Elanah clicked her tongue.

The poisons failed again.

In front of her, a growling monstrosity of blight-woven flesh screeched within its glass cage. It beat its meaty fists against the walls with dull, resounding thuds, leaving red smears on the glass where it touched. Along its arms, spots of necrotized flesh spread like black blots along the muscle, but they only made it so far. Within the seconds, the creature’s biology adapted.

And it grew bigger.

That was the worst part. Whenever she poisoned it, the creature rapidly adapted. Then, using the mana-charged alchemy, it siphoned energy from her brews and used it to grow. Elanah pursed her lips and motioned for the assistants behind her to come forward.

“Type 3C of the Selas-Amer poison compound is a failure. Record, necrosis ineffective. Dead flesh is recycled. Neurotoxins also ineffective. Reason unknown.”

She bit her thumb, grinding her teeth against her now jagged nails. The frustration was maddening. Two weeks of constant experimentation, and the creature was virtually immune to everything she tried. The last time a Convergence War had happened, she was still apprenticed to another master. At the time, the Coalition had scorched the forests and the soil to wipe the blight from the earth. But that had killed three Ancestor Trees—a disaster the realm had never recovered from.

Elanah was determined to make this time different. Especially now that the blight had spread so far. If the Blight Witch of all people couldn’t make a poison that could cleanse the Crimson Tide from the soil, what hope did Caereith have?

Not much, she knew. She was the best alchemist on this side of the realm by far. Few in all of Caereith were her match.

“Bring in type 4C, Selas-Thann compound. Gas it.”

Her assistants came forward, setting up the devices set next to the cage. With a hiss, blue vapors flooded the cage and the monster inside began to screech. It roared—a shrill, pained shriek that scraped against the walls of its glass cage. Inside the blue fog, it writhed and convulsed. Elanah saw the flesh slough off, melting and pooling along the cage floor.

She leaned forward. This would work. It had to.

This was progress. Far more than she’d made over the past week. The assistants in the room held their breath as the monster melted into a puddle of goop beneath the cage. Elanah raised a hand.

“Siphon,” she ordered, and a vent within the cage sucked the gas away. The monster inside was still. Melted.

And then it began to move.

Elanah clenched her fists as the monstrosity twitched. The puddle of blood and flesh tightened—coalesced. In front of them, it wove itself back into a monster, staggering up from the ground to stand back on two, half-melted feet. A bump rose from the lumps of muscle and twitched.

An eye flicked open to stare at them, and it took almost everything Elanah had not to throw her clipboard at the damn thing’s cage.

Frustrating.

She’d already dipped into her specialties—biological materials. Poisons, diseases, viruses. She’d cultivated all manner of virulent plagues to purge the blight, but it turned everything she knew against her. What could she do against a thing that could actively alter the poisons it absorbed? Instead of decaying, it simply thrived under her alchemical assaults. And after each round, it grew stronger. More toxic. Judging from the pulsing, blue veins along the monster’s arms, it had absorbed the last poison too.

To be touched by this thing was death. That was certain. Experimenting on it further would be to risk an escape and the deaths of everyone in her lab.

“Activate the incinerator,” she ordered, pushing the words across her gritted teeth. As soon as she gave the call, the other alchemists released sighs of relief. They activated the runic engravings on the bottom of the cage, and with a flash of white-hot flame, the creature screamed its last cry.

Not even ashes remained. Elanah almost wished that they’d use this instead—that Halcyn would issue an order to bomb the blight before it could spread further.

But fire couldn’t save a forest. And if they torched this one, what of the next? And the one after? Would they turn those to ash too? Rifts were inevitable. Unpredictable. Using those means would only destroy the realm from within.

Stop-gap measures were a losing battle.

Elanah had to be the alternative.

She glanced at the remaining capsules she had. A week of constant fighting, testing, and brewing. It had resulted in twenty-three containers of the most toxic concoctions she had ever made. And of them, two remained untested.

The rest had completely flopped.

Approaching capsule C5, she took it in her hands, gripping it tight. A drop of this into a river would kill forty thousand amarids with ease. But would it bring down a single blighted monster permanently? Prevent it from being reassimilated and recycled into a stronger form?

The doubt she felt in her heart made her want to retch. It roiled and churned in her stomach, threatening to burst out of her. If she failed, Caereith would pay for it dearly.

She steadied her trembling hands and turned, swallowing down the bile trying to gurgle its way up her throat. The situation was dire and weakness wasn’t an option. It never was. If she faltered here, in front of all her assistants, it would only lower morale further. So she steeled herself. She encased her heart in stone and clenched it tight under an iron-bound grip.

The next cage was wheeled into the room. Inside, there was what used to be a wolf, now bloated and pulsating, filled to the brim with blighted parasites. It stared at her with dead eyes. Elanah approached the cage and prepared to slot the next capsule in, only for the door to open. She frowned, turning. There were to be no interruptions.

Who was it that dared to interrupt their work? She watched as an amarid with a wiry, grass beard stepped inside.

And the soldiers didn’t block his way.

He stepped past the assistants and the workstations, striding into the room as if it belonged to him. The ends of the black alchemy coat he wore fluttered and the wind seemed to swirl beneath his feet, giving his steps a weightless ease that allowed him to step past the alchemists blocking his way.

The man stopped in front of Elanah, and he was tall. Easily seven feet. He looked down at her from underneath his rectangle-framed spectacles, frowning for a moment, before moving his eyes down to the capsule in her hands.

“I heard about your work,” he said, glancing around the emptied containers along the table, “but I never realized just what it was that you did until now. You make weapons.”

Elanah frowned at his coat. Black ones were for masters—ones like her. But she didn’t know him. She regarded him with a wary look, “Weapons, among other things.”

He nodded and stepped away, picking up the empty containers one by one. Observing the labels. The materials used. Elanah watched him.

“I don’t know you,” she said. He didn’t turn to face her.

“You never bothered to try.”

“That’s impossible.”

“And yet here we are,” the man replied. He set the capsules down, sighing. He fixed her with a tired look. “None of these have worked?”

“None. The blight is either capable of gaining immunity or capable of recovering from each one.”

“Are these all based on the same concept?”

Elanah nodded, and the man pursed his lips. He motioned to the capsule in her grip.

“Then that won’t work either.”

She knew that.

But her assistants didn’t need to.

At the man’s words they glanced at each other uncertainly, hesitating. Elanah cursed him in her mind. These two capsules were to buy time—for her to keep the work flowing until she came up with a new solution. All that effort to sustain the lab’s morale, and he’d thrown it out of the window. She gave him a cold look.

“If you’re entering my lab to criticize my methods, then you better have an alternative ready. Did Halcyn send you?”

“He did. I’m not here to wound your pride, mo…” he stopped. Frowned. Elanah furrowed her brows as the man turned away to approach a set of instruments. He plucked several from the table and set them aside, then began reaching for components. He glanced at her, “I’m not here to insult your methods, miss Kindlebright. I’m only here to help.”

Elanah joined him at the workstation, and he passed her a perfectly assembled set of tools—the exact ones that she preferred. The man turned the tableside heaters on. One at a temperature that could boil water instantly, and two that could turn iron to slag in seconds.

She figured out what he was doing at a glance.

Her hands moved without thinking. Elanah began turning on the magitech appliances they needed. Activators, mana cauldrons, processors—and each step she took was answered in return. The man was in rhythm with her, working with a familiarity that seemed as if they’d worked together for years.

Elanah never had an assistant that lasted longer than a month. The man next to her acted as if he’d been her colleague for over a decade.

She reached for something—he already had it. She prepared a component and he instantly had the next in hand, passing materials to her even as she worked. It was like having four arms—two minds, linked into one whole. But this other mind was different. For every bit that it seemed to memorize her habits, the man’s actions had their own methodology to them. The inspiration for his methods was obvious—they were taken from her techniques. Ones she’d never taught others.

And yet he worked as if it were common knowledge.

Elanah quickly realized where they were going as soon as the bases were assembled.

“You’re using alchemic metallurgy,” she said, eyeing as he assembled glass dishes full of metal flakes, dusts, and nuggets. The man nodded, and Elanah shook her head. “We’ve already tried that. All the elements in the lab? We’ve tested them. The only thing left to use is—”

“—organic materials. There are hundreds of thousands of them compared to the base elements. That’s true. But you’re mistaken about one thing. You haven’t tried everything yet.”

The man opened one of the mana-cauldrons and tipped it over.

White-hot metal slag flowed into a vat and cooled into something that Elanah failed to recognize at first glance. Her eyes widened as the material hardened into a thin plate.

The man was creating alloys.

Insanity.

Metals were unique elements in that they were far more reactive than others when exposed to magic. Each one had dozens of properties and activation processes—each resulting in a different effect. Alloys exacerbated this problem to an exponential degree. Each one had hundreds. Some had thousands depending on what was combined, and many of the effects were unpredictable. Unrecorded.

Combined with the other elements? The potential effects reached the ten thousands. Simple compounds were in the hundred thousands.

And to combine it with complex compositions easily allowed the possibilities to go into the millions.

“I had a good father and a strict mother growing up,” the man said, lining up alloys to experiment with. Brass. Cobalt. Nickel. “They taught me many things. But among them, I learned my metals the best. It was our common ground, after all. Between the three of us.”

The man turned to her with his silver eyes.

“I know my metals. You know everything else. Alchemy is a science—invention, creation, innovation. Anything tangible is a viable component. That’s what you believe, no? So help me. I need your expertise if we’re going to succeed.”

Elanah stared at him. There was a certainty in his actions that reminded her of herself. A slow, steady confidence. One cultivated over years of painstaking study and practice. But what he was suggesting, it was madness. There was a reason no one bothered with alloys. They were unnecessarily complicated—completely, utterly pointless in the eyes of many of Elanah’s contemporaries. Unlike compounds and other materials, metals in their raw form were highly unpredictable.

Few survived the volatility of unexplored alchemy. It was scoffed at as a fool’s errand. Suicide.

And yet, at the insanity of it, a sense of anticipation she hadn’t felt in years filled her chest. Suddenly, she was a journeyman alchemist again—testing, learning. Constantly trying to attempt new things. Elanah turned to her assistants and raised a hand. What she was about to do would be far too dangerous for them.

“Leave us.”

Hesitating, they left the room one by one until only the two of them remained. The man nodded to her. Elanah cupped her chin in her hand and stared down at the components they’d arranged along the table.

“This’ll be a trial-and-error process,” she said. “With the number of potential formulas we’re looking at, it’ll be impossible to narrow it a solution down to something feasible without prior knowledge. How much do you know about these alloys?”

She turned her eyes to him, and the man was already clearing a space for them on the table. She pulled in two chairs, setting them down next to each other. Her partner placed several stacks of paper onto the table.

He passed her a pen and took a seat.

“I’ll list down everything we need. Base properties and the like. The rest, we’ll have to gather with theorycraft.”

Elanah accepted a piece of paper he passed her and got to writing. Before they got to experimenting, they had much to do. Study, study, study. And between both of them, the work she had to handle was monstrous. But that was good. That was okay.

She was no stranger to work. She thrived in it. And whoever this man was, he knew that.

“…Who are you, really?” she asked, but he only gave her a shake of the head.

“My name is Ashran. And I wasn't anyone you knew until today.”

He turned his silver eyes to her and spoke.

"Let's get to work, Blight Witch. We've got a long week ahead of us."