Chapter 73-Meeting Balfiel (Patreon)

Long Chapter. Didn't want to split it up. Think I still have some editing to do on it but wanted to get it out. Let me know if it works or not._____________________

Harold led Mors under the trees, and the smell of the small grove hit him. It was warm and crushed sunflower; it smelled like summer, even though the mountains should have been just entering spring. He stopped a few steps in and breathed it in.

It had been too long since he had been here. Or not long enough? Time shenanigans made it weird.

He'd left the rest of the guard back at the mouth of the pass, picketed and grumbling, with orders to stay put. Only five had come in with him — Ren and Corwin walking their horses abreast, Carter behind them with his hand loose on his reins, and Elroy and Jenkins bringing up the tail, already looking around like men who'd wandered into someone else's church.

Up past the top of the grove, where the trees thinned and the ground climbed, the pass ran on into Balfiel's valley. And he was nervous. 

"Kinda wild," he said, mostly to Mors, "that of this whole trip this is the part I am dreading the most."

Mors blew out through his nose and started nosing at a sunflower the size of a dinner plate.

The air was thick with bugs.

Dragonflies the length of a man's hand, drifting on wings that caught the light wrong, and fat bumbling things the size of plums that hung in the warm air and turned to watch the horses come in. There were dozens of them. 

"The hell," Corwin said, and ducked as one banked past his ear.

Elroy swatted at one. "Bugs. Great. Summer bugs in the middle of—" He swung again, harder. "Get off—"

That was a mistake.

The whole cloud of them lit up like he'd rung a bell. They came at him — at both of them, Jenkins caught it a half-second later — diving in twos and threes, into their hair, around their faces, one riding the brim of Elroy's ear and another bumping his nose on purpose and peeling away before he could get a hand up.

"THEY'RE IN MY— get it out, get it out—"

"Stop hitting them!" Jenkins had both hands over his head. "You're making it worse! Elroy! You're making it WORSE—"

"I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING—"

One of them landed in his hair and sat there like a queen on a throne.

Harold started to laugh, and he was surprised by how easy it came.

He raised one hand, palm out, and let a little of his aura roll off gently.

"All right, all right. Enough." His voice dropped, and he went soft in a way he hadn't in a while. "Come here, little ones. I see you there."

The cloud broke off Elroy and hung in the air, thinking about it.

To ordinary sight they were bugs. To Harold they never had been. They were covered in a glamour, but he could see them clearly — small folk, a hand tall and less, dressed in leaf and petal and stolen thread, all of them turned his way now with a hundred tiny suspicious faces.

"Look at you," he said quietly. He picked one out, a brown-skinned thing in a rag of green, hovering close. "Fen. Look how beautiful your flowers are this year. You've been busy."

The little thing preened.

"Mote." He tipped his chin at another, greener than the last. "That's a lovely green on you. Suits you very well."

And a third, a girl-shaped one in a scrap of cornflower blue, wings going like a hummingbird's. "Tansy. That blue dress makes your wings pop. Veeerry pretty."

She spun in the air, delighted, so pleased with herself she nearly flew into a branch.

Then his tone shifted — a touch lower, a touch mocking — and he looked down.

A small one had planted itself in the air right in front of Mors's nose, holding a sunflower spine over its head like a lance, feet churning, chest out.

"Oh," Harold said. "Now that is a fearsome spear."

Mors didn't find it funny. He laid his ears flat, snapped at it, missed, and let out a furious, offended neigh that rang the whole grove.

The faerie did a loop and came right back to hover an inch from the same nose, spear high.

"Down, Mors." Harold got a hand on the big neck. "He won't hurt you. He weighs less than your left ear."

Carter had gone still near his horse.

"Wait." He was staring at the cloud, at the little one taunting Mors, at Tansy still showing off her dress. "Those aren't— the bugs are the faeries. The ones you were talking about. On the mountain."

Harold looked back at him and grinned.

"Yeah." He said. "These were my friends. For years."

Elroy was still batting the air over his head, one-handed.

"Well," he said. "That explains a lot, actually. That explains why you're batshit crazy."

Jenkins elbowed him hard in the ribs. "Stop. Stop, bro."

"I'm just saying—"

"I know what you're saying, that's the problem—"

Harold let it roll off him and laughed again.

He raised his hand and held it flat in the air, and waited.

The fearsome one gave Mors a last hard look, wheeled, and came and set down on Harold's palm instead. It weighed nothing at all. Up close it was a boy-shaped thing with bark-brown skin and a shock of white hair like dandelion seed, and it stood on his hand with the spear grounded and glared up at him, entirely unafraid.

"Thistle," Harold said. He lifted the hand slowly up to his face, until they were near enough to speak low. "Do you mind if I have one of your flowers?"

The answer was immediate and total.

"No." A tiny, furious, absolutely certain voice. Thistle shook his whole head, and stamped one foot on Harold's palm, and shook his head again for good measure. "No, no, no. How know my name?!"

Harold nodded gravely.

"I understand," he said. "They're precious to you. And they're beautiful — I agree with you. I wouldn't give mine up either." He let a beat go. "But what if I used the flower to make you a treat?"

Thistle's foot stopped mid-stamp.

The no was still there in his little face, but it wobbled. He looked at the sunflowers, and back at Harold, torn clean down the middle.

Another fae zipped in and hung at Thistle's shoulder and whispered something in his ear, fast, both of them glancing at Harold the whole time. Thistle cocked his head.

"…something tasty?" he asked. Very small. Very hopeful.

"I promise."

Thistle considered seriously for a moment.

"Okay."

Then he shot straight up off Harold's palm, spun to face the cloud, and shouted — a high, ringing, imperious stream of orders in a language that jingled — and a dozen of them peeled off at once, mobbed the biggest sunflower in reach, and set to work. They came at the stem in a swarm, sawing and hacking with little bright edges, and the whole heavy head came free and tipped, and they caught it, all of them straining under it, and flew it wobbling and drooping across the clearing to hang in the air in front of Harold.

"I still just see bees," Carter said. He'd come down off his horse and was standing close, squinting hard at the floating flower and the fat golden shapes holding it up. "Big ol bumblebees. I'm looking right at it."

"You have to look," Harold said, and gentled his voice. "Not with your eyes. Use your mana senses. Push at what you're seeing — there's a glamour on them, but it's thin. Pierce it."

Carter frowned and went quiet, and Harold watched the moment it landed — the small jerk of his head, the breath he took.

"Oh," Carter said. "Oh."

"There they are."

"They're—" Carter's mouth worked. "They're beautiful."A few heard him and preened under his attention, dancing around his head gently.

"They are." Harold nodded at one that had drifted off the work detail and settled on the bridge of Mors's nose, small hands spread against the coarse hair, patting it. "And deadly in their own way, if it ever came to that. Don't ever forget the second part." Mors's eyes had gone half-shut. The great warhorse who'd trampled a goblin flat two days ago groaned low in his chest and leaned his whole heavy head into a creature the size of a thumb. "But mostly? Mostly they're just playful."

The sunflower head hung there in the air, sagging, the little ones under it starting to lose the fight with its weight.

Harold reached out and took it — a single thread of mana, no thicker than a spider's line, hooked under the flower and lifted it the last of the way, easy, until it floated level between his hands.

"All right," he said. "Everybody watch, now."

The whole cloud drew in to hover in a ragged ring, muttering to each other, nodding furiously, jostling for a view. One of them near his ear pointed a finger at his mouth.

"Stop talking," it said. "Stop talking."

The other faeires jeered at it while more than a few settled down on Mors head and started to braid his mane.

He let the mana come up off him in a slow wave, and the fae went "woooow" in a hundred tiny voices, and he brought his hands in against the flower and pressed. The whole head compressed between his palms, folding in on itself, petals and seeds. All of it crushing down between his hands. A pattern started to pulse — mana pulsing in a pattern only he could understand. 

Carter took a half-step back and got a thin shield up in front of himself without quite meaning to.

The fae did the opposite. They swarmed in around the pulsing light, shrieking with joy, wheeling through it and around it, dancing on the flares.

Harold held it to let them play, and then he spread his hands.

A small cupful of fluid hung suspended between them, glowing gold-green, turning slowly in the air.

He reached into the pack on Mors's flank one-handed, pulled out a small cup, tipped the fluid into it, and set the cup down on a flat rock.

The faeires shrieked.

They mobbed it — every fae in the clearing, shoving and climbing over each other and shrieking, elbowing tiny elbows, one of them fully sitting on another's head to get at the rim, Thistle right in the middle of it, fighting for his own prize with both hands and losing badly.A host of beautiful little people brutally fighting for a chance to get a drink.

Harold laughed more than he remembered doing in a very long time. He was home.

"They go wild for sugar," he said, when he could. Carter was staring at the riot on the rock as he'd never seen anything like it in his life. The little ones were brawling over the last drops of the liquid. "The tincture won't do a thing to them. It just tastes good. Thought I made enough." He muttered. Carter stared in shock as one, a little smaller than the others, darted away with his prize.

He was watching Thistle who had finally shouldered his way to the cup and was trying to get a drink.

"Looks impressive, though."

He took a moment longer to watch the cute brawl and sighed as he breathed in deeply. Trying to enjoy the moment, his eyes drifted up to the peak, and he sighed. Knowing it was time. “Ok, let's continue. We have another 30 mins of walking or so.”The trail kicked up out of the grove in tight switchbacks, and within a hundred paces the sunflower smell gave way to wet shale and cold rock. Mors picked his way up with his ears swiveling, and three of the fae rode along on his crest, hanging off their fresh braids like reins.Along the trail he noticed the various ingredients that Balfiel had cultivated. He blended a marvelous amount of ingredients that needed demanding environments. One flower needed shade during the day and moonlight at night. Balfiel would plant a large flower that bloomed in the daylight, shading the other flower. Then it would hide at night. A simple explanation, but it was something that Balfiel had done all over this area with various plants. It was an alchemist's dream of rare ingredients cultivated by one old lonely elf. But it also made the area dangerous if one didn’t know what to look for. One plant could captivate the senses, and more than once Mors started to leave the trail to go towards it, and the little ones began pounding on his head to get his attention and yelling in his ear. 

The roar reached them before the valley did. It came up through the stone and into Harold's boots, a low steady thunder that climbed with them until Corwin had to raise his voice over it.

"That a river?"

"Waterfall," Harold replied easily.

"Sounds like the whole damn mountain's taking a piss."The valley opened below like a bowl somebody had tipped on its side. Terraces of grapes stepped down the far slope in narrow green lines, vines tied to stakes and hung with fog off the falls, and at the head of it all the water fell white off a lip of black rock and hammered into a pool crystal-clear glass. Beside the falls, a stone house had been built straight into the cliff, its one door and two windows cut square into the mountain.

Harold pulled the flask off his belt and took a long pull of cold coffee. It had gotten cold days ago, but Adeline had made him a few flasks of cold coffee, with that cream she sometimes included. It was little moments of care like that that made him lo-. Well, maybe not that. Dangerous to think like that. Made him care deeply for her.

"You gonna share that, my lord, or are you just drinking it at us?" Elroy asked.

Harold handed it back over his shoulder without looking. Elroy took a swig, made a face, and passed it to Jenkins, who took a swig and made the exact same face.Carter nudged his horse up level with Mors and followed Harold's line of sight down to the house. "That him?"

"That's the house."

"Doesn't look like much."

"He'd take that as a compliment." Harold rolled his shoulders and caught himself turning the flask cap over and over between his fingers, and he got the flask back and screwed it back on.The path ran along the bottom terrace, between the vines and a low wall of stacked stone, and the fog off the falls beaded on everything. Harold's cloak was soaked through at the shoulders by the time they reached the pool. The noise here was enough to feel in his teeth.

The little fae who had fled the brawl on the rock sat on the stone wall at the end of the path, legs dangling, clutching an acorn cap with a gold-green smear still in the bottom of it.

The elf sat beside him, and when he saw him, his pulse quickened as he sucked in his breath. 

Balfiel wore a well-made plain brown robe rolled to the elbows and held a pruning knife in one hand, his silver hair tied back with a piece of twine. There was a long, ropy scar up his arm, and his hands were heavily callused. A large owl’s feather was tucked into his hair. He held a single drop of the tincture on the tip of one long finger, and he was examining it. 

He took his time about it. The fae watched him with enormous, anxious eyes. He nodded and handed the drop back to the little one, who cried joyously and ran off with it as Balfiel raised his head to make eye contact with him. "Your compression was sloppy; you need to compress evenly so you don't get small lumps, then your final pulses were too much. You scorched the sugar. Your mana quality makes it tasty for them, though. "He raised his head, and his eyes went across the soldiers, the horses, the braids in Mors's mane, and finally Harold again. "Who taught you to do like that? The human cycle has just started. None of you should be that far along." Harold had rehearsed this one for three days on horseback, and he forgot everything in his happiness at seeing Balfiel. And he knew in that moment exactly how to speak to him.

"An elf," he said.

"There are a great many elves. Most of them are fools."

"This one was a real asshole. I figure that narrows it down some."

Carter coughed into his fist. Balfiel stood, and it took a while, since he stood at an even 6’3. And he looked Harold over from his muddy boots to his cropped hair and back down again.

Behind Harold, Elroy leaned all the way over in his saddle toward Jenkins.

"That's the elf king," he whispered. "Gotta be."

"He's way too big to be an elf king," Jenkins whispered back.

"That's how you know he's the king, dumbass. Nobody's gonna follow a short king."

Jenkins sat back up slowly and nodded. "Oh. Shit, you might be right."Balfiel's gaze moved to them. Both men found something very interesting about their surroundings.

"You brought idiots," Balfiel said.Harold couldn't help but smile. “They’re good people.”"Thank the stars for small mercies." Balfiel looked at the terraces, then back at Harold, and the silence stretched. The waterfall filled it for them. "What do you want?" Harold smiled and leaned over into Mors's ear and muttered something, and Mors shook his head heavily, his reins rattling, and turned to look at him. “Go on now. I gotta do this.”Mors snorted, and he turned and cantered back up the path a little. Balfiel looked at him with a frown. “Don’t do this, boy. Whatever you have heard about me is false.”“You always were a cocky elf.” He replied with a smile. “This is a lot I’m sure I don’t know about you. But I do know a lot about you. And I know you can’t turn down a good brawl.”He began to spin up the engine of mana within him. This time, not using it to empower himself. Alchemists compete a different way. They competed with the one thing that had to be earned: better control. And violence, of course. A braided thread of mana appeared from his arm like a whip. Balfiel looked at his whip with a grunt and a devilish smile. “Oh, I’m gonna enjoy this, boy. You're a couple of centuries too early for this fight.” A copy of his braided thread of mana appeared within his hand. Except his had little flourishes that his didn’t have. Vines were threaded up and down the whip, and in his hand the whip had an elegant handle. They stood there for a second, looking at each other before Balfiel spoke again. “Well, come on now. You came here asking for this fight. Don’t be a chicken shit now.”Behind him, he heard Carter whisper to Elroy. “I thought these elves were supposed to be elegant and soft-spoken and stuff.”Balfiel’s eyes drifted over to Carter, and Harold swung.

The trick in these fights was to hit the other person first or make them move. You could block, but you couldn't move. He swung his arm, straightening the whip of mana into a slender, straight construct right at him. “Pathetic,” Balfiel spat out as he blocked, and Harold’s straight construct hit his block. So he folded the construct over his straight block and aimed it right at him.

Balfiel grinned as he moved his other hand, and a flat shield of mana blocked the blow, and Harold retracted his whip. The mana exercises had been working. He had more control than ever. He could manipulate the shape, hardness, and thickness of the whip damn near any way he wanted. He had taken many a beating from Balfiel in this competition. Now it was time for some payback. He grinned wolfishly at Balfiel and the old elf smiled right back at him. They moved at the same moment. Mana came alive between them as they both swung and blocked at the same time. The two whips met in the middle with a crack that slapped off the cliff face, and the fog between them boiled away in a ring of steam.

The shock ran up Harold's arm and into his back teeth. Balfiel's line had come in heavy, and a hand's width from contact it went soft as wet rope and slid along Harold's construct, curling around it, the little vines along its length catching and holding like burrs. Harold hardened the whole whip into a rod before the wrap could close, and he ripped it free in a spray of green sparks that hissed out over the pool.

"Stiff," Balfiel said. "Everything you do is so goddamn stiff, boy. You fight like a fence post."

"At least I can still get stiff, old man!"

Balfiel flicked his wrist, and the tip of his whip split into three.

The strands came at Harold from three angles at once, high and low and one hooking wide around his left side. Harold threw a flat shield up in front of his chest, and two of the strands bent around its edges before they'd even reached it. He thinned the shield, stretched it wide, and pulled it open into a mesh; the strands punched into the net and stuck there, thrashing.

Balfiel's eyebrows went up. "A lattice. Cute." He yanked his line back, and the mesh tore and snapped back into Harold's hand hard enough to sting. "Who taught you to weave a lattice?"

"I told you, it was some cranky old elf."

The elf's jaw worked, and his next swing came in twice as hard.

Harold caught it on a shield and felt his boots grind on the wet stone. Spray from the falls had coated everything in a slick film, and he pressed his weight down through his heels and held.

Up on the wall, the fae had split themselves into two howling camps. Thistle stood on top of the stones with his sunflower spear raised over his head, screaming something that jingled at Balfiel, and Tansy and a dozen others had lined up along Mors's saddle on the hill, shrieking at the top of their tiny lungs every time Harold landed anything at all.

"What the fuck am I watching?" Corwin asked.

"Two grandpas slap fighting with glow string," Ren said.

Elroy dug in his belt pouch. "Two silver on the elf."

Jenkins turned all the way around in his saddle. "You're betting against the lord?"

"I'm hedging, Jenkins. You gonna bet against the elf king?"

Balfiel's whip dropped low and vanished into the fog along the ground.

Harold felt it a half-breath late. A thread came up out of the wet stone right under his left boot and snapped tight around his ankle, and it pulled. He barely got a shield of mana around his leg before it happened and his heel skidded on the slick rock. He slammed mana straight down through the sole of his boot and fused himself to the stone, and his whole leg shook with the effort of holding it. But he didn’t move his muscle, so it didn’t count.

"Oh, you felt that one," Balfiel said murderously.

"That's a cheap fucking shot."

"The rule is you do not move." Balfiel gave the thread another lazy tug. "You picked a wet rock to pick a fight on. That is on you, boy."

Harold whipped his own line down and cut the ankle thread off at the root, and it came apart like wet paper. He brought the whip back up in the same motion, and as it came he hardened only the last hand-length of the tip to a spike and left everything behind it loose as a rope. The loose length curled around the edge of Balfiel's first shield and hugged it, and the spike came in behind it at the elf's shoulder.

Balfiel dropped a second shield behind the first in the time it took Harold to blink. The spike rang off it like a nail on an anvil.

"A little better," Balfiel said. "Now you fight like a slightly flexible fence post."

"Keep talking, grandpa. I can hear your knees creaking from over here."

"That is the waterfall."

Harold rolled his eyes. "Sure it is."

They traded fast after that, and the conversation got shorter as the swings got harder.

Balfiel's control was absurd. His whip changed as it moved, thick at the handle and thin as fishing line at the tip, and then, halfway through a swing, the whole thing reversed so the heavy end arrived first. Vines grew along it, shed off it, and grew back in a beautiful wave. He made a shield with a hole cut right in its center, and when Harold's spike went through the hole, the elf simply closed it, and Harold had to rip his line back out, and the drag nearly tore the construct apart in his hand.

"You feel that?" Balfiel said. "That is what control feels like. You have a lake of mana, and you don’t have the control to really use it."

"And you've got a cup, and you just won't shut up about it."

"A good cup is all a master needs."

"Thats what they give the little guy so he feels included."

Thistle, somewhere on the wall, screamed in outrage.

Harold's mana body was a furnace, and he could feel exactly where it was working against him. The power came up out of him easily and plentifully, and every ounce of it wanted to go too far, and every swing he had to catch it and choke it down to the shape he'd asked for. Sweat ran into his eyes and mixed with the spray.

Balfiel's breathing had grown heavier too. The elf's face stayed smug, but his shoulders had crept up toward his ears.

So Harold got stupid on purpose.

He threw a wide, heavy wave of raw mana straight at Balfiel's chest, a shapeless, clumsy flood of power that any first-year apprentice could have thrown.

"Sloppy," Balfiel sneered, and he set a broad shield to eat it.

Underneath the wave, laced through the middle of it where the flood hid it from any sense but touch, Harold ran a single thread thin as a hair. He'd learned it bent over a cauldron, a heavy push on top and a quiet line working below, and it had taken him years to learn to hold both at once. The flood crashed into Balfiel's shield and splashed, and the hair-thin thread slid along its surface to the end, then slipped inside.

Harold pulled, and the shield came apart in Balfiel's hand as the rest of the wave continued on towards him.

The elf threw up another one in an instant, and Harold's follow-through slammed into it and splashed off. But Balfiel's back foot had twitched. Harold saw the heel of the old elf's sandal lift off the stone and come back down in the exact same spot.

For the first time since the fight started, Balfiel kept his mouth shut.

The fae on Mors's saddle lost their minds.

Balfiel looked at the scrap of his old shield still fading in his fingers, and then at Harold, and his eyes had gone narrow and flat.

"Where," he said quietly, "did you learn to do that?"

"Invented it."

"Liar."

"Figured you'd say that." Harold rolled his neck, and it popped. "You want to keep talking about it, or are you tapping out? It's okay. I heard naps are real important at your age."

Balfiel smiled, and it was the ugliest smile Harold had seen in either life.

"Oh, boy," he said. "Now we are drinking."

The elf's whip came apart in his hand.

It unwound into a hundred threads, each thin as silk, and they hung in the fog behind him like the branches of a willow, swaying and whispering, vines crawling along every one of them. Then he swung his arm, and all of them came at once.

"Holy shit," Jenkins said.

Elroy slapped gold into his hand. "I'd like to triple down."

Harold split his whip into two and brought them both up spinning, hardening them into flat blades mid-rotation, and he stepped his mana body up as far as he dared. The first wave of silk threads hit the spinning blades like hail on a tin roof, and the sound of it cracked off the cliff over the roar of the falls. Threads snapped and hissed away into sparks. More came in behind them, and more behind those, curling in over the top and hooking under his guard, and Harold's arms burned, and he held his feet, and he spat water off his lip.

"Two?" Balfiel shouted over the noise. "I have a hundred, boy!"

"Quality over quantity, you wrinkled raisin!"

A thread slipped through and laid a stripe of fire across Harold's forearm. He caught the next one out of the air with a lattice, wrapped it, and sent a pulse straight back up it toward Balfiel's hand, and the elf hissed and let that strand go before it reached him.

The two of them stood thirty feet apart on the wet rock with their boots planted and their arms moving, and the air between them sang.Then Harold sighed. Breathing deeply as he pulled his mana back into him.Balfiel spat into the puddle of water at his feet. “Who taught you, boy? What elf broke the compact and taught you Alchemy? No one teaches the old methods like that anymore. Was it one of my old apprentices at Ism Thalor? I would know if they taught you. They’re sworn not to.”He smiled and walked slowly over to Balfiel, his nervousness growing again.As he walked closer, his eyes drifted over the familiar sights. It was good to be here again. He was so, so eager to leave last time. Never knowing what the old elf had given him last time. This elf was responsible for every success he had in his last life and his new one.When he got closer, he knelt in front of him as Balfiel glared down at him, and he churned his mana again, using it to empower his voice. “I swear on Gravensend that what I say is the truth. Grandmaster Balfiel Hurcruonis Thalorium taught me in this valley. I left before my training was complete. I didn’t regret it at the time, but I've regretted it for years since.”As he spoke, he saw his eyes narrow, and his own mana began to appear around him as he listened with an unusually serious look on his face.He continued. “I earned the Battle Alchemist Path on my own. I earned the EmberWright Path and the Lifetouched Path on my own.  I was named Mad Alchemist, The Laughing Killer, The Kept Man, and Butcher of Granorga. Rotmaker and named Stray by you.”His mana rose within him again, but his voice lowered. “Now I just go by Harold. Some call me Count and Master of the Basin. Potion Lord. I have returned, Master Balfiel.” 

Before he could stop it, a tear fell from his eye, and he wiped it away. “I am sorry I ever left; you were right about everything. It is not a nice world, and I was not ready.”Balfiel’s eyes narrowed, and he was silent for a long moment. The valley was silent as they watched. Even the normally unserious faeires were looking on curiously. “How can Gravesend allow an oath like that?” Balfiel spat out. “That can not be true. What gods' fuckery is going on right now?”

Balfiel's mana continued to rise; even more astonishing, the quality began to rise. Where Harold had barely edged him out in quality before, Balfiel's continued to rise and rise until it completely overshadowed his own. The quantity rose with it, and Balfiel completely unshackled his mana pool.His eyes began to glow with a black, purplish glow as he stared down at him. “Rise, boy; let me look at you.”He stared at him in wonder as the mana around Balfiel became tinted the same color as his eyes. He had heard stories of something like this but never saw it before. Balfiel had touched a concept, and he was channeling it. He rose as Balfiel stared at him and placed a hand on his shoulder. 

They were quiet for a moment as his hand rested on him in the center of a storm of mana before it finally began to calm down. Balfiel looked at him consideringly, and Harold stayed quiet. “You have traces of time on you, yet you have not touched the concept. I believe you even have a small affinity for it. Yet you should not. You are young for a human. You are what? 24 years old?”“Yes, master,” he replied curiously. Balfiel pointed a finger at him furiously. “Cut that out. One of me may have accepted you but it was not me!”“Get inside my house and sit down. Tell your people to camp just outside my valley. I don’t want them in here.”

Elroy leaned over to Jenkins. “Lord Harold was right. He’s a petty old elf.”A whip of mana appeared behind him and slapped him across the head. “What did you say, child!”Elroy went white as a sheet and started to back away with Jenkins. Ren and Corwin started to move up next to Harold, but he looked at them and shook his head. “I’ll be back. Let me figure this out. Thank you for getting me this far.”Carter spoke up. “We belong with you, Lord Harold.”“For fucks sake, I won't kill him. As a matter of fact, I will be kicking him out as soon as I can. Now get out of my valley.”Elroy and Jenkins, who had gotten back to the entrance, began shouting as if they were having a normal conversation. 

“Man, that elf was a grumpy bastard.”“And did you see his ragged old hair? I thought elves were graceful? He looked like an old mop.”Harold had to turn to hide his smile while a vein was popping in Balfiel’s forehead. This was exactly why he brought those two along. They could piss anyone off.Balfiel just turned and stormed away towards his house.Harold nodded to Carter and followed. Walking to the house and entering it felt like a blast from the past. When he entered, Balfiel was nowhere to be seen, so he went to the cabinet, pulled out two glasses, and went to where Balfiel kept the small keg of wine and poured two cups.Finally, Harold was sitting down, waiting and sipping on the very, very good wine. Balfiel came back, saw the wine that was poured for him, and took an appreciative sip.Finally, he placed a ring on the table between them with a very solemn expression. He looked at it curiously; it seemed to have a black monster's core set into a beaten silver-and-gold ring. Balfiel took a deep breath and spoke. “This is something an old friend made for me a long time ago. He led a clan of talented Imbuers that had a unique path that allowed them to imbue a portion of a monster's abilities into an object.”Something about that seemed very familiar to Harold as he spoke, but he listened as Balfiel continued.“The core in this ring comes from a very powerful mind flayer we slayed together as we adventured within the deep dark.”He sucked in a deep breath. Mind Flayers were powerful monsters with psychic powers that were almost exclusively deep within the deep dark. At least until mana levels rose and allowed them up on the surface. That they could slay it and repurpose its core spoke to the level of power he and his friend controlled.

Balfiel continued, “If you would allow it, boy. I would use this ring to examine what you think are your memories of our time together. You have been touched by time, but I don't know what that means exactly, and I would like to examine your memories to see whether they have been tampered with. 

Harold nodded as he understood what he was trying to do. The nail in his chest rose in defense of him. It saw his memories as his own and didnt want Balfiel looking at them. Balfiel’s eyes were drawn to the part of his chest where the nail was, and he frowned at it but let the unspoken communication continue. “I will allow it, but if you go too far, I will stop it,” Harold said.The old elf grumbled under his breath but allowed it and put the ring on. Instantly, the elf's aura changed. It became colder and was filled with pain and death. The atmosphere of the cabin changed, and he tensed as Balfiel stared at him. Suddenly the cabin tipped sideways, and the wine cup and the table and the old elf across it all slid away into a black so cold it burned the inside of Harold's nose.

Something slick moved through his head. It pressed along the backs of his eyes and down the length of his spine; it smelled of old blood. The nail in his chest rose up hot against it, and the cold thing paused.

"Easy," Balfiel's voice said. It came from everywhere and from right beside his ear. "Easy, boy. Show me the valley. Start there."

"It doesn't start there."

"Then show me where it starts, and be quick about it. This ring is a hungry bitch, and I would like to keep my own mind when we are done."

Harold took a breath and let it go, and let the ring in.

Mud first, and rain, and the smell of burning thatch.

He was running down a muddy lane behind a line of wattle houses with Sarah's hand locked around his wrist hard enough to leave bruises, and behind them somebody was screaming a name neither of them knew. The village they'd landed in had been kind for long. 

"Keep up, Harold, Jesus Christ—"

They went over a fence. Harold caught his shin on the top rail and landed in mud, and Sarah hauled him up by the collar, and they ran into the treeline.

"I do not care about your childhood hovel," Balfiel said, somewhere above the rain.

"You asked where it started."

"I asked for the valley. This is a boy covered in filth." A pause. "Although I will admit it explains a great deal."

The waterfall came up around him, and the fog, and the low stone room he knew so well.

Sarah stood in the doorway. She had mud to her knees and a gash down her forearm that had crusted black, and a jackalope over her shoulder. She walked to the table and dropped it, and the whole table jumped.

The Balfiel of that day sat behind it with a pestle in one hand. He looked at the thing on his table for a long time.

"What do you want?" he asked her.

"Teach my brother." Sarah jerked her thumb back at the doorway. "He wants to be useful."

Harold watched himself standing there, twenty pounds too light, clothes hanging off him, chin up and hands shaking. It felt like a hundred years ago, and he pitied that man because he knew what was going to happen.

The old elf looked at the boy in the doorway.

"He may stay," he said. "Whether he learns is his own concern."

In the black around the memory, the present Balfiel made a low noise.

"Your sister scammed me. Jackalopes are not real. I told her to find and kill a made-up monster," he said. He hummed appreciatively.

"She was worth ten of you."

"Yeah," Harold said. "She was."

Then the grind, years of it, running together into one long ache in the back of his neck.

He was bent over the stone worktable with his hands cramping around a glass rod, holding a binding while sweat dripped off the end of his nose, and the solution in the flask went cloudy and then brown and then black.

"Again," the old Balfiel said from across the room, without looking up from his grapes.

"I held it steady for—"

"You held shit. Pour it out. Again."

Harold poured it out. He burned the next one. He boiled the one after that so hard the flask cracked and spat hot glass into his forearm, and he stood there picking shards out of his skin while the old elf ate a pear.

"Your mana leaks," the old Balfiel said with his mouth full. "You leak like a cracked pot. Every binding you make, half your will runs out the bottom and into my floor."

"Maybe if you help explain what I am doing wrong."

"Maybe you could use my boot up your ass. Again."

Months of that. Nights of it. The fire in the hearth gone to coals and Harold still at the table, lamp guttering, the old elf asleep upright in his chair with a cup of wine in his lap. Sarah blowing in out of the rain every few weeks with a new cut and a shopping list.

"Healing draughts. Poisons, whatever you've got that works on things with two stomachs."

"What in the hell has two stomachs?"

"I'll let you know when it stops trying to eat Tomas." She scooped his last four vials into her bag without asking. "And that sticky shit. The paste. The blade one."

"That paste took me two weeks."

"Then you'd better start now, huh?" She kissed the top of his head and was gone again, and the door banged, and the fog rolled in through the gap.

"You gave her everything you made," the present Balfiel said. “Why?”

“It was my job to look out for her. Instead she looked out for me.”

Harold was bent over a flask at dawn with the lamp long dead and the gray light coming in off the falls, and the binding held.

It was a stupid thing, a basic clarifying tincture, a first-year compound. It sat in the glass, clear as spring water, with a faint silver thread spinning through it; he held his breath and waited for it to break, but it stayed.

He turned around. The old Balfiel was awake in his chair, watching him.

The elf got up, and he crossed the room and picked the flask up and held it to the light. He turned it once. He put it down.

Then he went to the keg in the corner, poured two cups of wine, set one on Harold's side of the table, and went to bed.

The present Balfiel said nothing for a while.

"You'd never poured me a cup before that. I’ll never forget that day."

"Hm."

Then the night he left.

His pack was on the table. The old Balfiel stood by the hearth with his arms folded in his stained robe, and the fire threw his shadow up the curved stone wall.

"She's going west," Harold said. "Toward the coast. Her team lost their healer. They need somebody who can brew in the field."

"You are not trained, Harold."

"I'm good enough!" He turned as he shouted at Balfiel.

The old elf kept his voice level, same as always. "You cannot hold a binding under pressure. You cannot brew in the rain. Your stabilizers break if a cart hits a rut. Three more years and I could make you something, boy. Right now you are a clever child with a bag of glass."

"I'm done being dead weight; I will learn."

"Then stay and stop being dead weight."

"Three more years of pouring shit out and starting over? More years of this abuse. No." Harold shouldered the pack. His hands were shaking on the strap, and he gripped it harder. "Thanks for the roof."

"Go, then, boy." The old Balfiel turned back to the fire. "Die somewhere else so I can forget you."

Harold watched himself walk out into the fog, and he felt the cold thing in his head go very still.

"You regretted it as soon as you left," the present Balfiel said. "You stayed at the top of the terraces."

"You didn't."

"I was watching from the window."

The road ran on for years after that, and the memories came faster and thinner, flashing past like a stack of cards somebody was riffling.

A market town with a leaning stone bridge and a steward with a rotten tooth who paid him half what they'd agreed and laughed about it, and a week later Harold sold that man's rival a tonic that turned the steward's piss blue for a month. A burned-out mill where he slept for a winter and blew his eyebrows off four separate times trying to make fire inside a bottle. A dwarf trader who taught him to curse in a language that sounded like rocks falling down a well.

"Fire," Balfiel said, sharper now. "Stop. This. What is this?"

Harold stood in the mill in the snow with his hands up, and between his palms a knot of flame turned slow and even, holding its shape in the open air.

Path completed. Prime Perk granted: Emberwright.

"That one was an accident," Harold said. "I had to learn how to maintain the fires around my potions. Eventually it became a way to defend myself when I was out."

"That is a terrible way to learn."

"Worked, didn't it. That path saved me more times than I can count."

Then he was hunched over a cauldron in a rented back room with a cold wind whistling through the shutters, and he was running a heavy push of mana down into the mash with one hand and sliding a hair-thin thread underneath it with the other, over and over, for months, until he could do it half-asleep.

"There," Balfiel breathed. "That’s some magic. Maybe you truly did learn something."

"Told you."

A house came next, small, whitewashed, with a blue door and a woman standing in it.

Harold pulled the memory away before it could open, and the nail in his chest went hot, and the cold thing pushing through his head stopped.

"No," Harold said. “Not her.”

The elf let the blue door go. "Fair enough," he said, and the house slid off into the black.

Sarah laughing, with her feet up on a camp stool, a year or later, on a ridge above a burning goblin camp that was still popping in the dark.

"Saratops," Harold said, "that was the dumbest fucking plan I've ever seen in my life."

"It worked, didn’t it?" She exclaimed with an easy laugh. She adjusted as she sat, her large wings extended behind her.

"You told me it was a diversion. I threw a diversion into their powder store."

"And now they're diverted." She stole his canteen and drank out of it. "Relax, Harold. It all worked out."

She passed the canteen back. "You're good at this, you know. I don't have to worry about you anymore."

The present Balfiel was quiet.

Harold kept the memory for one breath longer than he needed to, and then he let the next one come.

What came after came in fire.

A wall of timber on a river fork, and the Velthari coming up out of the fog in their bone-white lacquer, and Harold on the parapet with a bandolier of clay pots across his chest. He lit the fuse on one with his thumb and threw it, and it burst in the middle of their column and Harold laughed.

He laughed until he couldn't breathe. He laughed as he threw the next one, and the next one, and he was still laughing when a sergeant with half his face burned grabbed him by the collar and shook him.

"Calder! CALDER! The west gate's gone, we're pulling back!"

"Pull back, then." Harold lit another fuse. "I'm busy."

"You son of a bitch, you'll die up here—"

"Promise?"

They pulled back. They always pulled back. A season of it, two, gate after gate and wall after wall, retreating from monster after monster, and every retreat Harold was the last man off the parapet with an empty bandolier and a grin nobody wanted to look at.

Path completed. Prime Perk granted: Battle Alchemist.

"They called me the Laughing Killer," Harold said. "Our side did. The other side had worse names."

"And Granorga?"

Granorga was a walled city on a hill with a spring under it and forty thousand gnolls inside it who had eaten everyone else.

Harold stood at the spring's outflow at the bottom of the hill with a keg of something black at his feet. A commander in a fur mantle stood next to him with his arms folded.

"There are still people in the lower wards," the commander said. "Maybe a few hundred. Holed up in the temple."

"Maybe."

"If you do this, they will die too."

"If I don't, the horde comes down that hill in a week and eats Carrow and Dunmere and everyone in them." Harold knocked the bung out of the keg with the heel of his hand. The smell that came up made the commander stagger back. "You want to argue about it, or you want to hold your breath?"

He poured it in.

It took four days. By the second, the whole hill smelled like meat left out in summer. By the fourth, the birds had stopped landing on the walls.

"Rotmaker," Harold said. "That's the one the soldiers used. The Butcher of Granorga was what the families of the people in the temple called me."

The cold thing in his head moved slowly through that one, and it stayed a long time.

"Did you sleep?" Balfiel asked. "After."

"Like a baby. We're not done."

A lord's hall, with good tapestries and bad wine, and a heavy iron collar around Harold's neck.

"Kept man," Reyes said to the room, and the room laughed. He had rings on every finger and a hard voice. "Our famous Mad Alchemist. Look at him. He's been in my facility for a month."

"The glass you have is garbage," Harold said. "It'll crack the moment I put heat on it, and then you'll lose the whole batch, and then you'll whine about it and blame me."

The guard behind him hit him in the kidney with a truncheon, and he went down on the flagstones.

"Better glass," the lord agreed pleasantly. "After you give me the recipe."

Harold spat blood on his rug. "Eat shit."

That was the first year.

The workroom in the cellar was a stone box with a drain in the floor, a bench, and hooks in the ceiling, and a man named Oster who came down every few days with a bag of tools and very clean hands. He was so polite. He would apologize sometimes. He hated him.

"You could just give it to him," Oster said, wiping his hands. "I'd much rather be home with my girls."

"Then go home."

"You know I can't do that."

"Then I guess we're both stuck here, aren't we."

He wrote the recipe on the wall in his own blood because they had forgotten to leave him paper, and then he sat under it and laughed until Oster went and got the lord.

After that, they kept him working because, for some reason, none of the other alchemists there could make the recipe, and that made the beatings worse.

Cages on the far wall with things in them, and later people. A growth compound that forced a body to ignore the signal telling it to stop, and a row of grown men on cots who grew anyway until their bones split, and Harold walking the row at the end with a syringe because there was nobody else they trusted to do it. The new body-improvement tincture was the result of his work with those subjects.

Path completed. Prime Perk granted: Lifetouched.

He tried to leave more than once. There were always eyes on him, and they always brought him back. Too valuable to let die.

The cold thing in his head was shaking.

"Stop," Balfiel said. "Harold. You may stop."

It was the first time the elf had used his name.

"This is the part you wanted," Harold said. "You wanted to know how I got here. This is how I got here."

The years in the cellar ran together. He lost count of them, and later, when people asked, the number changed each time, because he truly didn't know. Even Mens Perfecta didnt help there.

But somewhere in the dark, a crate of reagents came down the stairs that shouldn't have existed. A vibrant red and green shifting series of potions within the crate.

"You did it," the present Balfiel whispered. "That was your body improvement potion."

The lord wanted another improvement potion, and he was obsessed with making it. 

"How did you know what it would do?" Balfiel asked.

"I didn't. I just hoped. But when it was completed, I knew it would work."

"You fixed my recipe?"

"You were on the right track. The coefficient for mana decay was wrong." Harold watched himself pour the last thimbleful into a small vial the size of his little finger and drink it. "And I was lost in my work at that point. That final version fortifies your body by 100% while giving you more affinity to your greatest concept. I believe it also brings out any latent bloodlines or physiques in your body. The result of thousands of deaths and years of experiments. One good thing came out of it."

Then the end of the world.

They'd dragged him up to the last wall in chains, because they needed every bomb he could throw, and the collar was off. The wall was a hundred miles long and falling down in a hundred places. Behind it was everybody left. In front of it was everything else.

The sky was the wrong color. Something the size of a mountain was walking in the east, and the ground jumped every time it stepped.

A kid next to him on the parapet was maybe seventeen, crying and loading a crossbow. "Is this it? Mister? Is this it?"

He ignored him and continued to throw his potions into the horde. 

The kid stared at him. Then the wall under them came apart, and everything went white.

He remembered getting dragged back into a cell and thrown into it, but they forgot to lock it again. It was a stupid mistake, and he took the chance. He ran. Only to get run over by a stupid runaway wagon. He could still feel how it felt to get trampled and run over.

"Harold," Balfiel said, faint and far away.

A phone alarm was going off.

It buzzed on a nightstand in a room with beige carpet and a water stain on the ceiling shaped like Ohio, and rain ticked on a vinyl window. The air smelled of old pizza and a coffee maker set on a timer, gurgling through its last cycle in the kitchen.

Harold lay on his back in a bed that sagged in the middle, and he lifted his hands up in front of his face. They were soft and had all ten fingernails, and the knuckles were smooth and the wrists were clean, and the skin on them was pink and twenty-four years old.

He started to laugh, and then he rolled over and threw up on the carpet.

The phone kept buzzing. The screen lit up with a text from Josh.

you alive? Last night on Path of Exile was wild.

The cold thing in his head surged forward, suddenly and greedily, reaching past the phone and the window and the gray rain for the rest of it, for the months that came after and everything he'd built since.

Harold drove the nail up out of his chest into it.

The black ripped in half. The cabin slammed back around him, the table and the wine cups and the roar of the falls through the stone, and across the table Balfiel jerked back hard enough to scrape his chair across the floor, and the ring came off his finger and hit the table and disintegrated.

Balfiel ignored it, and Harold stared at Balfiel as he started at him back in shock. Until Harold pulled a potion from a pocket in his tunic and placed it on the table. It was glowing green and red. Throwing colors from the vial across the room. It was…beautiful. And Balfiel's eyes were locked on it. Stunned. “You were brought back? Before your cycle began?” Balfiel whispered. Harold snorted. “Yeah, trust me, it’s a blessing and a curse.”Balfiel looked at him urgently. “How long?” How long have you been back?”“A little under a year.” He replied.“Ok ok so we have some time.” He looked up at Harold and stood up, his eyes ablaze. “You must win, Harold. Your people must make it through your crucible. You must leave Gravesend.”He looked at him curiously. He knew there was a lot he didnt know about Gravesend, but this was something new even to him.

“What are you talking about?” He replied. And Balfiel looked down on him softly. “Why do you think all of us natural races are here?” He said sarcastically. “We failed our crucible cycle. We elves failed our final challenges and were forgotten by the system. Forever doomed to remain here instead of joining the other races that succeed in the crucible. Left as challenges to future crucibles. Instead, the ones that win get to leave and join the greater universe." Harold nodded and pushed the potion across the table towards him. “Drink that. Let me refill our cups. We have a lot to talk about, Master Balfiel.”A wide smile graced Balfiel's face as he looked at Harold. “Get the good keg out, boy. You better have brought some of that beer you have been working on.”