Two heavy leather-bound tomes thudded onto the stone examination table beside a row of burning tallow candles.
Inside the quiet alchemy hall of White-Lotus Academy, Alchemist Linnea pushed her spectacles up her nose.
Beside her, Barnaby Holt wiped soot from his thick right fingers onto a canvas apron.
Spread out between the two ancient volumes were twenty crumpled sheets of coarse flax paper.
These were Kaelen Vance’s earliest alchemy notes, scribbled in careless charcoal during his youth when he first studied basic pill theory.
The paper was stained with dried barley tea, grease from fried dumplings, and roasted melon seed shells.
On the left side of the table lay the Grand Imperial Pharmacopeia, the holy canon of the Nine-Cauldron Guild.
Bound in red pigskin and embossed with genuine gold leaf, every alchemist in the Iron-Crown Duchy was required by ducal decree to follow its formulas to the letter. Any deviation was punishable by imprisonment in the salt mines.
