Adrift

Again, I found myself adrift.

I clasped the splintered fragments of my alchemy desk that came with me after the calamitous backfire. The bitter cold of my new environ surged through the bones in my fingers, rattling me to near suffocation. Steel-grey folds in the sea waves wove across a summer-gold horizon. It stank of deep brine and I couldn’t hear anything but the wallowing of water over water. Our magnificent glowing globe let out its last light, burning out from its day-long journey, leaving me with uncertainties about surviving the night. I was never much of a swimmer.

As I splashed my arms a bit, and gained my bearing, it didn’t seem obvious to me where or how far from land I was.

Thinking back to the moment of translocation mere moments ago, I was so confident I had curated every rune as instructed by the scrolls left behind by my professor. There was no doubt my adherence to detail was without failure, rather it had to be a shortsighted mistake of his instructions. Seems unlikely given his tenure and position as the now Dean of Alchemy at Tyriswerth where I graduated, and his infinitely beneficial contributions to the study.

But I was now paddling in the ocean, so clearly, he was wrong.

I considered each step in considerable length and veracity, having taken six months to assemble the reagents and another three to prepare the desk and runic circle as dictated. I carved the angles of each line with such detail that a carpenter would be jealous: thirty degrees here, five centimeters there, a rounded tip at the bottom of the third rune clockwise from the top.

Still, it backfired.

Shooting me kicking and screaming through the aetheric vacuum and out the other end into this wet abyss. Scattered bits of the desk bobbed and weaved with each coming wave like little crumbs in a pot of grey stew. My fingertips went pale and my hands fumbled as I tried to get a hold of something I could pull myself onto. The drawers! I pulled one of the small drawers that contained a small ceremonial knife and some pens which tumbled into the water. I grabbed the knife, nearly slicing my fingers, and lodged it into the desk to pull myself up.

As drowsiness took over, I realized I was a goner if I did not sort out a means to escape the clutches of the Sea. I swept my body across the top of the desk desperately clinging to the lodged knife like a child until it balanced against the waves. The runic lines were still there, beneath me, etched upon the mahogany by my hand. The sloshing sea had scattered the reagents that once littered the desk. Tiny bits of each element and mineral still peppered the spots where they once were, but it is doubtful their potency would cause the desired outcome.

Not much to work with in my estimation. Of course, my estimations are what left me splashing about in the ocean.

The cold punched the wind from my chest, my vision faded, and my teeth chattered. As I slipped out of consciousness, my wife’s... ex-wife’s voice crept into my ear as I curled up on the soggy wood like the exasperated whispers of a ghost haunting a dead man.

Was this what the precipice of death felt like? A recounting of every wretched moment? Coinetta’s voice was cruel, sharp like a buzzard’s beak scraping against my ears as I sat at my desk with her shouting from outside the study room, “You daft and oblivious man. You couldn’t find your left hand from your right, Henry. Presinia’s husband doesn’t waste his days locked in his room playing with bloody magicks. Is it so much to ask that you spend a single dinner with me?” She went quiet for a moment, nearly long enough that I thought I was free from her incessant nagging, “Don’t expect me returning here after my piano lessons, I’ll be staying with my mother.” She was never very good at piano, even with the lessons.

Good riddance.

I remembered why she was so ferociously howling at me. Twelve long, agonizing years of marriage ended in a flash when I poured out our wedding sands onto the alchemy table for the experiment. The sands that we scooped from our homelands and mixed before binding ourselves to one another in this life and the next. A ceremony that held deep meaning for people who had long passed away. However, sand doesn’t grow on trees after all, and the closest beach to my estate was hundreds of miles away.

What was sand, when from it could come man’s eternal pursuit of wealth, for power? What was sand to the one who could alchemize his own fortune? She never understood. I did this for her, to capture the world for her in a glass vial, a vial that I could transmute through the brilliance of aetheric coupling into the most valuable mineral on the planet.

Blinking my eyes awake, I had come back to for another moment. The sun had finally sunk and the light of the stars peppered the sky as clouds built around them like a winter coat. The waves picked up in pace and strength. My desk twirled round in slow circles. A feeling deep in my gut churned, and I vomited bits of bread and salt-water—a latent side effect of runic translocation.

I wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for my damnable assistant Rupert, always so pestering, pricking my hide like a needle for instruction. How I could be assigned such an incapable fool from the academy is beyond my understanding—and reputation. Repeatedly, I would need to coddle him, feeding him from my endless knowledge like a babe suckling at their mother’s teat. Six times I explained to him the importance of purified burrow-root.

That was it, the reason for the backfire. If Rupert hadn’t purchased the burrow-root from that less than reputable merchant from the ports of Darrow, the experiment wouldn’t have backfired. Yes. It was the root that did it. And his incessant whining about another lesson. Just pay attention to what I’m doing, and you’d have your lesson Rupert.

Light rains pattered against the fluttering waves, as a storm cracked through the sky like split stone. The sea’s fingers rippled and pulled, nearly tossing me from my desk. I tumbled back and forth as a bright streak of lightning severed the sky in two.

I was glad Rupert left in a fright after I yelled at him. It was the night before the summer equinox, when the aether was acutely focused and I nearly completed the runic circles. We were in my study after having some tea that had gone cold.

“If you don’t like how I teach, then find yourself a different teacher!” I yelled. His trembling hands nearly dropped the vials of pig’s blood that I needed.

“It’s hard to have a problem with your teaching when you’ve not taught me a single thing.” Were his last words before fumbling out the door. If he were around any longer, the backfire could have outright killed me. Good riddance to him, too.

The winds and rain blasted my withered hair into my eyes, burning them as the desk was torn from my clutches. I tumbled backward into the roaring waters and drifted in and out of consciousness. Memories, like photographs, cascaded into my mind as the cacophonous booming of water filled my ears and my senses went black.

It was morning. Or, at least the morning of the backfire, as far as my recollection could take me. Not physically present, no it felt different, rather a sort of near-death dream state. I was alone in my bed. My clothing was soaked, not from water, but from sweat. The night terrors that started when my wife left me.

I turned over and found a half-eaten pastry on the bed-side table. My initials had been cut into the pastry, a detail I didn’t notice before. I tried gulping down what was left, but it was tasteless and hardened as though it were stale.

My office was a mess. The desk where I conducted my alchemy was covered in runic circles and different reagents that I had collected through the previous months. In the center were vials of pig’s blood and a pot of sea water. The wedding sands were used to draw the circles and smatterings of different inks connected and bound the circles together to create a series of even larger concentric runes.

Scrolls hung from the bookshelves with small hooks that I had hammered into the wood. A temporary setup that Coinetta berated me endlessly about.

I looked over the table once more, trying to find the hiccup in the diagram. Hundreds of steps, incantations, smoothing of lines, perfecting of circles, resulting in a backfire that had me tumbling through coarse waters and stormy weather. Where had I been so foolish? What was overlooked?

The clock above the fireplace struck its apex at 16:00 o’clock. How could it already be midday? I had just rolled out of bed. My mind raced, rushing back and forth between the desk, Coinetta, Rupert, my stale pastry, my—

I woke again in another dream, except this time I was next to Coinetta. We were younger, maybe in our early twenties, when we first fell in love. She was so beautiful, with her stark black hair and bewitching red eyes. A woman of the Amberwoods, a place far from the colonies in which I grew up. Her family ran a lumber mill near Latihfall before it all burned to the ground. I met her on an expedition to collect samples of Junji spice for the College of Alchemy at Tyriswerth when she caught my eye. She had escaped her family to go swimming in a glade near our campsite. Her slender form and youthful complexion had me completely enamored, and the crook at the end of her smile stole my heart.

But it wasn’t just her appearance that captured me. It was how her presence stilled my heart and my mind. The world seemed to all slow down and make sense. The pureness of her being was a map, a map to my love. When I was with her, I knew exactly where I was.

She lay there next to me. My swirling mind slowed as I watched her dream. Her hand moved down my arm and squeezed my hand. A smile sneaked across her face. I kissed her, just above her ear, where my beard tickled her cheek and she’d giggle every time.

Nothing else existed at that moment.

Time had stopped.

The thoughts ended.

It was just her and I. It was then; I realized where I had failed. Where I had overlooked. My disparately distracted mind had become separated into thousands of pieces since that day, and it was her smile that brought it all back together. I leaped from my bed and dashed back to the desk where everything was where it should be.

A small notch in the desk's wood was tucked quietly under one of the concentric, runic circles. Something so small which caused such an immense problem could be reversed if I made a few adjustments, if I could only-

I gasped as my body burst from the seas, born anew.

The storm continued to rage, and the desk had drifted several meters away. Thrashing my arms and legs to-and-fro against the current, I reached the desk and found on its face the same notch that caused this whole mess. It’s location at a crucial juncture where three concentric circles crossed. The aether was picky, but not picky enough that it couldn’t be reversed if given the right intentions.

The pigs’ blood and burrow-root were long gone though, and the water had washed away most of the sand. I had to contribute something to empower the runes, something imbibed with aether. I dislodged the knife I used to pull myself up with before and pressed it into my palm. My blood rushed down my hand and I pressed it hard against the desk. The aether within the blood bubbled and spread through each of the circles, glowing a bright crimson. My vision went white and the sound like a steam engine’s whistle cut through the rain and the thunder until it was all I could hear. Then, everything grew suddenly warm.

The storm had crumbled, and a lively tide ran up my back as I lay on something soft. It was a shore. One I recognized. A shore whose sands I once mixed with the sand of another’s. I was far from where I needed to be, but now I had direction.
I was no longer adrift.