Chapter 2

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He stopped trying to keep the sand from entering their underground home a long time ago. Instead, the alchemist started making glass sculptures from the particles that littered the ancient ruins of Central City. The child loved them, asking over and over that he show him how to make them too. Of course, he instructed the boy on how to visualize and understand a very basic formula, then deconstruct the silica into base components and finally, reconstruct them into whatever he imagined.

"Father?" The little boy looked up at the elder, the child's golden eyes wide with glee. "I made another, you wanna see?" He tugged at the man's sleeve.

"And what do you have there?" The older man pushed his desk chair back and he adjusted his spectacles, his own amber irises glowing by the candle light.

"I made a little alchemist, just like you told me from your stories! Come see!"

"Alright, alright." The elder let the child pull his white shirt sleeve until he was directed to the "playroom." The boy's alchemical genius never failed to surprise him, and he often indulged his tiny protege. However, a knot formed in the pit of his stomach, hoping the boy constructed another glass sculpture and not, not anything like the last time. "Show me."

"Here he is." The boy stepped aside, revealing a large transmutation circle etched in chalk or sandstone on the rock floor. In the center of the circle, a horrific brown and gray mass of flesh squirmed. "I saw the little white ghost boy again." He pouted. "He made me come back and yelled at me the whole time." The creature groaned and wisps of golden hair blew out of its twisted face. "He's better than the last one, I almost have it right, don't I?"

"Oh, child." The man came closer to the almost human mass of pain writhing on the floor. "You cannot bring back the dead, you do not have this man's soul." He looked sternly upon the child. "You must stop this, all you are accomplishing is making a living thing suffer so." The elder knelt down to the creature's head and its eyes opened, causing the man to jump. Golden eyes stared up at him. "I will give you peace." He placed his hand on the poor being's head and blue sparks traveled from his flesh around the mangled cranium of the creature. It didn't scream or struggle, it just fell down in silence.

"Aw, did you have to kill him?" The boy pouted again, upset that his creation had been destroyed. Before his father could answer, the man performed another transmutation until the mass on the floor disintegrated into several piles of different colored powders and a puddle of water.

"I want you to put each element into a glass vial, classify it then label it and put it away." He stood. "The liquid too, I'll leave it up to you to figure out a method of picking up every last molecule."

"But that will take me days!" The boy whined.

"Correct. And in that time, you will reflect on why you should not try to create a human." He started to walk away, leaving the child.

"It's not fair!" Tears welled up in his eyes. "It's not fair!"

"What's not fair?" He turned to glare at the boy.

"It's not fair because YOU make all the golems! YOU made me and I'm human!" The child couldn't stop the tears now and they fell freely, he wiped his face with the side of his arm.

The elder didn't answer. Instead, he ignored the child, turned and walked away, yet spoke loud enough for the boy to hear him. "The Golems are not human...they are mud and clay. They have no soul. You are not human either...you also have no soul."

Back in the confines of his study, his door shut securely so he couldn't hear his child's cries or curses, Father fell into his chair with a thud. He adjusted his necktie and leaned back, looking up at the mosaic ceiling. He scrutinized the scene portrayed in ceramic tiles in midnight hues of blue, black and glistening gold and silver: A lion, the Sun, the Moon. These figures started a reflection upon the long memory of his equally long life. Squandered. His gift of ultimate power had been wasted over the last thousand or so years until only two of the previous millions of souls remained and neither were his own. The only thing other than the dual souls he possessed was his alchemy. Well, and this boy. This boy. Father knew the child was neither good nor evil, there could be nothing without a soul to lean one way or the other. Yet, the boy's penchant for alchemy left him stymied because an artificial human shouldn't be able to perform alchemy, let alone a soulless human. Father sighed and looked upon the book on his desk. He wondered if he wasted his third soul, the soul he exchanged with Truth to create the human child and not another homunculus pulled from within his most devious sins. No, his calculations were perfect, his transmutation brilliant. Now that all the souls within him had been released either by use or he had set free to the Otzer on his own, he need only wait until they returned to him and he could finally right his wrong. He waited four hundred years to cause this tragedy and another thousand before realizing and trying to correct his folly.

Perhaps when that happened, he could truly become human himself.

He'd forgotten when that became so important to him to begin with.


The boy kicked a pile of his former creation and let the substance float down onto the hard stone. All he desired was to please Father yet all he managed to accomplish was upsetting the man. He felt useless and angry. Why did having a soul make him human anyway? Why was that so important to Father? He seethed and stomped over to the pile of embroidered pillows in the corner of the playroom and he fell backward.

"Maybe if I weren't so little, he'd teach me real alchemy." The boy scrunched his brows hard and concentrated. Ever since he created his first human, he'd been able transmute without a circle. He smiled because this baffled Father, who searched his body saying he should have lost something but he remained whole. Father theorized that a lack of a soul kept Truth from taking payment, something he explained happened to human alchemists who performed alchemy to create one of their own. It didn't matter, he just wanted the man to take him into his arms and praise him, he yearned for something, acknowledgment...love even. The child began to concentrate, as he did a small grunt emanated from him. This tiny sound transformed into a louder yell as he deconstructed his body and reconstructed his cellular structure effectively aging his form. The tearing and re-knitting of his bones hurt the most, turning that yell into a scream, the sound catching the astute ears of his father.

The elder, having heard his child in distress, leapt from his comfortable seat, letting the chair fall to the floor as he exited his study in haste to reach the child. Thinking that perhaps he was too harsh on the boy, that thought exited his mind as he caught sight of a new form, lingering inside the still intact human transmutation circle used to make the monster he killed a few minutes earlier.

"Fa...Father?" Instead of the high pitched intonation of a little child he'd known for a scant seven years, a more masculine voice carried through the large subterranean abode.

"Child?" Before him, stood an unclothed young man, his golden eyes on verge of tears and his short golden hair replaced with shoulder length locks. The older man smiled, understanding that his child, the small boy he just reprimanded earlier used the materials left over from his failed human transmutation to reform his own body, finally becoming an adult.

For the first time since before the recent accident - a thing even he never planned for, Father smiled a genuine, warm smile.