THE LITTLE ALCHEMIST

[Toffee 2843]

 

 

Erika ran through the woodland meadows with her arms flung wide, fingers streaming over every stalk and flower she passed. Amberiddle hung from the branches and brushed at her face, tickly and scratchy all at once, but she never got cut. Amberiddle was not a spiky plant. Neither was the coltsfoot dotting the narrow paths with bright yellow flowers, nor the draugr tongue, which looked like tulips but were not tulips. Even a young herbalist like Erika knew what to look for to tell the difference, which was important, because you couldn’t use tulip petals to wash wounds, but draugr tongue made the skin soft and supple enough to remove anything that had been stabbed there. Mamej said so, and she was the best physicker in the whole kingdom.

 

Catching her breath, Erika leaned against a tall birch tree and looked up at the hawfinches twittering and hopping between the branches. One, two, three, four, five… Erika could count higher than five, but the birds were just too fast, and she didn’t want to count one of them twice. Papej took her and her siblings birdwatching once, but Andrei and Markus started play-wrestling and frightened them all away. That made Karlotta angry and she yelled at them, but Primrose’s cheeriness never faltered. Primrose was always smiling, but she smiled the most when playing with Erika.

 

Bright blue flowers grew in clumps at the base of the birch tree. Erika crouched down beside them and picked a bunch, but as soon as she touched the petals her fingers instantly tingled and soon spread with numbness. Oh, no. Blissfoil! How could she be so stupid? She should have known from the colour and shape of the petals, and where it was growing. Mamej had warned her again and again and again! Erika tried brushing off her hands but that just made the numbness creep higher up her fingers and into her palms.

 

“Mamej!” She sprinted through the trees to where she had last seen her mother harvesting some soggy roots from the edge of a stream. “Mamej, help!”

 

Silence. Her mother was not where Erika had left her. Was this even the right place? Erika recognised that rock jutting out of the stream, she thought, but all rocks looked very much alike, and had there always been that much lichen clinging to it? Were the trees always so mossy? 

 

Erika took another step and something crushed underfoot, hard and brittle, splintering and snapping under her weight. Erika rolled her foot to the side. Down there in the dirt and moss… a bone. A human bone. She knew that because of how the delicate wrist bones connected to the hand bones, then the finger bones, just like when Karlotta broke her hand playing at swords and Mamej taught Erika how to spot the break under the surface of the skin before healing it with a few potions and bits of stick Mamej called splints, with bandages to keep it all in place.

 

Erika bent down and picked up the skeletal hand, but it slipped right out of her fingers, still numb and clumsy from the blissfoil. Something had cut the person’s hand off around the middle of the forearm, because the break was clean, with only a few splinters. Maybe a sword? Probably quite a long time ago, too, because the bones were all yellow and dry like the skeleton in Mamej’s office in the clinic, the one propped up on a stand with bits of twisted wire. Right by the edge of the stream, a rusted upturned helmet collected water. Drip, drip, drip, plinking from the end of a leaf, the foliage still wet from recent rain. Erika left the hand and kept running.

 

She found her mother kneeling beside the rest of the skeleton. It must have been the same person, because this skeleton was whole except for its right hand, severed in the middle of the forearm just as Erika had seen. Small, flaky brown mushrooms grew out from between its ribs, where the breastplate had rusted away to reveal them. Purplish grey ones grew out of its eye sockets, but Erika didn’t look too long at that. It upset her stomach. Mamej only scraped up the brown mushrooms and put them in a glass jar.

 

“How did he die, Mamej?” Erika kept her voice to a hushed whisper. It felt wrong to speak too loudly around the dead. Even the birds seemed to fall quiet in the clearing.

 

“I don’t know, sweetness.” Her mother straightened up, tucking the jar into the satchel hanging at her hip. She pulled over stones, the smoothest and flattest she could find, to cover the skeleton starting at its feet.

 

Erika tried to help, but the stones were too heavy, her hands too numb and useless. If she could, she would put a pretty speckled red and brown and grey stone on the very top, and a yellow flower. She hoped the dead knight liked flowers. 

 

“There’s a bull on his armour, but not like our bull. It’s facing us and only shows the head, not the whole bull, with a cross between its horns. What does that mean?”

 

“It means this man was from the League of Veletz, or at least fought for them.”

 

“Fought for them in the…” Erika scrunched up her nose and thought and thought and thought about all the history lessons her Papej taught her. He was the Lord Palatine, the trusted right hand of the King and Queen, so he knew everything there was to know about everything. Veletz fought against the Grand Covenant in the… “the War for the Heartlands!”

 

“That’s right, the Aevos Coalition War.”

 

“Then… why did we bury him? Wasn’t he the enemy? Our kingdom was part of the Grand Covenant, Papej said so. Papej was born during the war, he said.”

 

“In the end, we are all just men and women. He worshipped Godan just like we do, and should have a proper place of rest now that his soul is in the Seven Skies.”

 

Erika mulled over this as they walked back to where their carriage waited on the main road. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be buried under a mound of stones in the middle of the woods far from home. That would be very lonely. Now that she knew her letters, she had read the beautifully illuminated book in the library written by one of her long ago ancestors, or at least someone who had been related to her ancestor. The book was called The Woldzkiy People and talked about how, when someone died, their eyes were carefully removed and fed to a murder of crows to fly their soul away to the Seven Skies. Erika didn’t want that to happen to her either.

 

I don’t know what your funerals were like in Veletz, but I hope you’re resting peacefully now, Ser Knight.

 

That thought made her a little happier, even though the sunny day had turned grey and overcast, and raindrops started pattering down as the carriage rolled into motion. The big wooden wheels splashed through the ruts and puddles; that was her favourite part. Swoosh, rumble, whoosh.

 

“Mamej,” Erika swung her feet, because her legs were too short to touch the yellow-red-and-black panelled floor of the carriage. “What were those mushrooms you collected?”

 

Mamej reached into her bag and brought out the glass jar, holding it out to Erika. “They’re called cryptus shrooms, dearest. They can be ground into a powder and used to dry out herbs or cure meats.”

 

“Like salt!”

 

Her mother laughed quietly and picked a twig out of Erika’s hair. “A little bit like salt. Would you like to look at them?”

 

“No, thank you. My hands are still numb from touching the blissfoil, and I don’t want to drop the jar! It might break.”

 

“From touching the…” Her mother’s eyes widened and Erika got an earful about the proper way to harvest blissfoil, and that she had to be careful in their line of work or she would wind up with numb fingers forever.

 

Erika just kicked her feet and stared out happily at the world as it rolled by, all the way back to Krusev.

 

Spoiler

Also go check out my brother's post ok....

 

 

[Gandhi 3225]

Andrei sat in the quiet thicket of the Karoswood. He was only a few dozen feet from the road, headed south to Krusev, and north towards Old Sankt Johannsburg - but he was wholly engulfed in his book, a retelling of history, of the Grand Covenant and their war against the Veletzers.

 

He skimmed a finger through a chapter, detailing the Battle of Westmark, how his forefathers had been brought to rout - he hadn't ever truly seen a corpse before, blood? Sure - but never something as final as a lifeless body, only once, in his dream, did he bear witness to a limp creature. But that wasn't anything real, was it? How many men must have fallen that day? He pondered in silence, the only noise brought to him was the relentless whistle of autumn wind.

 

Same as he'd hoped to protect the people of the Kingdom someday - he'd protect his sisters, Karlotta, Primrose, and Erika.

[sarahbarah 7105]

"You should never pick blissfoil with your bare hands, Erika." Emma knelt before her youngest, scrubbing her hands clean. As she did so, she couldn't help but spare her a warm look, one conveying immense pride.

[erictafoya 3276]

"Whats taking them so long?"

 

Along the parapets of Krusev waited the Father Bull anxious and ever so restless. His nails were bitten to the skin, a habit his wife had warned him about. Though he trusted Emma, Erika was his precious little doll. 

 

"Were anything to happen, if something went wrong-" 

 

NO! He thought silently. . .  Nothing was ever going to happen to his girls. So long as he lived, there could be no harm to them. The Lord would raise armies to defend all of them or die trying, and he was no warrior.

 

"No. . . they will be alright" 

 

And alright they were. His darling wife and his doll of a daughter made their way safely into the gates of Emsgrad, their home which he so lovingly named after is partner. The once shaky and stiff shoulders and rickety cane relaxed immediately. Upon seeing their bright smiles that they shared, here he knew. . . 

 

"Our future is bright"