He was fully aware of the childishness of his visceral discomfort with the implication of a sapphic relationship between one of his comrades and the person who got them across the border. But that was Makhus the man, Makhus the Alchemist. The source of such insecurity was far deeper than his conscious self, it was an insufferable little boy that couldn’t get over his inability to woo a woman into bed, it was a mental vestige of his past self that he had done all he could to exterminate.

Makhus had killed a dozen Grekurian soldiers in a single evening using nothing but his sword, he had bedded women that wouldn’t give most men even a passing glance, he had achieved feats of alchemical engineering few ever would, all for the sake of building his own sense of self-worth… But it remained shaky, for it had rotten foundations.

So it was that he retreated to a lab that rightfully belonged to a dead man, surrendering himself to childlike wonder at the sight of a life’s fortune that also rightfully belonged to a dead man. His trail betwixt the lab’s equipment led him towards a writing desk situated amidst two large closets, each containing many flasks and jars full of reagents, from colorless chemicals to preserved organs. There was even…

“A homunculus! A real fuckin’ homunculus!” he exclaimed, staring at a malformed blob of flesh that floated in off-green, Viriditas-based preservation solution. It was a tiny, vaguely humanoid thing, barely bigger than someone’s head in its entirety, its pallid skin clung to its bones so tightly one could see each individual rib even through the cloudy liquid. Its right arm and left leg were little more than nubs, but its other two limbs were fully-formed, if miniature and distended, while its head was so fully proportional and recognizable it could be mistaken for a wax miniature of a real person’s head.

Its vacant stare followed his every movement, just like the textbooks described a correctly-grown homunculus would. Unlike the textbooks described, however, it slowly raised a hand, and pointed towards the writing table. Its expression was dead-serious as it went on to write out a few words on the inside of its jar using the sediment that had collected on the glass.

BURN IT

OR

USE IT

It rubbed them away and did a breathing motion, causing the layer of sediment to reform before it wrote something again.

ALBEDO

SHOWS

THE

WAY

Another breathing motion. It raised its stubby little hand to its mouth and did a zipper-closing motion, gave a knowing nod, and just like that, the spark of sentience vanished, its eyes once more absently following Makhus’ every movement.

The Swordsman turned his gaze to the desk, to the many notes and notebooks strewn about it. He took a seat and began reading. The word length and sentence structure made sense, as did the alchemic diagrams, but… It was all letter soup. It was…

A substitution cipher. Just like he’d been taught back in training.