Many variations on the theme of: 'Good morning' burst from a multitude of smiling mouths as she crossed the threshold, head tilted just slightly to avoid catching her crown-of-horns on the lintel. Her decidedly unenthusiastic “Morning,” seemed to put not a single dent in their armour as they bent willingly back to their tasks Imagine, then, something of the delight when a decidedly hangdog Alses was informed, and cheerfully at that, to report to Cook for something that wasn't cleaning. Perhaps her tactic of burning carelessly untidy students' painstaking notes and research – or more precisely, the tide of complaints it generated for Tahala - had at last worn down the formidable woman. Regardless of the actual motivation, Alses was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and so merrily toddled off down to the hygenic hell that was the kitchens of the Towers Respite – a formidable forbidden territory for those with no business there. Barely-organized chaos always seemed to rule supreme in the vaulting chambers that made up the kitchens, a tide of moving humanity that surged and beat against the condensation-beaded walls. Order and counter-order sang in the air, a cat's cradle of opposing commands, everyone fighting to be heard over the bubbling of sauces and the clang of pots and pans on ranges, in sinks and rattling on racks as busy hands darted in and out of the serried copper ranks. Sous-chefs danced through the billows of steam, their knives flashing in the humid air. They were chopping vegetables in double-time, boning fish and filleting meats, the sharp metal dancing a frenzied toccata on long wooden boards in their skilful hands. Iron chains ratcheted back and forth overhead, a constant thunderous fugue that hammered at the senses, callused hands reaching up to pluck handfuls of ingredients from their hooks as they rattled by. Alses pressed herself against a damp wall as an argument of cooks surged past, loudly declaiming about some Eypharian sauce that was apparently on tonight's menu. She swallowed down bile and forced herself not to think too deeply about it all, trying to breathe through her mouth. The odours of the kitchens were already offensive enough to her. “You want?” Alses blinked at the sweat-streaked sous-chef who had whirled out of the morass to stand in front of her, wiping his streaming forehead with a raggedy handkerchief. “You want?” the man repeated, with a short and jerky bow, eyes straying back to the melange of culinary activity on three sides. “Cook sent for me...” Alses replied feebly, overwhelmed as usual by the battering assault on her senses that the kitchens represented. If one was of a philosophical bent, it could be said that that was a metaphor for Lhavit as a whole; a stately ship sailing through a sea of cloud, but rip the top off and underneath one would find a boiling charivari of ceaseless activity that kept the whole grand edifice sailing serenely on. Alses, buffeted by the disgusting smells and sights, wasn't ever in a philosophical mood in a kitchen, and so this deep and moving metaphorical analysis of the city and its place on Mizahar went completely unnoticed. “Back t'your station, boy!” There came the booming tones of Cook, bearing down like a stubby galleon under full sail. “Alses is here t'work for me for a bit.” He nodded to her amicably enough, effortlessly dismissing his underling and gesturing for her to follow him without a single break in his energetic stride, dancing around the myriad obstacles in the way with a consummate ease born of long, long practice and absolute familiarity with the layout of his dominion. Alses, to whom this was still very much alien territory, and still less used to a crowd of people pressing against her on all sides, lagged behind somewhat, but eventually caught the rotund head chef up, breathing heavily after a particularly tight knot of people had forced the deployment of a strategic elbow or two. “Caught me up? Good. Now-” “Is it...” she paused for breath, gasping in the fetid humidity of the place “...is it always like this?” A short, sharp burst of laughter, a bark of sound that had quite a lot of force at close range. “Yes. Students are hungry people, y'self excepting, of course.” He led the way to a smaller antechamber that was at least partially shielded from the main bustle, a room lined with cupboards and long worktables. In the centre there stood a very familiar piece of equipment, the kitchen still. A pot-bellied copper and brass monstrosity, resting, heavy and ponderously bulbous, on four chunky and elaborately clawlike legs that had been cast to look as though they bowed under the prodigious weight. There was ornamentation and scrollwork across the still doors and all sorts of miscellaneous twiddly bits – thick glass gauges and viewing ports, adjustable wingnuts and internal sieves – to afford accurate control of as many conditions as possible. It was an old friend, of sorts; she'd used it on several occasions to distill out attar of roses from the hundreds and hundreds of blooms painstakingly culled in Summer and Autumn from the Respite's gardens, making enough of the devilishly strong rose otto (a thoroughly disagreeable substance until vastly watered down) to keep the Respite's baths smelling sweet right through Winter and Spring. Now it seemed as though Cook had another task to suit her skills.

[Alses]

One meaty banana hand, swollen from heat and continual scourging with the Respite's harsh soap (not for the first time, Alses made a mental note to try and render something not quite so vicious when she had a few bells spare) flapped at the workbenches ranged around the small room, piled high with ingredients and rather battered – though serviceable - apparatus. “Chilblain salve,” he barked abruptly, making Alses jump once more. “Bit more complex than the lip balms you've been making so far, but take it slow and you'll be fine.” He paced along the workbench, picking up bowls, jars and other such sundry containers, each one filled with something different. “Camphor wax, o'course, fer the base, as well as its coolin' properties. Ye'll need a nice even melt – nobody likes lumps, so keep the heat, and later yer cooling, steady. Don't heat it too strong, either – it'll go straight from solid to gas if you do.” He put the tub of the oily, strange-smelling wax down and moved on, to a dizzying array of leaves and powders on small squares of paper. Podgy fingers stabbed at the various ingredients as Cook spoke in double-quick time. “Taka moss, four parts, yer old friend mint, two parts – finely ground to a paste – calamine powder, one part, and leiyona sap, one part. It's in those jars over there. That's yer basic chilblain salve right there. Tease the moss out until it's strands and soak it in wood alcohol over a reducin' flame – you know what that is, right?” Alses smiled. “I did make rose otto in Autumn, or had you forgotten?” “I forgot,” he replied easily, not embarrassed in the least. “Busy man, busy kitchens. Can't keep track of everything. Now, once you've condensed the wood alcohol an' taka moss, that's your first step done, and ye can let that liquid cool off. Don't need you wastin' firewood – they've told me how much you go through every winter up at th'Respite.” “I hate the cold,” Alses replied icily, slightly stung. “And considering how much of a saving it is to not have to feed and water me, the Respite should consider a few extra baskets of wood a small price.” Cook raised his hands in submission. “No complaint from me, miss! 'Taint me who pays for it,” he said with a laugh. “You've got a sharp tongue on you when you've a mind, haven't you? Meek as milk and mild as butter only when it suits you, eh?” Alses sighed. “It doesn't come easily,” she admitted. “Even though we've had quite a bit of practice at being unassuming, now. Winter is the hardest time of all, though; forgive our snappishness - as I said, we hate the cold. And the dark, admittedly.” She shuddered. “Dark at the third bell in the afternoon? Barbarous.” “Take it up with th'gods, not me,” Cook said with a laugh, moving towards the door. “Believe me, we have. Not that it'll change for one Ethaefal, but we've made our position on the turning of seasons perfectly clear in the past.” There was no answer; Cook had vanished up the steps and back into the main kitchen, probably drawn by some culinary emergency that required his immediate attention, lest some sauce go gloopy or something equally catastrophic. The sous-chefs were a lot like headless chickens whenever anything went wrong, wasting time running about and shouting instead of thinking clearly and logically about exactly how to sort it out. That particular skill was probably what separated the chefs from the boys. Once again, in the relative silence of the room, Alses examined the equipment carefully. Basic, of course – what else could she expect from a student dormitory? Still, better than a tin can over a campfire, or something of that ilk, but hardly the sophisticated and glittering equipment of an expert or a master. Not that she'd know how to use half of the things she'd seen in Tian's shop-cum-laboratory, though, the spiralling glassware that looked like its fabricator had had the hiccups whilst travelling backwards up Tanroa's river and – for some of the more complex items – had got caught in a whirlpool for a bit, all the while not letting go of their glass. No, for her, the basic kitchen equipment; the still, several mortars and pestles (mostly used for grinding herbs to pulp) a retort or two for destructive distillation – she'd been surprised to see them, until Cook had mentioned making his own flavours every now and then – and a few other bits and pieces that had either been acquired for a singular purpose a long time ago and then forgotten about, or else repossessed from students who'd left them behind for whatever reason – or perhaps had donated when they went on to bigger and better things. Whoever had last used this room had been sensible, at least, Alses found, after a brief rummage through the various cupboards. The wood alcohol was stored in sturdy brass-bound kegs (a sensible precaution in any kitchen, since it often got hot and damp, inviting rust in the more usual iron) alternating with barrels of rather stagnant water. Not that the state of the water mattered, particularly – it wasn't ever meant for drinking, rather to contain any fire that might start, similar to the way people lined their flour-rooms with water barrels to absorb the force of an explosion if the dust caught. She realised Cook hadn't actually told her how much to make. 'Buggeration,' she thought, surprisingly calm. Once, that would have sent her into a lather of indecision and worry about her apprenticeship position, but not any more, no - Alses felt much more secure in Lhavit nowadays. It was where she was supposed to be. 'I suppose I'll make a sample batch and then ask Cook how much more I should do.' Paper was precious, especially since funds were currently in short supply. Alses spared a few moments for some uncharitable thoughts about the Patriarch of House Dusk and his caution with regards to her work. Thoughts only, and ones quickly quashed at that, since by his own admission House Dusk dealt in information and whispers. No need to go incriminating herself, even here where she was at least reasonably sure of her privacy. This enforced dearth of writing material meant she hoarded her books and her papers jealously, and had also forced her to become much more adept at memorization. Part of her, the academic, thought this was a very bad thing indeed; if nothing was written down, how would anyone know what you'd achieved, or even how you'd done it? That paranoia, that fear of someone taking the discovery as their own, had surely led to many, many more setbacks in the arcane arts than almost anything else – bar the Valterrian, of course. The more practical side of her welcomed the skill; memorization was useful. She could remember things without having to write everything down. It helped with her focus, with meditation, the singular purpose of remembering something could cut through the usual chorus of memories with ease. If she was ever put in a tight spot, being able to recall something without recourse to tomes and notes would surely only be an advantage, too. Despite these two arguments continually going on in her head, necessity ruled; memorization it was unless the work was critical, at least until money brought her books and sheaves of paper once more. The large tub of camphor wax went onto a high shelf – counter-intuitively, until one thought about it for a bit, that would be one of the last things to be prepared. It would, after all, be a criminal waste of energy, apparatus and firewood to have it kept constantly liquid when she didn't have anything to blend into it, and economy was always a consideration. The worktops were made of some pale tile that showed up every ingredient and spill quite clearly; whoever had designed the room had put some thought into its use, at least. With a quiet, contented sigh, Alses settled herself onto a high stool and pulled a basket of drippy taka moss and a knife towards her, set on paring all the wriggly tendrils of the stuff out into broad mats, ready for immersion in alcohol.

[Alses]

Alses hadn't reckoned on one particular property of taka moss when she first began, and was soon dealt a rather sticky reminder. 'Glue,' she thought ruefully. 'Syna-cursed sticky glue.' Her knife, hands, arms and even forehead (the victim of an ill-timed swipe with the back of one hand) all had moss clinging on for grim death, the adhesive clinging as enthusiastically to skin as it more generally did to rock. Alcohol dissolved the glue, that much she knew – but this was wood alcohol, rather nasty stuff. Alses had no desire to go back to a doctor with another case of self-inflicted poisoning – especially since the only one she knew was, by now, back in Kalinor with the rest of his kind. A shame, that. He'd been a fascinating study, intelligent and quick-witted. She'd had to work to get anything out of him – and she was proud of what she'd managed, especially in the wake of getting herself poisoned with kuhari. She shook her head; there was a time and a place for dwelling on absent acquaintances, and here wasn't it. She had a job to do for the Towers Respite, and by Syna's infinite radiance she was going to see it done. Grand thoughts, which would have been far more impressive had she not been stuck with patches of taka moss all over her arms and forehead. Decidedly not the image of a divine Ethaefal. With a sigh, Alses set to with her rarely-used knife, using it to cut and tease and lever the clinging moss from her arms. At some point, presumably, it would need sharpening, but since it was used so rarely it still retained a fine edge and did a sterling job of freeing most of her from gooey, sticky ingredient. She was rather leery of using her knife on or even near her face – one slip could send it into her eye, and Ethaefal regeneration or no, she wasn't sure if that was a) survivable or b) healable. Besides, who would want an Ethaefal with one eye? And perhaps a Konti with one eye, too; broken legs had carried easily enough over the Change before now, back when she was in Tathis Arenn's tower and forgot she was Konti, trying to leap the stairs in a form totally unsuited for the impact. A hobbling Ethaefal was no-one's idea of a divine servant, just the same as if she lost an eye. They were supposed to be beautiful and perfect in a way that transcended mortal beauty – the sort of words people used for bowed women and those with one eye was generally 'hag' or 'crone', and that carried all sorts of ugly connections with it, a word cargoed with misery and fear. Alses' lips quirked. 'Such melodrama,' a part of her chided. 'To work, if we want kina for treats!' A flash of true-blue light wrapped around the remaining patches on her face in rapid sequence; they shrivelled and fell off, dry as if they'd been next to her skin for a day, the glue having lost its stickiness in an instant. Useless as ingredients now, of course, but there was always taka moss somewhere in Lhavit; the stuff grew in every shady, moist corner after all. Even the disgusting stinks of the kitchens behind her – roasting beef, fish and vegetables to name but a few of the scents that billowed in on wisps of reeking steam – faded somewhat as she concentrated fully on the task at hand, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as her fingers pressed and kneaded and teased and untangled the dense mats of greenery, unravelling the twisting strands of taka moss and dropping them into a round-bottomed reducing flask. It was monotonous, repetitive work, but it didn't allow her mind to wander; one wrong finger would see the whole lot stuck fast to her again. Focus, that was what one needed. Focus and method. There was a way of looking at the world that could make everything palatable, even fun. Alses was an unashamed, unabashed mage, a sorceress of many lives and scattershot recollections of many disciplines of magic. For her, the trick was to see the magic in the things she was doing, or how the task might benefit her studies in some small, material way. Focus and method was important for magecraft, the sheer concentration on measured detail essential for the making of true artifacts that would hold their power until the world was swallowed up by the Void – and perhaps even beyond. The twisting, twining moss fragments were almost as slippery as the tertiary djed conduits in a nascent artifact, twisting and jinking away from her sight and fingers both, making it good, if unorthodox, practice. It was a puzzle, a test for her agile mind; predicting where each coiling fragment would spring next, the dance of fingers and teasing nails, gently pulling it all apart and carpeting the flask in green. It took a while – several bells, at least, before she'd assembled anything resembling a respectable amount. Her hands reached for the spigot of the nearest barrel of wood alcohol, and then paused as a thought struck her. 'Hold on, Alse...I still don't know what sort of heat I need for all of this. Reducing flame, yes, but at what point does that become a denaturing flame for this stuff? Better test it out first.' The thought brought an involuntary smile to her lips even as she tipped out most of the green tendrils into a careful pile some way away, so as not to get it confused with the other ingredients. One pile of diminutive greenery looked a lot like another, after all, and she didn't have a magnifying lens handy for identification purposes. 'A test of the test batch?' she mused, with a grin. 'Where will it end?' Careful, steady hands manoeuvred the flask's neck to rest flush with the keg spigot. Alses knew just enough about the stuff not to treat it lightly; it caused all sorts of problems if breathed in or otherwise absorbed. The smell of the fumes escaping around the neck and spigot when she opened the tap made her feel funny and light-headed, a jolting instant of unreality that left her feeling quite...strange. Coughing, she held the flask up to eye level. What was inside didn't exactly inspire awe and fear; a few inches of clear liquid in which the taka moss pieces floated lazily, settling down gently through the alcohol to rest once more on the bottom. It looked no more dangerous than a flask of pondwater – but Alses knew that just a bit of wood alcohol in someone's evening wine would – if they were fortunate – take their sight. If they were unfortunate, then their life. It was amazing how blithe people were sometimes. With her horizons widened by the gardening and her stumbling experiments in philtering, she could see at least seven poisonous plants and precursors just from her window, looking out into the Respite gardens, and there were probably many, many more out there that she lacked the skill and specialist knowledge to find. Kindling wood would do for this little practice run; she had such a small amount to reduce down it wasn't worth starting a bigger fire. Dry punkwood and birch twigs caught easily, the hungry flames licking up towards the iron plate that insulated the flask from the naked fire. Stillness and calm, that was the next step. She shifted minutely on top of the stool, wishing it was a bit larger and more stable so she could draw her legs up to the same level. The kitchen stench billowed again, mixed with the smell of woodsmoke and the oddly pervasive aroma of punkwood; Alses' sensitive nose twitched with a nascent sneeze. It gathered momentum unstoppably, boiling down the passages to emerge with an explosive burst of sound and convulsive movement. The stool rocked, for a moment it looked as if Ethaefal and chair would go crashing to the floor in a tangle of spokes and limbs, but after a brief period where it teetered on the brink, the two of them remained upright, wobbling slowly back to stability.

[Alses]

Absently, Alses mopped at her eyes; even closed, some tears had forced themselves past her eyelids and were even now tickling her cheeks, yet another distraction from what she needed to do. Take two, then. Breathing deeply was out, since that had caused the first explosive sneeze that completely shattered her concentration. Heartbeat, then, that old standby, steady and dependable. 'And relax, Alse...' she thought to herself. 'You're not in the Towers Respite. We're back in Zeltiva, five and a half years ago. We've just relearned how to string sentences together in Common, and this was our first lesson. The first bit of our transition from pet to apprentice. Remember?' Alses did remember, of course, sharper than thought and sweeter than all but a handful of memories. It had been a darkened room, just a few reflections of light from the open door catching on gilt and plush upholstery, giving it a sort of intimidating, brooding grandeur. She'd been afraid, then – the dark was absolute terror and panic – and more than that, pain, the tearing slash of realisation that she might never again see the endless light of the Goldenlands, a thought she shied away from almost every night, even now. Only Tathis Arenn's voice, rich as red wine and smoother than fine brandy, had enticed her across the threshold. He'd directed her, directions so painfully precise that he had to have paced out each step for her beforehand, to an odd variant of a courting-chair he was so fond of, one of those unusual pieces of furniture designed for three people that seemed to have taken some inspiration from the spinning wheel. With her night-sight being so atrocious, she hadn't even noticed him sitting almost directly behind her, in one of the courting-chair's other seats, until his warm hands had landed on her shoulders, making her jump almost out of her skin. A slight smile at that memory, then a recollection of the purpose of the exercise. Ba-thump, ba-thump, ba-thump. There it went, steady and eternal. Her heartbeat, pulsing the instants, the ever-changing now through every part of her body. The internal recognition of the primacy of Tanroa's river, if one wanted to be pretentious. Alses didn't care overmuch for that, but the heartbeat was the perfect internal focus, and moreover the meditation tool she was far and away the most familiar with. The dull rush of blood pulsing through her arteries and veins drove most other thoughts and concerns from her mind; even the snap and crackle of the little fire heating her flask died away to a whisper, and then not even that. In the warm, red-lit dimness behind her eyelids, with the steady susurrus of blood rushing to and fro, Alses reached inside herself, an imperious mental hand reaching down in commanding entreaty towards the nova flare that was her soul, a brilliant and unyielding blaze garlanded with lesser fires that were her reserves of expendable djed. It responded, quicker and quicker these days, eager to come to her call, a rising wave of ethereal flame that brought knowledge rather than ruin. This was what Chiona Dusk would never appreciate, not in a million years; her magic was all dreadfully precise and fussy, directed as though it had a drill major after every single erg of djed expanded. She had no inkling whatever of the sheer joy of sight beyond sight; to her it was a birthright and a duty, not a wondrous power that should be enjoyed whenever it was used. 'Fenrad had the right of it,' she thought fiercely, wickedly, even as the world began to saturate itself in richly melting colours, like some of the water-paintings she'd seen in the Basilika. She'd almost cried when first she'd observed the artist take a beautiful picture, heavy with pigment and rich with layers of meaning, a canvas so layered and sculpted that she wanted to run her hands through the mountains and canyons of paint he'd built up, and chuck a bucket of water at it. She'd been unable to look at what was surely a ruin for long, long minutes. When she did eventually look, it was with no small amazement – what had been clear and precise was now muffled and blurred, the colours and lines melting and mixing into one another, but nonetheless still retaining flashes of what had been there before. Yes, Fenrad had had the shape of the world in his mind when he'd written about the delight of magic properly practised, and never mind that later philosophers had picked over his writings and torn them to shreds with their newer arguments. Gannets picking at the corpse of a giant. It was gannets that did that, yes? Alses shook her head; what did it matter, after all? Synchronised to the deeper beauty of the world, the sparkling veils and mists that hung, all unseen, about every living and unliving thing on the face of the world, Alses opened her eyes – and all her other senses, too. The harder path, perhaps, but one she'd been set on very early in her practice, so sight developed alongside sound, touch, taste and smell, rather than sequentially, one after another. To her, it would seem strange to see confidence as pale blue spires and lines in an aura without the faint smell of carnations, or to hear jealousy as a subliminal rumble thrilling up from her feet sans a pinching, electric prickle. Heat tickled the bed of her nails – an odd location, to be sure, but there were far odder things in magic. The shimmering paleness of the alcohol surrounded, encapsulated, enveloped the still-living emerald glimmer of the moss, the subliminal whisper of life barely audible to her thanks to the muffling poison of the solvent. She was proud of herself for remembering the technical term. Under that swirl of translucent gray and green – glass, by virtue of its stability and elemental self-contentment, had virtually no aura to speak of – there crackled and snapped and raced the little tame kindling fire, a pathetic shadow of the great blaze of the sun or even those which fired the kitchen ovens, but perfectly sufficient for her purposes. Watching the transfer of djed between two phenomena was always a fascinating thing to observe, even if the finer niceties of it were completely lost to her Sight. The needling spires of the fire, flickering and ephemeral and yet orders of magnitude brighter to her vision than the far more stable alcohol and moss auras, stabbed and prodded at them, giving up more and more djed until they, too, began to glow, softly at first and then brighter and brighter as the influx of thermal energy began to disrupt their gentle, placid stability, pressing them together, breaking them apart, setting up currents and countercurrents that set the liquid gently moving, a continual roiling boil of gray mingled with tumbling green, rising and falling and fighting, all inside the smugly inert confines of the reducing flask and funnel. Alses moved closer, eyes intent and a little distant, focusing on the progressive discoherency of the alcohol aura, how the shimmering curtains mixed and mingled and fused as they rose up the tapering flask and condensing funnel, a commingling melange of pearl-gray and green as the whole became infused with something of the character of its disparate parts, how the webworks became clearer, more complex and more defined as the water was left behind in the reducing flask. Moving slowly and uncertainly, so as not to break her fragile concentration, she added a few more pieces of wood to the kindling-fire, firmly keeping a weather-eye on the character of the curling whorls of gas that lazily moved through the condenser. Too great a fire beneath her flask and water vapour would start to boil along with the alcohol, contaminating the mix, too little and nothing would happen, the perennial thermal tradeoff of philtering. Not for the first time, Alses wished for reimancy to be part of her repertoire; with command of the basic elements of the world, things like control of the flame temperature, the purity of the water and the gas pressure in reaction vessels would be – well, if not child's play then at least much more easily controllable than they were at present. Having unknown variables in her work, even something as mundane as chilblain salve, was not something Alses liked; they invited chaos and disaster if not carefully watched.

[Alses]

Watching the boil was both interesting and necessary – her auristic skills granted her deeper levels of knowledge than most philterers could achieve, able to monitor the changes in state and temperature through the variations in their auras rather than having to rely on sight, smell and (occasionally) touch. All the practice seemed to have paid off; her auristic talent was now capable of actually working without a line-of-sight to her target. All in all, it was a very strange sensation, having three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of vision in varying technicolour shades. It wasn't a shock, exactly; that particular ability had been slowly developing (albeit fuzzily) for quite some time, but still, it was an unusual feeling all the same. Useful, though – right now it meant she could turn her attention to other matters whilst still keeping an eye on that test batch of moss extract – at least, for the more egregious problems, anyway. Time, then, whilst the alcohol and moss bubbled and simmered away, commingling and tumbling through one another and perfusing the whole with their combined character, to look at the other ingredients for chilblain salve. She ravelled the jaggedy mint leaves through wondering fingers, delighting at the soft and yielding touch of it, at the cool pale-green waves of its aura that filled her mouth with the taste of it and her nose with the fresh, clean scent. That brought a smile to her face, and she set one leaf aside; the phantom scent that filled her nostrils completely obliterated all the disgusting, unpleasant odours of the kitchens all around her, blasting them away on a tide of minty freshness. For the first time since setting foot in Cook's kitchens, Alses took a deep breath, nose filled with the tingling smell of mint and, blessedly, nothing else. There was also calamine powder, so finely ground it behaved almost like a liquid, running fluidly over her inquisitive hands and back into the bowl, and finally heavy earthenware pots of leiyona sap, always faintly warm to the touch and – she knew from prior experience with the stuff - an astringent, antiseptic sort of smell that attacked her sinuses with a will. The recipe, the steps she would need to follow, slotted itself together in her head. First, one prepared taka moss extract, for a more powerful easement of the chilblain pain, and whilst that was simmering away... One hand reached for the heavy granite mortar and pestle whilst the other darted to one of the piles of greenery that surrounded her, picking up a small handful of mint leaves, scattering them into the base of the mortar. Seen like that, they looked very small indeed. Alses shrugged and picked up the heavy pestle – then paused, casting around for the small bowl of grinding sand that generally went with the apparatus. “A-ha!” she exclaimed after a moment, flourishing the tiny bowl triumphantly before scattering a small amount of the stuff in with the mint leaves. Grinding up leaves in alcohol was a slow and monotonous, repetitive task, rhythmically pounding them with the pestle until they became a sort of noxious, mushy paste, but it had to be done, rocking the pestle back and forth, the shuddering vibrations humming up her arm as the sand and steady motion ground the mint leaves down into a fine paste. The whole object of the exercise was to further homogenize the mint and release more of the essential oils. That showed in the aura – she'd found recently, to her unbridled delight, that she could hold more than one in her sight at once with relative ease - smoothing out its striations and more complex structure in the wake of the pestle's pressure, rendering it down to the most basic of elements, a faintly luminous pale green sea undisturbed by feature, current or complexity of any sort. It also did a sterling job breaking down any lumps and bumps in the resulting slurry; nobody liked lumpy medicinal cream, probably for good reason. Muslin gauze over a flask neck – the kitchens were quite short on beakers, alas, alas – then gently pour...and then wrap and press the grainy, gritty dregs, leaves wrung of their vitality mixed in with the grinding sand that had so broken them under the pestle's iron heel. More green liquid, this one several shades brighter than the stuff boiling up in wood alcohol. Only to be expected of course, fresh-pressed natural versus distilled concentrate, but there had to be a reason why one was richly green and the other a sort of pallid water with just a tint of emerald at the edge of sight. The green wasn't any indicator of strength, as far as Alses could tell, quite the reverse, in fact – the concentrate of mint, for example, was practically explosive in its flavour, whilst the simple press was rather more gentle in its effect. Then again, there were times, when dealing with plant extracts, when the green colour didn't seem to have any bearing whatever on strength. An inert material of some kind, perhaps? An impurity, a pervasive contaminant? Something to experiment on maybe, when she found time. It went into the rapidly-swelling 'mental notes' box inside her head, something that was already bulging at the seams with ideas and observations that needed more in-depth study. It was filling up far faster than she had time, inclination or ability to solve the mysteries and curiosities the world threw at her. A good thing, of course – she'd not be bored, at least. Absently, she selected a few pieces of birch kindling from her pile and tossed them under her moss extract, into the dying embers of the fire there. It was nearly done, by her auristic estimation, just needed a final little kick to wring the last out of the mixture, a final lick of flame to get the most out of it. Really, being able to see the auras of her philtering reactions, to taste and smell and hear and feel the flow of shimmering liquid, the blocky solidity of various reagents boiling and sublimating into ephemeral gas, the trickling phantom tickle of condensates running shivering fingers up and down her spine...all that and more, at least in some cases, was absolutely indispensable for her particular brand of the discipline. She was, after all, mostly self-taught, aside from the odd bits of advice passed on by Cook and Tian J'net whenever her footsteps took her back to the Starry Chalice, so her methods of doing things might have seemed very strange indeed, to those inaugurated into the mysteries of potion and phial – and indeed more often than not resulted in failure, at least with the more complex preparations. Or rather, one more complex preparation in particular. Infusing magic into philtered solutions, ah, that was the prize, richly to be desired! Such complexities of djed had to be involved in their creation; to know those secrets would be a grand thing indeed! To be able to hand to a person in the street a bottle of philtered water and through its agency let them wander through the beautiful deeper mysteries of the world! What works of art and literature might be produced from such glorious sights, from the charivari of colour and shade and hue mingling and melting, mixing and rising and falling in concert with a symphony of many-splendoured sound? Ah, but then, it could be put to nefarious uses, too. Seeing the Shinya without them seeing you, for instance. Few places in Lhavit even bothered with private guards, not with the loyal Shinya standing vigilant guard, and every one of them a trained Projectionist. Evade them... Best to ensure it only went to reputable people, therefore – but how did you tell someone was reputable? Rely on their station in life, their connections? Have their friends vouch for them? That'd never work. What about - Alses shook her head; that sort of circuitous thought wasn't helpful in the least. But still, that would be an interesting challenge, would it not? To infuse plain old boring water – fresh from the glacial snowmelt or the volcanic heart of Kalea no matter – with the subtle art of magic. A rainbow in every phial. She made a face at that last – it sounded dreadful, even in her own head. “Syna's flaming knickers!” Alses swore; the birch kindling must have been a particularly resinous example of the breed and had heated the small flask to excess – wood alcohol and the sad remnants of taka moss were boiling on a tower of bubbles up into the condensing horn – and that would never do. Swift action saw Alses juggling the hot flask for a moment before setting it safely down on the workbench, shaking slightly-burned hands even as she contemplated her little test-batch, anxiously extending her senses and ignoring the cherry-red glow of the iron tripod, in order to test the levels of contamination. Not high, to her small relief – a little muddying of the auristic waters, so to speak, a slight fuzzing of the homogeneity of it all. Nothing that would cause undue problems – and besides, it was only the test batch! Best to get all the mistakes out at the beginning – she'd nearly simply poured the ground mint into the flask grinding sand and all, for example, and it was only serendipity that had led her eye to fall on the gauzes at the appropriate moment. Yes, definitely best to catch these things before Cook had her in full production. Wasting the Respite's resources was a sin, after all, up there with the greatest of them.

[Alses]

Now came the final step: blending. The merging of all the ingredients into a harmonious whole, to create something that was greater than the sum of its parts, the very heart of philtering, in a way. With a sigh, Alses scooped out a dollop of the greasy camphor wax and set it to heating gently, aiming to soften and melt it slowly, evenly, as per Cook's off-hand instructions. He was perhaps not the best possible teacher for this sort of thing, forever vanishing off to deal with some kitchen emergency and giving her only the briefest of instructions, but at least that let her work – and so learn – at her own pace. Mistakes were made, true, but by the time he returned to check on her she'd generally managed to figure out what had gone wrong with her preparation of whichever one of the manifold gloopy preparations the Respite used to keep ticking merrily along, and so could present him with a pristine new batch in fairly short order. That generally smoothed things over pretty well. As the orange spires of flame gave up their energy to the camphor wax, it began to soften, become transparent, bead with liquid droplets of itself and finally to melt in earnest, losing the solid rigidity of its structure and becoming freer, more chaotic, swirls and whorls developing in its aura as a consequence of the steady input of energy from the fire below. Dubiously, Alses swirled a small wooden stick through the melting wax – despite the melt looking smooth and clear to the eye, the stick dragged a rumpled skin behind it as it moved, a surefire sign that the wax wasn't hot enough yet. More twigs went on her little fire, it licked higher, shone brighter and vapour began to curl off the camphor, filling the room with a strong – although not entirely disagreeable – smell. A quick swirl established that the skin of wax had now completely melted – consistent with her auristic observations, but it was always good to have second confirmation – and so the melt was ready to accept the other ingredients. First – although as far as Alses knew it didn't actually make much difference which order the constituent parts were added – came the taka moss extract, a stream of pale liquid commingling with the viscous melt as she stirred, clockwise then anticlockwise figures-of-eight in the approved mixing fashion, tumbling the two liquids together until they blended into one, inseparable, at least under normal conditions. There probably was a reverse reaction, true, but what use that would be was another matter entirely. Then, the pressed mint, but that was an altogether trickier proposition; it sizzled and spat, sending a spray of molten wax globules up against Alses' skin – the fire was evidently too vigorous, beginning to boil the glutinous mixture, which would never do. She hissed through her teeth and flinched as hot wax and mint liquid spattered her arms and face, eyes reflexively slamming shut. A bit of water soon brought the fire back under control, curbing its tearaway tendencies in a cloud of steam and a fusillade of affronted hissing and crackling from the remaining wood. Too bad; the stuff would learn who was master here! Absently, Alses rubbed at the puddles and thin runnels of camphor wax that had now settled on her arms and face, crumbling and flaking off her fire-opal skin under the pressure of her hands. Fortunately, the leiyona sap went in without incident, sending a wave of red and gold through the developing aura. Then, face set and whilst holding her breath against the perfidious dust that rose in puffing, chalky clouds from the finely-milled calamine powder, she stirred that into the turgid surface, watching the whitish dust – behaving almost like a liquid, so finely-ground was each individual grain – sink and melt and vanish into the depths of the molten wax. The miniscule granules soon formed a glazed layer at the bottom of the container, however, a mildly worrying development, and vigorous scraping was needed to free them and get them to circulate once more, slowly dissolving under the steady(ish) heat and continual motion. Effective and useful it might have been, but the continual stirring was taking its toll on her poor hand, sending spikes of cramping pain surging up her arm. She'd already used Tanroa's Blessing to take the pain away once, giving it the equivalent of a full day's rest, but, as she'd found to her cost years before, it wasn't something that could be repeated over and over. Blasted divine restrictions. Her right hand, by contrast with the smooth and relatively practised movements of the left, was awkward and jerky; the stick felt wrong, somehow, alien even, and her fingers couldn't really find a comfortable purchase on it. She scowled, but the philtering reactions didn't care a jot for discomfort, proceeding at their own pace without heeding their instigator, and so she needed to keep up if she wanted a bowlful of chilblain salve, rather than, say, useless glop. Finally, after what felt like at least twenty chimes of continual stirring and juggling the fire level, the last lump had gone from the mix, the last bit of gritty glaze dislodged, broken up and dissolved, and the vapours rising from it had taken on an altogether more complex nature, mixing in hints of mint and astringent antiseptic from the leiyona. Very medicinal, from her limited experience. With a sigh of relief, Alses tipped a bit of water over her fire – sending up more billows of steam to twist and disperse amongst the rafters – and took the bowl of slowly-congealing chilblain salve (hopefully) off the heat. A quick burst of true-blue light – the joys of being an Ethaefal at work again – saw it cooled, as though it had stood at room temperature for a day. Cautiously, she peeped inside, and a broad smile split her face as she beheld the fruits of her labours. Faintly green in colour, viscous and thick, a semisolid wax fragrant with camphor and mint and faintly warm to the touch – the leiyona in action again, surely – it looked exactly as it should do, at least judging from the salve samples she'd seen from the Respite's dwindling stocks. A quick swipe of it across her arm gave her the expected tingling warmth and gentle coolness she'd expected, too. Time to check with the ultimate arbiter of such things, then. A Carefully, magisterially, supremely indifferent to the swirling bustle all around him, Cook dipped one stubby finger into the salve and rubbed it between his fingers, eyes closed – the better to focus his senses. “Nice and smooth,” he opined after a moment. “Smells right, too.” He opened his eyes, and looked at her properly. One corner of his mouth turned up. “Next time, ye might want t'put the leiyona sap in first. Raises the boiling point of the mess so's you don't get splattered later on.” Alses flushed; really, she should have known that. “Yes, Cook,” she replied obediently. “Speaking of, how much of the stuff did you want me to make?” He turned, surprised, having already made motions to return to the hurly-burly of his kitchens. “What? Oh, just use up the ingredients in the room and see how much you make. Th'salve keeps for ever in any case, so whatever we don't use this winter we can crate up fer the next. Chop chop!” Alses sighed, though tolerantly, and bulled her way through the argument of sous-chefs and back to the little still-room. Production of the chilblain salve en-masse would involve the same basic principles as her little test, of course, but massively scaled up. Instead of birch twigs and punkwood, whole logs would feed the hungry blazes. Instead of drops of this and dabs of that, entire kegs of liquid would mingle and fuse together. Instead of beakers and bowls, the cavernous interior of the still, condensing horn and sieve plates removed to turn it into an enormous cauldron of sorts. Fun, in other words. The joy of improvisation. END

[Elysium]

Character: Alses
XP:
Philtering +5
Observation +2
Auristics +3

Lores:
Recipe: Chilblain Salve
Taka Moss, Otherwise Known as Glue
The Benefits of Auristics and Philtering
Chilblain Salve, “Leiyona Sap Goes in First”

Other: This is remarkably well-written. You certainly earned all five experience points. I would have liked to see more on expansion on her djed depletion; Philtering using Auristics is no easy feat! Both require a great deal of concentration. Still, this is a wonderful read and very realistic. If you have and comments of concerns, feel free to PM me!

and so, the journey continues...