Eventual Exchange

by Jonah Goldberg

A young wizard and his lackey arrive in their covered wagon, the wheels cresting the hill without anything moving them. The pair stop a few minutes’ walk from the town, hopping down from the wagon and quickly propping the vehicle up with boxes—the wheels show no sign of stopping. They then begin unloading the rest of their supplies.

“Doesn’t Brightwood have a nice inn we could stay in?”

“It’s frowned upon to bring magical items indoors,” the wizard responds curtly, “and we don’t have the time for disagreements with the locals. Watch it, shit!”

The lackey, pulling a leather-bound book as tall as his torso from the wagon, loses his balance and falls onto his back. Several pages fly from the book, each covered in handwritten lists. The wizard makes a noise like a pig squeal. Immediately, he drops the box he is carrying, checks his watch, a cumbersome device of crystal gears that barely fits in the pocket of his golden cloak, and splays his hands outward. On each index finger, he wears a ring carved of sapphire that extends into a thin, pointed cap over the nail. The wizard brings his arms up, forming a circle from his torso to his face; as he does so, small movements from his fingers cause his rings to trace in the air a complex alphabet in glowing blue script, each hand writing its own message. His fingers meet at the top and knot the cursive lines. The whole movement takes three seconds. The interior of the circle shimmers and reflects the inside of a tent at night. A swift, silver wind emerges from it, and it rustles through the book, shifting the scattered pieces back into their proper places. In two seconds, the circle shimmers again and vanishes, and the glowing lines fade save for a dust of sapphire powder that falls onto the grass.

“Elemental ordering spell,” the wizard remarks, “delivered in 3rd month of summer, 21st day, 16:32:15.” The lackey has unrolled some sticky parchment from a roll strapped to his arm for this purpose, and is jotting down the wizard’s words with a charcoal pencil. “Originated in 3rd month of summer, 22nd day, 00:00:00. You’re taking this one tonight, Patrick, since you dropped my codex. Don’t forget.”

“Always a fun before-bed cooldown,” Patrick mutters. He leans down to open the codex to tomorrow’s date, tears the list of two timestamps from the parchment roll, and lays it flat against the page.

The wizard stands behind Patrick and peers down at the page. “What else is on today’s schedule?” he asks.

The answer turns out to be three fireballs and a clothing mending charm, each due over the next couple of hours. “Tomorrow is tougher, although after that we have a week before the next set. You summoned… a cow? William, this is from the day you went into that cave without me.”

“I was desperate,” William admits as he lays out the first of three bundles of sticks. “There was a blind chimera guarding the quicksilver pool, and I needed to distract her noses.”

Patrick looks on stubbornly as William scrapes a flint stone to ignite the first fire. The wizard then spends several minutes measuring out pinches of brimstone and attempting to drop them exactly onto the tongues of flame. Each time he makes contact, the flames briefly shine bright blue before returning to their red and yellow.

“You took an idiotic risk,” Patrick finally spits out. “Notice that livestock is not a spell component we carry with us.”

“That’s—” William starts, giving more of his attention to the fire, “why—we— stopped—” he places the tenth successful pinch, and this time the fire stays blue, “in Brightwood.” He returns to the wagon. “There’s nothing else here, but someone will have cattle.” He opens a wooden box, revealing a beehive. William plucks a poppy from the ground and uses it to ferry one of the insects over to the fire. William spreads a dark powder on the bee, blackening its translucent wings. The bee shakes off the substance and flies from the flower, quickly getting out of reach.

“Damn it,” William whispers, then checks his watch, splays his arms outward, and begins to trace a circle with his rings.

“Stop it! You’re already paying back a spell! I’ll get another bee.” Patrick grabs a leather alchemy glove from the box he has been unloading, then reopens and reaches into the beehive, closes his fist, and draws his arm back out. He walks to William and loosens his grip slightly, allowing William to pour in the powder.

“You can’t make a fireball with a crushed bee,” William huffs. But as Patrick opens his powdered hand over the fire, one of the three bees inside still has unbent wings. While the other two immediately drop to the bottom of the fire and burn with a sickly smell, the other becomes trapped in the cage of the flames but otherwise unharmed. William grabs the glove from Patrick and slides it over his arm. The wizard and his lackey stop arguing, transfixed by the making of a fireball, which is no less beautiful than any sunset. For nearly 20 minutes, the bee flits around in the flames; each time it hits the edge, the flame bends outward, until eventually a blue sphere bounces lightly over the burning sticks. When the shape is perfect, William checks his watch, then begins counting down from 45.

At 20, William asks Patrick to read out the timestamps from the codex. “Standard fireball, delivered in 3rd month of summer, 16th day, 12:45:55. Originated in 3rd month of summer, 21st day, 17:00:00.” At 5, William’s rings glow, but this time the blue lines form a circle above them by themselves, without William moving his hands. They trace in cursive the two timestamps Patrick has just recited. William steps behind the fireball. The lines knot themselves at the top. At 0, the circle shimmers, then reflects an abandoned castle door covered in vines. William pushes the burning sphere with his gloved hand, and it rockets through the portal and off toward the wall, although the portal shimmers away before the impact is seen. Of course, William already knows how this ended five days ago; his beautifully crafted flames sputtered out in the wet vines, and he needed two more fireballs to finally break through the door.

William looks over at the two other bundles of sticks he has laid out, each awaiting the entire spellcasting process to be built on top of them. “I fucking hate magic,” he says. Patrick laughs as he crosses off the spell in the codex, for William says this every time he casts a longer spell, yet he never resists using powerful magic when the occasion calls for it.

Nearly four hours later, long after the sun has set and William has conjured three separate force fields over their belongings in real time—that is, without using his rings—the portal of the final fireball shimmers away, and the pair walk into Brightwood, William with his toolbelt and Patrick with a knapsack. They dine in a tavern, and many of the locals approach the wizard, asking if he has the time to stop by their homes and heal their children, mend their roofs, and fatten their cows. At the mention of cows, William swallows what he has been saying about having a tight schedule for the next two days, and offers a grin to the goodwife who asked, beginning to elaborate on a way he might keep them hefty and healthy, for a price.

Goody Hallisee and a friend who has joined their table then excitedly tell William that Brightwood is the perfect stop for an honorable wizard like him; there are stories that one of the hills around the town rests above a rare ingredient needed to smelt the legendary Philosophers’ Stone. Patrick looks to William excitedly, but William shakes his head and tries not to laugh.

Then the door swings open and another wizard enters, dressed in a flashy orange jerkin over his trousers, the color bringing out his own sapphire rings. William asks Goody Hallisee if she might bring him to her farm now, actually, since he has the ordering spell waiting at their camp. The goodwife is all too happy to lead her honored companion toward the door.

“William the Worldly!” The call comes with a hand tightly gripping his shoulder, the ring digging into his collarbone. “How fortunate that I found you here. You were so rushed the last time.”

“Ricard the Resilient,” William returns, not turning around. “How unfortunate that I’m in quite the rush now as well. Perhaps we should chat tomorrow, when my spells are finished.”

“Nonsense! I’m sure your friend will understand,” Ricard answers, giving a sincere smile to the aging woman. He ushers William over to a corner table, as Patrick looks on helplessly and the other patrons give the two wizards a wide berth.

They sit down. William’s hands fly to his lap underneath the table and begin to trace a portal. Yet before he can finish, he feels a chill from across the table, and his hands are suddenly encased in ice. He gasps and looks up at Ricard, shivering, and the other wizard smiles again, a faint sapphire glow reaching his face from his own lap. “Elemental restraining spell, perhaps the first thing we learned in the academy.” He takes his time writing down the timestamps on his own parchment roll, not having a lackey with him, before continuing. “I’m not letting you get away again, William. It wasn’t easy to track you to Brightwood. Now, before your hands fall off, where’s my quicksilver?”

“I saved it for three days from now,” William hisses through chattering teeth. “Now thaw me or I won’t be able to deliver it.”

Ricard falls silent. It’s not unheard of to send objects through portals clockwise, although it’s also a convenient excuse. Ricard opens another portal, and hot air blasts through it until William’s hands are warm and dry. The bartender frowns at the pair, but Patrick, who has already been talking with him, reassures him that the wizards won’t do anything more harmful.

“There was a whole pool of it,” William elaborates, “and it seemed logical to save it for a time when we could contain all of it. And I needed and still urgently need to repay the spells that got me in and out of that cave. I meant to meet you back in Firenze’s Landing after I’d taken care of my other spells here.”

“Well, now I’m with you again,” Ricard replies, spreading his hands, “and I’m not going anywhere until I get my quicksilver, so I suppose we’ll both be doing mindless chores for the locals for the next couple of days.”

William’s brow furrows. He waves Patrick over.

“Listen,” William tells Ricard, “there’s not enough here for both of us to do. I know we wanted to split the quicksilver, but why don’t I just pay you its weight in gold, and you can go off and do more important work?”

Patrick drops the knapsack on the table, and coins clang inside.

“You’ve been paying everyone for favors lately, haven’t you, William the Wealthy?” Ricard shoves the bag back toward Patrick. “But I had to fill the next two weeks with casting debt to protect you from the vampire bats guarding the cave. And I did it for the quicksilver. You know I wouldn’t have helped you otherwise, with the way you’ve been lately. Isn’t that what you wanted it for too? What’s money compared to perfect transmutation and the elixir of life if we formed the Philosophers’ Stone? To the glory of passing the known horizon of magic?”

William waves Patrick off to pay the bartender. He leans in close to Ricard. “All that time we wasted at the academy speculating on that—we were young and delusional. Nobody has ever made a Philosophers’ Stone, and nobody ever will, since they can’t find any primal matter, and since all the known and unverified recipes deviate wildly from each other. But everyone aspiring to, like you, will pay handsomely for the rarer ingredients.” He stands up and rubs his still raw hands once more. “You know what power is? It’s not magic at all. The respect we gain as wizards pales to what you can get simply by being rich. Now, don’t bother me for the next two days.”

Ricard is too stunned to stop William from walking away from the table and leaving with Patrick. Once the door has closed behind them, William exhales deeply, then grabs his lackey by the wrist and starts running.

“What is it?” Patrick asks, not having heard the end of the conversation.

“Nothing,” William mutters. “We just need to get back for your ordering spell.” Having come to expect both paranoid preparation and forgetfulness from his mentor, Patrick willingly jogs back to their camp. After they set up their tent, the wizard checks the timestamps from his codex. “Quicksilver,” he orders, and Patrick reaches over to draw a thin vial out of William’s discarded belt. The lackey does a double-take at the substance in his hand.

“You were supposed to give some of this to Ricard.”

“Focus, Patrick.”

The spell consists of William drumming a pair of fans on the canvas floor, which keeps drops of quicksilver suspended in the air, and Patrick solving a wooden sliding-block puzzle. As Patrick slides the pieces into their correct configuration, the quicksilver drops in the air also become more orderly. The lackey finishes the puzzle quickly, but the grid above him is imperfect. He looks up at his mentor, concerned, but William, his eyes closed, is too absorbed in his task. Eventually, the timestamps trace out above William’s rings, and the wizard snaps to attention. The circle shimmers, William slams the fans together, the wind flies through to sort William’s codex, and Patrick grabs his temples and groans in pain.

William scrambles forward and shakes his lackey. “Say something.”

“I…” Patrick starts, his breathing far too rapid. “Who are you?”

“You know who I am,” William snaps, his worry flipping to anger. “Get it together. Tell me the last thing you remember.”

“I… we were coming up on Brightwood; you pointed out the hills around the town. Where are we?”

William sighs with relief. “You didn’t put enough effort into an ordering spell,” he explains, gesturing to the objects on the ground. “Recall that, no matter our intentions, nor whether we’ve successfully prepared it, the portals don’t take shortcuts on spells. So the rest of the ordering effort was taken from your brain’s work today.” He sighs again. “I need to make new puzzles; we’ve fucking solved this one too many times.”

William packs everything up for the night, reassuring Patrick that sleep will help his mind find everything again. He snuffs out the candle, and the two lie down. 

When his lackey begins breathing slowly, William grabs a slip of parchment and a stick of charcoal and walks out under the stars. He traces open a portal in the air, and laser lines of emerald light climb out of the blue frame like the legs of a giant mantis. Steadily the different lines fold into each other and become a polyhedral compass apparatus, with several different indicators. William writes down the spell, then wanders the hills around the town, watching the compass adjust its angles in front of him. Eventually, its arrows point directly beneath him, and its meters all fill. William waves the compass away, then opens another portal, calling forth a bulky humanoid figure, twice William’s height and made of stone. White light shines from its hollow eyes and mouth.

“Dig,” William tells the golem, and immediately it begins a tireless rhythm of punching the earth with one hand and shoveling the loose dirt away with the other. William conjures a cloaking force field around the area, gives a satisfied grin to the now seemingly empty hill before him, then walks back to his wagon. Crawling underneath the vehicle, he opens one of several locks with one of his rings, and pulls out a small book—another codex. Its first pages are each taken up entirely by one spell timestamp, the origin of which occurs the day after next. William places his transcripts of the spells he has cast tonight several pages later, then flips to the last page, containing a recipe with dozens of steps and dozens more corrections and marginal notes. He holds his finger at step 15, then opens a small panel on one of the perpetually turning wagon wheels. An alchemical soup tumbles inside, one of the ingredients projecting actual sunlight. As the hours tick past, William measures, curses, and re-measures substances into all four of the wagon wheels, some known to a layperson, others, like the appearance of ripples and light reflecting off of water but without an actual liquid, unrecognizable even in dreams. One finger always remains on the page, tracing down until “Step #46. Wait until sunset. Add primal matter to Mix #2.”

Patrick awakens with the sunrise to find William turning fitfully next to him, his eyes red, but this is typical. The lackey skims the codex, jots down notes in his own journal, and then shakes his mentor fully awake.

“Right,” William says, speaking before he has even sat up. “Brightwood is a small town, but we’re running low on a lot of components, so spend the day by the town square and see what you can buy. Bring my Sefer Yetzirah, and read everything it has to say about golems; I might sell living scarecrows to Goody Hallisee. I’m off to take care of this fucking cow.”

William walks straight and purposefully across the town. His shoulders only sink when he locates the goodwife’s farm and finds her in an animated conversation with Ricard. “Look!” she tells William when he arrives. “He’s ripened all of my apples.”

“And Goody Hallisee has been telling me some fascinating stories about the Philosophers’ Stone!” Ricard says smugly. “Apparently a hundred years ago, a wizard mined primal matter from under the hills. Tell me you’ll at least help me rework my dowsing spells; I think your cynicism last night was just to insult me.”

“Say, you passed by the spot last night, William the Worldly!” the goodwife jumps in. “One of the cows got out and wandered there, and I had to go after her. I thought you were retracing that wizard’s steps as well; that’s how I remembered to mention it to Ricard the Resilient here.”

William blinks away the bags under his eyes. “I was just getting some air,” he says. “My lackey is intolerable at times.” As Ricard raises an eyebrow, William continues, “I admire the pride your town has in magic history. But as Ricard knows, dowsing spells can’t detect anything as unformed as primal matter would be, if it were here. Poor wizard must have just been frustrated like me. Now, didn’t I come here to help you with something?”

Ricard is not finished. “What happened to you? The William I studied with would have lost sleep over his excitement about a possibility like—”

“It’s been three years since then. Maybe I wanted to finally get some sleep instead of chasing nonsensical dreams.”

“You do look like you need a week of sleep. But you’re going to tell me what actually happened to you,” Ricard resolves. “Go on, finish your important work first.”

Ricard makes a gesture of rubbing coins together as he leaves. William gulps, but he manages to contain his shaking hands under his cloak and regain his composure as the goodwife goes on at length about her cows, introducing each one by name and by their unique mannerisms. William cannot see any differences between them. All are equally sickly and thin. The goodwife shows him where they have been escaping the corral. “I can’t keep the grass by the hills free of bugs,” she laments, “and I think something’s eating them from the inside.”

“Listen,” William suddenly interrupts, checking his watch. “I know just the thing to make your livestock healthy again, and another spell to make sure they don’t wander off. But I’m in a rush and a magic situation. What do you say if of these 20 cows, I take one but make the other 19 perfect as peaches?”

“Sir, I know it’s odd, but I’m not looking to sell any of them. I keep them for the milk and as work animals, and ever since… well, they’re my only children. Truly,” she adds, as William begins drawing out gold coins from a pouch, “there’s nothing else I need now, certainly not that money could buy.”

William checks his watch. “Alright. Well, how about this horse?” He opens a portal, and a beautiful brown mare, equipped with a saddle, falls out. She immediately whinnies loudly and kicks the air, confused and scared.

“Oh dear,” the goodwife yelps. “I… I’ll have to think about it.”

In the distance behind her, the partly cloudy sky suddenly cracks with a lightning bolt, followed by a boom of thunder.

William looks back and forth several times, then checks his watch again. “You’re welcome to reconsider then,” he stammers. He loosens the saddle from the mare and throws it onto a cow, then throws himself onto the saddle. The cow groans, but the wizard’s next portal carries a red smoke to rest around its hooves, and it speeds off with him, far faster than even the healthiest bull would be physically capable of.

Two more lightning strikes hit during the ride, while William curses at the cow for not being healthy enough to send back in time without a healing charm. When it resists going any closer to the thunder, William casts another speed spell on it, although he can feel the animal’s muscles dissolving between his clenched legs. He arrives within sight of his camp just in time to watch Ricard call down two lightning bolts simultaneously to shatter the final force field. The wagon catches fire, and the flames quickly give rise to a series of multi-textured explosions and one implosion. Ricard calmly writes down the timestamps of his spells, then looks up and sneers at William.

William fires off a lightning bolt of his own, but Ricard has predicted the move and redirects it with another spell. “The longer you fight me,” Ricard yells, “the harder it will be to recover your burning codex!”

Ricard does not register that the fire has already died. William lowers his hands and maneuvers the cow straight to where the wagon had stood. Ricard runs in the same direction.

“You know something about the primal matter!” Ricard says once they are closer. “And now you’re not going anywhere until you tell me everything, and until you help me pay all the debts you put on me.”

His anger seems to deflate into confusion when the defeated wizard does not respond. William dismounts the cow, which whimpers and falls over, and he stumbles toward what remains of his entire camp: just two burning boxes that had been propping up the wagon. William digs into the one with the beehive furiously, tearing out the carmelized honeycombs. The only intact object left of the wizard’s arsenal is a red, crystalline orb, with a shifting membrane now primarily colored by tiny, captured lightning bolts. He grips it limply.

“That’s…” Ricard sputters. “That’s…”

“Do you know what you’ve done, Ricard the fucking Roach?!” William sways as he stands, heaving in breaths that immediately come back out as sobs. He stalks toward Ricard, only to then turn and pace the other direction. He chokes the words out. “You’ve just destroyed a sun scale, a moon silver, seven starshards, four seeds of first life, maker’s clay, eternal ember, all of the quicksilver, all of the standard components and my equipment, my complete recipe for the stone, and the three known recipes it was derived from! Irreparably destroyed, I might add,” gesturing uselessly at the black, sunken ground around him, “because you burned the fucking liquid shadow too! Damn it, damn it—”

“You’re holding the Philosophers’ Stone. You made the Philosophers’ Stone. How? And what do any of those components matter if you’ve already—”

The wizard finally digests the situation, appraising his manic former classmate. 

“In the academy,” William says, “we both said this was our life’s mission. But we watched it drive other prodigies crazy, spending their lives chasing something that wasn’t real, or always saying they’d start looking for the rarer ingredients next year, when they had done more planning. So I summoned a complete one, for three years in the future, as far ahead as these fucking rings let me. And then I knew it was possible, and I had all the motivation, the necessity, to finish it. For its origin tomorrow.”

Only now does Patrick return, laden with bags, knowing better than to have come close to the explosions. William reflexively checks his watch. “Oh, shit, shit, shit.” He looks at the cow beside his feet and kicks it. He hears a bone break in the drained corpse. “Shit.”

Patrick does not know what has occurred between the two wizards, but he recognizes the immediate problem. “You can’t repay a live cow with a dead one,” he says. William gives him a look suggesting the opposite of gratitude for the reminder.

“I’ve got a work-around. Your outer clothes are leather, right?” William asks his lackey.

“Yes?”

“Start taking them off; it’ll pay back some of the mass. Ricard, you are going to help me finish the stone. Nobody else around here can, and I’ve come too far for this not to work. Tell me you understand.”

William moves his hands inches from Ricard as Patrick pulls his shirt over his head. The rings begin to glow. Ricard, considering Patrick’s words and the animal corpse in front of him, realizes what William still needs to repay the spell—what his former friend is threatening. He trembles.

“I understand.”

William turns his arms to face Patrick instead of Ricard. The portal traces itself from above the wizard’s shaking arms. All too quickly, the circle knots itself and shimmers, revealing the cave and the hungry chimera, sucking the cow in, shucking Patrick’s leather outer garments and pulling the young lackey toward the portal, ripping the life from the boy’s husk with a shriek. In the past, William distracts the monster with a plump, living cow.

The two wizards stand still for a moment.

“The sun scale, for example,” William says with a level volume, staring at the spot where his lackey had just stood. He continues to answer the question Ricard has not yet asked. “They’re made of 20 years of condensed sunlight. The nearest summit that might have any is thousands of leagues away. So if we don’t replace the sun scale by the time my spell is due, the portal will just stay open, sucking in the sunlight over the hundreds of closest leagues for weeks until it gathers enough. All of Goody Hallisee’s fucking cows die, as does she, as do the inhabitants of the four nearest towns. And that’s just one ingredient you destroyed. I did not want that for Patrick, but by the gods’ graces, we have much, much bigger things to worry about.”

William stalks off toward the other hill. “Get your wagon,” he tells Ricard. Ricard, with no other choice, rushes to gather his supplies and help remake the Philosophers’ Stone.

Soon the two wizards have a wind column carrying the dirt from the hole, as their crew of three golems have dug themselves hundreds of feet straight down. The pair sit down with the incandescent Stone between them.

“How many of the rarer ingredients do you have?” William asks.

“Just eternal ember and a moon sliver,” Ricard answers. He hesitates for a moment. “‘An object can’t be used as its own future source,’” he recites. “Are you certain an object can be used as a tool to make its own source?”

William dodges the question. “And which recipes?”

Ricard sighs. “The Templar and the Ziggurat.”

“All right. Double all the light ingredients and halve the dark ones. Count the sums of the lines in the Ziggurat with the Sefer Yetzirah’s rules, and use those numbers to go back through the Sefer Yetzirah and pick out the other ingredients.”

“Okay. I may have an algorithm spell for that.”

Ricard’s wagon has only three wheels, which need to be re-enchanted to move each time, but he carries more alchemical equipment than William has ever felt comfortable using. As the first star appears in the sky, they dip the moon sliver in four rotund cauldrons filled with saltwater, the formal beginning of the recipe. They work through the chilly night, alternatingly casting spells to wake them when new ingredients need to be added and hotly debating with books and experimenting with the Philosophers’ Stone to transmute the other ingredients. 

Ricard has crossed paths with William sporadically in the three years since they finished their schooling, but it is only during these discussions that Ricard realizes how advanced his former classmate has become. William describes theories not from memorization but rather instinct, and the temperamental bouts of obsession he once brought to his studies have matured out of necessity into single-minded determination. Ricard begins to think he is the loser of their old rivalry, as he struggles to keep up with William’s thought process, but he does not dare say this aloud.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Ricard asks at first light. Both of the wizards are wrapped up in their cloaks next to the overheating Philosophers’ Stone, trying and failing to sleep. “When you started, if not yesterday. You’ve had a community of wizards who could help, and instead you just dropped off the map and turned this into a suicide mission.”

“It would have become a bloodbath. I don’t think the academy is ready for this, and someone would’ve taken it, for good or bad intentions. I couldn’t even tell Patrick. When the world finds out about this, I want it to be on my terms.”

“What I’m hearing is, your pride—”

Before Ricard can finish, his codex suddenly opens, flaps its pages like wings to fly just above its owner’s head, and begins screeching.

“Agh!”

“What the hell?” William adds.

Ricard resolutely stands and grabs the large book. It instantly falls still and quiet. “It’s an alarm,” he explains, “when I have a spell due soon and don’t seem to be preparing it. You don’t do this?”

“I have Patrick. Had Patrick.”

“Get up and help me; it’s your fault I owe this one.”

Ricard pulls William to his feet. They walk a few paces away from their makeshift camp and enchant the grass into a series of vines that Ricard had used to restrain the vampire bats outside the cave. William, exhausted, curses at the interruption. His demeanor quickly changes, however, when the pair finish and notice that no more dirt is rising from the wind column.

Ricard grabs his infinite rope, and the wizards rush to the edge of their hole and shrug out of their cloaks. Just as William begins to descend, however, Ricard spots a few townspeople approaching the site.

“We need to harvest this quickly; it’s too unstable to be left in open air,” William says. “Keep them away. Threaten all of Brightwood with plague if they don’t keep away, and I’ll get it.” His hands white around the rope, he starts walking down the dirt wall. Ricard reluctantly pulls himself away from the hole. He grabs William’s pouch of gold and walks off to meet the villagers so that they cannot get much closer.

It is not quite sunrise, and the hole quickly grows dark as William rappels further. The wizard ties the rope through his belt and uses his freed hands to conjure a small purple flame that stays hovering near his shoulder as he moves. He descends for over an hour, the dirt and rock walls around him largely unchanging. He expects to hear the golems, but the constructs seem to have disappeared. At last, William’s feet touch sand softer than water. As he moves his legs from the wall to the ground, he sinks up to hips. Shaking, he grabs a handful of the sand and holds it up near the flame above his shoulder. It is difficult to see the edge of the powder; its color is the night sky, an all-absorbing black with distant stars in its depths. As he stares at it, William thinks again that the sand feels like water, and suddenly the primal matter in his hand turns clear and splashes out. William bursts into joyous laughter. Then the ring in his outstretched hand begins to glow. He stares, eyes wide, his mind running through everything he can remember casting in the last week. His own inability to place the spell does not stop the timestamps from tracing themselves above his rings. All too quickly, the circle shimmers, and a faint hiss can be heard.

For a moment, nothing seems to have happened. Then William begins to feel very, very cold. His muscles seize and his body forces him into a ball, teeth chattering and gooseflesh blooming on his skin as he sinks further into the primal matter. He exhales, and immediately regrets it as the warm air only barely touches his hands before being lost forever.

William looks in supplication to the purple flame, but it offers no more heat than a candle, and passively watches him freeze. He takes in a painfully cold breath and screams for Ricard. His voice comes out pitifully soft, his jaw too cold to form the words correctly. His mind turns to his cloak at the top of the hole, and he forces himself to think of anything else. He wriggles to bury himself further in the primal matter, but the powder does not possess the quality of temperature. William aches for a fire and blanket, the way he had planned to recover from summoning his own body heat. He turns his mind away and tries to cast a spell, but his hands shake too much to write. He longs for a thick, fur coat, with deep pockets for his hands, and a heavy hood.

Miles above William, Ricard takes his time talking with the locals, ensuring them that he and William will repair any damage done to the town. He has handed over William’s entire pouch of gold, and asked kindly that someone bring hot meals to the wizards. When Ricard finally returns to the campsite, his codex gives off another alarm. He patiently sets up the spell that had allowed his wagon to travel here, although he cannot help but glance at the hole every few minutes, marveling at the fact that he might become one of the only living wizards to see primal matter.

Finally, he is able to join William at the bottom of the hole. Having relied on his infinite rope in dozens of situations, he is able to skip and hop down its length, feet never slipping too seriously from the dirt and stone walls. Soon, Ricard can make out a purple flame below him.

When Ricard reaches the bottom of the hole, he finds William wrapped in a luxurious fur coat, shivering and whimpering. Only dirt surrounds him.

“Where’s the primal matter?” Ricard asks. “Was your dowsing spell wrong?”

William looks up, the warmth beginning to return to his face. His eyes are sunken. He limply gestures to himself with the coat, hands tucked into oversized sleeves.

“Oh,” Ricard mouths. He hesitates for a second, then says, “So primal matter really can become anything. That’s amazing! Can’t we just change it back?”

William only shakes his head. He takes a few moments too long to stop, as his head keeps shaking to keep his body warm.

The concern drains from Ricard’s face more quickly than a spell could have done. “You wasted the most powerful element in the universe… to make a coat.”

William whispers, “You can’t control how much you use unless it’s separated. You can’t control it at all. I lost all of my body heat. I might have died. And then everything would’ve been fucked.”

“Wait, did something attack you down here?” Ricard readies his hands for a spell and quickly turns around the thin well. It is only after two rotations of seeing just dirt that he looks down at William, curled up in the ground. “Or was it just your own stupidity.”

William has no response. Ricard secures them both into the rope and hoists them back to the surface, without the one ingredient they came to Brightwood for.

By time the sun hangs close to the horizon again, the wizards are still missing four of the rarer ingredients. Creating maker’s clay has cost most of two other ingredients, as well as the entire hole’s worth of dirt. William does not stop working, but he remains silent for hours at a time. 

As the sun sets, William suddenly bursts into laughter, which quickly turns to crying again. He tosses down the vial he has been holding, and he keels over, rolling in his torn, gold cloak. It is several minutes before he gets up again.

“Write this down,” William rasps, and steadies himself with a cauldron.

“Write what—”

“Primal matter, originated in Year of the Horn, 3rd month of summer, 23rd day, 12:00:00.” The wizard’s numb fingers barely trace the timestamps correctly. “Delivered in 3rd month of summer, 23rd day, 18:10:56.” The portal opens, and more of the endless celestial powder falls into the cauldron. As soon as the portal closes, William begins another one. “Sun scale…”

Ricard only watches, with a splitting headache, as William conjures the remaining ingredients from three years in the future.

“You’re killing yourself. You don’t know that you’ll be able to find these things again.”

“Don’t you see?” William wheezes. “I’ve got my life’s mission. I gathered all the ingredients once before, even if it almost killed me, and I’ll do it again. This is my fate.” The sun setting behind him, he adds a pinch of primal matter to the first cauldron. The pair maneuver the contents of the other three cauldrons into it, and the ingredients reacting quickly begin to resemble the membrane of the Philosophers’ Stone beside them. William checks his watch.