Alchemy – Basement, Lab 482

  The alchemy wing of the university wasn’t in a tower. It was beneath it. Deep below the roots of the northern building, carved into ancient stone and fortified with layer after layer of containment runes, the lab sat like the heart of some sleeping engine. Even before he entered, Nathan could feel it. A slow, pulsing thrum—not alive exactly, but waiting.

  As the group of students descended the spiral stairs, the air shifted. It grew warmer. Scented. Metallic. A mix of crushed petals and burnt salt, as if someone had set fire to a greenhouse and distilled the smoke.

  The door opened on its own. Inside, the lab was a dream of contradiction. Lush vines grew from walls of copper mesh. Glass tubes floated midair in elegant clusters, slowly distilling vapor into silver basins. Tables were marked not with numbers, but symbols—some glowing faintly, others so old they’d been scorched into the wood. Shelves overflowed with labeled jars containing everything from stardust powder to crushed insect wings to dried dragonroot. And at the center stood Professor Irena. She was short, slight, and dressed in robes that looked halfway between a botanist’s coat and a blacksmith’s apron. Her eyes—one green, one a swirling golden clockwork—ticked softly when she blinked.

  “Welcome to the only class that can kill you politely,” she said without preamble.

  A few students laughed nervously.

  “Alchemy,” she continued, “is not potion-making. It is not herbalist work. It is not throwing random shiny things into a pot and hoping they don’t explode.”

  She snapped her fingers, and a floating burner lit beneath a swirling flask. The clear liquid inside shimmered—then hissed and turned into silver smoke, which twisted upward and solidified into a flower of mirrored glass.

  “Alchemy,” she said, “is a conversation between elements. A negotiation. You take one truth. Another truth. You ask them to dance. Sometimes they do.”

  Nathan leaned forward without realizing it.

  Something about this made sense.

  “The key to alchemy is knowing not what an element does,” she said, “but what it wants. Fire wants to move. Earth wants to hold. Water wants to remember. Air wants to be free.”

  She tapped a chalkboard, and four new runes appeared:

  Fire: Δ – Movement

  Earth: ? – Stability

  Water: ? – Memory

  Air: ∴ – Liberation

  “Today, we begin with reactions. Choose two opposing base elements and see what kind of tension they create.”

  The students broke off into pairs. Nathan ended up alone at a table marked with a warped triangle rune etched in brass.

  He found vials of crushed ember root and glacial salt.

  Fire and Water, he thought.

  He followed the instructions precisely: equal measure, clockwise swirl, heat only when the mixture turned violet. His hands were steady for the first time all day.

  When the mixture turned color, he activated the rune-plate.

  It pulsed once, twice—

  Then fizzed and turned into a soft cloud of orange vapor.

  Nathan leaned in to smell it.

  It didn’t smell like fire. Or salt.

  It smelled like memories.

  He blinked.

  And saw, for just a heartbeat, the image of a girl’s face—bright, laughing—on a summer day he’d long forgotten.

  Then it was gone.

  He staggered back.

  Professor Irena appeared beside him, silently.

  “You saw something?”

  Nathan nodded slowly.

  She smiled.

  “Good,” she said. “That means you did it right.”

  For the first time since arriving at the university, Nathan felt something strange:

  He’d succeeded.

  No sparks. No failure. No explosions. No staring. Just a brief, quiet yes from the world.

  He left the alchemy lab not energized—but steadied.

  Like maybe he wasn’t completely broken.

  Just… misaligned.

  Survival – Asteria Woods: North Entrance, Trial Zone 1

  The Survival training compound wasn’t a classroom—it was a different world entirely. Located on the far western edge of the university’s grounds, it sat beyond a veil of shimmering wards that distorted light like rippling water. Past the threshold, the terrain changed. Grass became moss. Moss became stone. The temperature dropped. By the time Nathan stepped through the boundary with the rest of his cohort, he was no longer on campus. He was in the Trial Zone. The air was dense with scent—pine and loam and something metallic underneath. The trees were real, but the land itself wasn’t entirely normal. Runes pulsed faintly along the trunks, suggesting that the entire forest had been grown, enchanted, or both.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Eyes forward,” barked a voice ahead.

  Instructor Andren looked like he’d been carved from tree bark and taught to shout. His cloak was mud-stained. His left arm ended in a steel-reinforced prosthetic that clicked when he moved it.

  “You are not here to be coddled. You are here to survive.”

  Behind him, three stone arches hummed with active runes. Each was labeled:

  PATH OF STORM

  PATH OF STONE

  PATH OF SHADOW

  “You’ll go in threes. One path per group. You’ll have no weapons. No spells. Just your focus crystal and your body. When the trial begins, get to the center rune and hold for sixty seconds. If you can’t—don’t die.”

  The students exchanged nervous looks.

  “Pair up. Now.”

  Nathan didn’t have to look around. Lissandre already had him by the sleeve.

  Krit joined without a word.

  “Team Lost Cause,” Lissandre said brightly. “Let’s take Path of Shadow. Because our lives clearly aren’t complicated enough.”

  Instructor Andren raised an eyebrow. “Confident?”

  “Nope.”

  They stepped into the arch.

  The world flipped.

  The Path of Shadow dropped them into fog.

  Cold, thick, clawing fog that swallowed light and sound. Trees towered high above them, but the ground was hard to see. Something moved in the distance—quiet, low, and circling.

  A rune pulsed faintly on a black stone pedestal half a field away.

  Nathan turned to say something—and found Krit already gone.

  Lissandre cursed.

  “Visibility’s being altered. It’s warping proximity.”

  Nathan’s head spun.

  Something brushed his arm.

  Then something else—a whisper in a tongue he didn’t know.

  Lissandre shouted, “Don’t move! It’s mimicking us!”

  Then the shadows closed in.

  Nathan closed his eyes.

  He didn’t know what to do—but something inside him did.

  He knelt, hand against the ground. Instead of trying to cast, he just… felt. The note inside him. The golden thread. He didn’t ask for a spell. He just sought clarity. And the fog parted. A path opened, straight to the center stone. It was barely wide enough for one person—but it was there.

  “Nathan!” Lissandre called from somewhere behind him. “I can’t see you!”

  “Follow my voice!” he called. “Don’t stop!”

  She stumbled forward—then Krit appeared on the other side, leading her by the wrist.

  “How—?” Nathan began.

  “I followed the pulse,” Krit said simply. “Yours.”

  They reached the rune.

  Held it.

  One breath.

  Two.

  Sixty seconds later, the trial faded.

  They emerged back on the training field, covered in dirt and mist.

  Instructor Andren nodded once.

  “Interesting,” he said, looking at Nathan. “Very… interesting.”

  Then he walked away.

  Nathan turned to Lissandre.

  “Did I do that?”

  She smiled. “You didn’t cast. But something definitely listened.”

  History – Tower 1, Room 26B

  The History wing didn’t look like part of the university. It looked like an archive carved out of memory. High, arched ceilings. Walls of books, scrolls, and glass-locked relics. Runes etched not with light but with shadow, flickering softly like old thoughts still clinging to life. It smelled of ink and woodsmoke, and something older—dust that remembered.

  Nathan walked in last, still brushing forest moss from his boots.

  The room was arranged in a semicircle of tiered seats, each desk embedded with a glow-crystal. The professor’s table was lower than the students’, not raised. It placed her in the center of their gaze, not above it. Professor Tassarene was already seated when they arrived. Old. Tall. Dry. Her face was lined like sun-cracked clay. Her robes were faded, and her staff was made of something that looked like petrified bone. She didn’t speak until every student had sat down. Then, without looking up, she said, “Magic does not care about your comfort. History even less.” She tapped her staff against the stone floor. The lights dimmed. A wide projection opened above the room—shifting images in sepia and ink. “Today,” she said, “we begin with what we choose to forget.”

  The image showed an ancient seal: a circle surrounded by nine runes, the eighth darkened, the ninth missing entirely. “The original elemental spectrum,” Tassarene said, “included nine. Not eight.”

  Murmurs.

  Nathan leaned forward.

  “Fire. Earth. Water. Air. Metal. Wood. Sun. Moon. And Blood.”

  The room went still.

  Tassarene continued, unbothered. “Blood was not always forbidden. Once, it was studied. Refined. Used. Until it wasn’t.”

  The projection shifted.

  New image.

  A child’s room. A cradle, shattered. A smear of runes scorched into the wall. “The Child Reaper,” she said. “A thousand years ago, he began his work. Stealing children born under aligned stars. First randomly. Then, starting three hundred fifty years ago… twins.” A new image—two children, back to back, glowing with opposing auras. “Twins who showed convergence. That is, compatibility across opposite elements. Fire and Water. Earth and Air. Normally impossible. But with twins—possible. Once. Twice. Then never again.”

  Nathan felt cold.

  His hand instinctively covered his chest.

  The image shifted again.

  Text appeared, but written in a ciphered script Nathan had never seen.

  Until now.

  Because somehow, he could read it.

  “…and when the golden thread awakens, the silence will sing again. The Composer returns not with knowledge, but with echo…”

  He blinked. The letters blurred. Became gibberish again. He looked around. No one else reacted. No one else had read it. He swallowed hard. Tassarene’s voice returned. “The Child Reaper vanished. No body. No trace. Just laughter, echoing from a flooded town. Then silence.” The lights brightened. “That is what history leaves us. Gaps. Scars. Echoes. Your job as mages is not to believe everything. It is to listen anyway.” Nathan sat very still. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Because something inside him had stirred again. And it wasn’t done listening.

  After Class

  The sun was beginning its slow descent beyond the far edge of the university lake, casting long gold shadows across the towers. The sky glowed the way it always did just before magic whispered through the air—too quiet for most to hear, but not Nathan.

  He heard it now.

  A hum. Low. Not music, not yet. But... a resonance. Like the universe was slowly tuning itself to a new key.

  Nathan sat on the old stone bench beneath the copperleaf tree near the south courtyard. He hadn’t meant to sit down. His legs had just taken him there, like they remembered something his mind didn’t.

  He stared up at the sky and let out a slow breath.

  Behind him, footsteps crunched on gravel.

  “You look like a man who’s been dumped by all the elements,” said Lissandre, flopping down next to him, her salamander companion climbing onto her shoulder like a scarf made of embers.

  “They didn’t even date me,” Nathan muttered. “They ghosted me before the first spell.”

  She snorted. “Companion still ignoring you?”

  “No. This time I think it watched me. Then decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.”

  Lissandre tilted her head. “That’s progress, technically. You got ghosted in person.”

  Nathan let out a weak laugh.

  “Still can’t cast right. Runes fizz out. My companion won’t come. Professors look at me like I’m a half-dismantled puzzle someone’s companion shat on.”

  “But…” she prompted.

  Nathan looked at her.

  “In Alchemy,” he said softly, “I made something. And in Survival, I saw a path. I didn’t cast anything, I didn’t draw a rune. But it happened anyway.”

  She watched him for a long moment. Then nodded.

  “That sounds like magic to me.”

  Krit appeared a moment later, silent as ever, holding three steaming cups.

  “Tea,” they said, handing one to each of them. “Chamomile, starlight root, and lemon balm.”

  Nathan blinked. “You made this?”

  “Alchemy minor,” Krit replied.

  Lissandre sipped. “Tastes like good decisions and smug satisfaction.”

  They sat there in companionable quiet for a while.

  Eventually, Krit said, “Did either of you notice the cipher in Tassarene’s lecture?”

  Nathan tensed. “The one under the twin convergence sigil?”

  Krit nodded slowly. “It looked like gibberish. But something about the shape of it…”

  Nathan didn’t speak.

  He just looked out at the lake, where the reflection of the sky shimmered like a golden net.

  He didn’t tell them what he’d read.

  Not yet.

  But the words still rang in his bones.

  “When the golden thread awakens, the silence will sing again.”

  Something was coming.

  And Nathan was starting to think it had been looking for him for a very, very long time.