Inside the Hearth Behind the Stars, the air shimmered with the golden glow of enchanted sconces, their soft illumination casting restless shadows across the stone walls. The scent of exotic spices—cardamom, saffron, and a trace of something unidentifiable yet strangely nostalgic—hung thick, curling through the air like ghostly tendrils of old memories. It was the sort of warmth that promised comfort, but tonight, it did little to soften the tension simmering just beneath the surface of conversation.
The Hearth had once, long ago, been a refuge, a clandestine sanctuary tucked away from the prying eyes of those who might seek to silence the voices within it. Here, old comrades reunited over hushed schemes and whispered confessions, their words threading between the ever-present hum of latent magic embedded in the very foundation of the place. Tonight, however, the gathering carried a weight beyond nostalgia—a dangerous edge, a crackling tension reminiscent of a spark teetering near dry tinder. Even within these protective walls, words held power, and power, if mishandled, could ignite ruin.
Krungus sat at the head of the large wooden table, his red-lensed glasses catching and refracting the flickering light, momentarily obscuring his already inscrutable expression. Before him lay a haphazard collection of blueprints and parchment, each marked with precise mechanical sketches—intricate diagrams of brass components, etchings of minuscule gears and arcane sigils meant to weave together artifice and magic into something altogether new. Scattered among the plans were small metal parts, tools with worn handles, and a few half-finished constructs, glimmering faintly with untapped potential.
Across from him, Bahumbus leaned back in his chair with deliberate nonchalance, though the tension in his shoulders betrayed his unease. His arms were crossed, fingers drumming a restless rhythm against his sleeve, while in his other hand, he absently twirled a tiny gear between his fingers. His brow was furrowed, skepticism etched deep into the lines of his face as he studied the proposal sprawled before him.
“Bahumbus, you’re overthinking this,” Krungus said at last, his voice bearing the careful patience of someone who had explained something one too many times. “A simple construct, that’s all I’m asking for. Something small, quick, able to follow the trail of her old magic without drawing too much attention.”
Bahumbus let out a scoff, shaking his head as he tossed the tiny gear onto the table. It rolled to a stop amidst the scattered blueprints. “Oh, of course. Something simple. Just a tiny, inconspicuous mechanical bat to go sniffing after Na’atasha, one of the most dangerously unpredictable people we’ve ever known. And when she finds out who sent it? Do you have any idea what she’s capable of doing to me?” He jabbed a finger at Krungus, his expression dark with memory. “You remember what happened last time I got tangled in one of her little experiments?”
Krungus exhaled slowly, rubbing his temple as if warding off a coming headache. “You mean when she had you seeing colors that don’t exist for three months? You survived, didn’t you?”
Bahumbus slammed a fist on the table, rattling the metal components. “Three months, Krungus! Three months where every time I closed my eyes, I saw my own thoughts melt into fractals. Do you have any idea what it’s like to dream of infinite cascading versions of yourself, each one whispering secrets you were never meant to hear? My mind still isn’t the same!”
Krungus waved dismissively. “You’re exaggerating. And besides, she’s had nine thousand years to mellow out.”
“Oh, right. That’s what she’s known for. Mellowing out,” Bahumbus deadpanned. “Like the time she turned that poor merchant’s shop into a living hallucination, where customers wandered in and forgot what they were looking for until they starved to death?”
“An unfortunate incident,” Krungus admitted.
“Or the time she convinced a whole village they were butterflies, and they spent a week fluttering around naked in the fields, utterly convinced they could sip nectar from flowers?”
“Creative, I’ll grant you.”
“Krungus!” Bahumbus’s voice rose in exasperation. “She does not just mess with plants—she messes with minds. She bends perception like a mad dreamweaver. People who cross her don’t get hexed, they get rewritten. You want to send a bat to track her magic? She’ll turn it into a songbird that only sings in forgotten languages. Or worse, she’ll make sure it comes back and fills our heads with riddles we’ll spend the next decade unraveling!”
Krungus steepled his fingers, his expression calculating. “Which is precisely why we need to find her first. If she’s still alive, she’s either hiding for a reason, or she’s preparing something. Either way, we can’t sit back and hope she doesn’t come looking for us. Her old magic is still out there, lingering, warping reality. That’s our best lead. And you, my dear brother, are the only one skilled enough to craft something small and unobtrusive enough to track that magic without setting off every surreal nightmare she might have waiting. I trust your work. Do you trust mine?”
Bahumbus hesitated. He did trust Krungus, in the way one trusted a particularly reckless but brilliant older sibling. But this felt like prodding a sleeping god and hoping it wouldn’t wake up laughing.
“And what happens when she finds it?” Bahumbus pressed, voice quieter now. “What if she follows it back here? What if she decides she doesn’t want to be found?”
Krungus tilted his head, a slow smile spreading across his lips. “Then we’ll know exactly where she is, won’t we?”
Bahumbus groaned, running a hand through his unruly hair. “You’re going to get me lost in an eternal loop of my own memories, I know it. I’ll wake up one day convinced I’m still a child, staring at an infinite parade of my own decisions.”
“Only if she finds out it was you who made it,” Krungus pointed out, ever the optimist. “I’ll make sure the tracking spell is woven separately, no artificer traces left behind. She’ll think it’s just some stray magical anomaly.”
“And if she still traces it back to me?”
Krungus smirked. “Then I owe you a very expensive drink and an even more expensive set of mental wards.”
Bahumbus sighed, long and deep. He tapped a finger on the table, considering the blueprints before him. “Fine. But if I end up questioning the nature of my own reality because of this, I’m holding you personally responsible.”
Krungus grinned. “Deal.”
She looked like a woman stretched too thin across the centuries, her body a fragile scaffolding of bones wrapped in parchment skin, as if time had tried to take her piece by piece but never quite finished the job. Gaunt to the point of skeletal, she moved with the slow, deliberate grace of something that had forgotten how to be human but remembered how to endure. Her hair, a tangled mess of dark curls, was streaked with white, not in the manner of wisdom but in the way that dead roots push up through cracked earth. Her eyes—dark, sunken, ringed with the bruised hues of sleepless nights—were deep wells that had long since stopped reflecting light. Of all those granted Sharrzaman’s false immortality, she alone seemed to have paid a price for it. Wrinkled, withered, a body fraying at the edges while the others remained frozen in time.
She hunched over a deep clay bowl, its rim cracked, its interior stained with a lifetime of potions that had seeped into its pores. The thick, swirling liquid inside pulsed with shifting colors—murky purple one moment, viridian green the next, then back to something like the color of moonlight through thick fog. It had no fixed hue, no steady form, only movement. A potion meant for visions, but not the kind that brought enlightenment—this was something else. Something deeper.
Her fingers, long and delicate but stained at the tips from centuries of alchemy, worked without hesitation, plucking ingredients from the chaos of her cluttered workspace. A twist of lamb's gut, still slightly slick with the oils of a creature that had lived in fear before it was butchered. A shard of mirror, dulled at the edges, reflecting the distorted image of whoever looked into it. A dried moth, its wings intact but so brittle they crumbled as they hit the surface of the potion.
She reached for a bundle of withered hemlock flowers, their once-vibrant purple now shriveled into something closer to black. One by one, she plucked the petals, letting them drift into the mix, watching as they dissolved, turning the liquid briefly blood-red before it shifted back to green. Then, she took a single scale from a snake that had died swallowing its own tail, a symbol of eternity folding in on itself, and crushed it between her fingers, letting the dust fall like a whisper into the brew.
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Symbolism was the cornerstone of her craft, a truth she had unraveled millennia ago. She had learned that power did not always come from the physical essence of an ingredient, but from the significance it carried. A thing could hold more magic in what it represented than in what it actually was. This was the foundation of her understanding, the secret to crafting potions that not only changed the body but twisted reality itself.
It was not enough to mix plants and minerals, to rely on mere chemical reaction. Magic was not a science to be measured; it was a force shaped by the weight of meaning, by the reverence placed in a thing. A flower picked at the height of bloom had one effect, but one plucked from a graveyard, whispering with the grief of mourners, carried a different kind of power. The essence of an object was not fixed—it shifted with perception, molded by history and intent. To understand this was to grasp the true art of alchemy.
Over centuries, she had tested the boundaries between the tangible and the conceptual, refining her methods through trial and error. She had seen how a single item, steeped in memory or longing, could ripple through a spell like a stone cast into water. A candle melted in prayer burned brighter than one lit without thought. A lock of hair from a lover betrayed did more than any herb for a potion of sorrow. The key was not just in selection but in recognition—knowing which fragments of the world carried weight beyond their form, which echoes of the past could be woven into something new. Magic did not live in the hand that stirred the brew, nor in the fire that boiled it, but in the story bound to the things inside.
Other alchemists sought reaction; she pursued transformation. Where they saw a balance of reagents, she saw a language of intent. To her, magic was not just chemistry—it was belief, shaped by will and sharpened by understanding. The world was not made of inert materials but of meaning waiting to be harnessed. A thing's past shaped its future, and so alchemy was not a matter of formulas, but of reading the hidden language of symbols. It was a force of conviction, turning forgotten words, lost dreams, and old grief into something potent, something undeniable.
The potion thickened, the scent curling up from the bowl—something sharp, acrid, like rain-soaked earth mixed with overripe fruit. She reached for the final ingredient: a scrap of parchment covered in faded ink, an old curse or a broken promise, its words smudged beyond recognition. Without hesitation, she tore it into strips and let them flutter down, where the liquid licked them up, absorbing the lost meaning into itself.
The mixture shuddered. The colors roiled, shifting faster now, flickering through the spectrum like a storm barely contained in liquid form. The potion was ready. Not for simple hallucinations, not for fleeting glimpses of another world, but for the deep kind of seeing—the kind that dragged the imbiber beyond thought, beyond flesh, beyond time.
Na’atasha watched it settle, then allowed a thin, crooked smile to creep across her lips.
“Perfect.”
Na’atasha reached into the folds of her robes and produced a tiny crystal dropper, its delicate glass shimmering in the dim light. With practiced ease, she dipped it into the swirling potion and drew up a single drop of the shifting liquid. Without hesitation, she lifted the dropper to her eye and let the droplet fall.
The world around her did not dissolve so much as it unraveled, folding in on itself like ink sinking into water. She did not move, and yet she was somewhere else.
The plane she entered was neither dark nor light, neither solid nor formless. It pulsed, a space between realities, woven from the remnants of lost thoughts and lingering regrets. And there, reclining with the ease of someone who had always been meant to be in this space, was Sharrzaman.
His presence was neither sudden nor startling. He was simply there, as though he had always been waiting, his form at once familiar and utterly distant. His robes, finer than they had ever been in life, shimmered with a magic that should have felt oppressive, but instead settled over the plane like a veil. He sat with one leg crossed over the other, watching her with the lazy amusement of a man for whom time held no consequence.
"You haven’t changed a bit," he murmured, his voice dripping with the same old arrogance, the same false ease. "Not that you ever truly could."
Na’atasha regarded him with a smirk, unbothered, unfazed. "And yet, you seem right at home here. How long have you been waiting?"
Sharrzaman chuckled. "Oh, you know me. I find ways into the places I shouldn’t be. The real question is—how long will you let me stay?"
She crossed her arms, unimpressed. "That depends entirely on what you’ve come to tell me."
He leaned forward slightly, the air around him humming with something just beneath the surface. "The Number is reforming. Scattered pieces slowly finding their way back together. And I imagine they will try to contact you."
Na’atasha laughed, a sharp and cruel sound that echoed strangely in the space between them. "Good. I was running low on test subjects."
Sharrzaman smiled, the expression holding something almost fond, almost indulgent. "That is what I like about you, Na’atasha. Always thinking ahead."
Na’atasha tilted her head, eyes narrowing slightly. "You didn’t come here just to gossip. What do you want from me, Sharrzaman?"
For a moment, he only watched her, his gaze unreadable. Then, he smiled, slow and deliberate, the kind of expression that slithered rather than bloomed.
"I want you to remember," he said. "When the time comes, you will have to choose. And I wonder—when it does, will you pick knowledge or power?"
Before she could ask what he meant, the vision wavered. The plane around her rippled like disturbed water, and then, without warning, she was hurled from it. Her mind reeled as the sensation of falling took hold, her consciousness snapping back into her body as though yanked by unseen hands. She gasped, blinking rapidly, her eye burning where the potion had touched it.
Sharrzaman had ejected her.
A thin smile played on her lips despite the lingering sting. He still had power, then. That was interesting.
She wasted no time getting back to her projects.
She set to work with the precision of someone who had performed this ritual countless times before. The dagger, small but wickedly sharp, gleamed under the dim light as she unsheathed it from her belt. Her fingers, calloused yet steady, wrapped around the beetle’s thick carapace, feeling the faint, desperate tremors of the creature beneath her grip. It was heavy, its shell layered with ridges like the worn bark of an ancient tree, a natural armor formed through cycles of growth, decay, and renewal.
With practiced ease, she placed the blade against the chitin and pressed down. A wet crack split the silence as the shell gave way, its resistance futile against steel and intent. The scent that rose from within was earthy and pungent, tinged with the faint acridity of something old, something that had lived in the dark for too long. As she pried the carapace apart, strands of fibrous muscle and sinew stretched between the fragments, reluctant to separate, as though the beetle still sought to hold itself together, unwilling to surrender to her hands.
She knew better than to ignore the symbolism. The beetle, a creature that consumed decay and turned it into renewal, was a harbinger of transformation. It thrived in the detritus of the world, burrowing into death and rot, yet emerging whole and armored, untouched by what it fed upon. It was a paradox, a creature that lived among ruin yet carried within it the promise of resilience. What did it mean, then, to carve into it, to expose what lay beneath its hardened exterior? Was she not doing the same to herself with every decision, every step she took deeper into the unraveling thread of fate?
Sharrzaman.
His name slithered through her thoughts like an incantation, unbidden yet inescapable. For centuries, she had assumed him lost, swallowed by the very machinations he once wove so expertly. Yet here he was, speaking as if no time had passed, his voice still laced with that insufferable patience, that careful deliberation that made every word feel like it carried some hidden edge. He had always been a master of manipulations, whispering offers into the ears of the desperate, weaving promises like fine silk and leaving behind only threads of entanglement.
She had been one of those, once. Long ago, when she was still na?ve enough to believe that power could be granted rather than taken, that fate could be rewritten without consequence.
The beetle’s exoskeleton peeled back in her hands, revealing the intricate network of tendons and muscle beneath. She exhaled, watching as the pale, fibrous tissue pulsed faintly, as though the creature did not yet understand it was already dead. The heart, small and glossy, still beat weakly, driven by nothing but residual instinct. She curled her fingers around it, feeling the damp warmth, the final, feeble resistance of something not ready to surrender. A final moment of defiance before inevitability.
The Number was reforming.
Old debts would surface, old ties reforged. Whether in alliance or in conflict, the past was clawing its way back to claim its due. Who among them would greet her with open arms? Who would seek to unmake her for past sins? She had not been kind, nor had she been gentle. Mercy was not a currency that held value in their world.
Her grip tightened, and with a slow, deliberate motion, she crushed the heart between her fingers. A sharp warmth spread across her palm as the dark ichor seeped from between them, sinking into the grooves of the stone slab below. The fluid glistened in the dim light, spreading outward in chaotic lines, forming shapes she could not name, patterns that twisted and reformed as though seeking meaning.
Trust was a luxury she had discarded long ago, an artifice as fragile as the membrane she had just broken. And yet, even as she watched the last echoes of life drain away from the beetle, she could not shake the lingering thought:
What, exactly, was Sharrzaman trying to resurrect?
