Edwin: 16 Flamerule

The equipment of this mage's study was efficient. One shelf for thick blank books bound in calf leather of good quality, some already filled and numbered and with the slight familiar tingle of magic across their spines that Edwin could sense across the room of privacy wards holding them closed; three further shelves full of Mordenkainen, Larloch, and other invaluable works of magical theory, showing usage but still good condition; large quantities of well-stocked and regularly labelled ingredients within a sealed case of warded glass that occupied in full a second wall; clean vials, braziers, sinks, and tubes; an astrolabe as intricately crafted as any Thayvian work and multiple sets of weighted scales; meticulously mapped spell-circles on the polished oaken floor; well-shined cages of varying sizes adequate for various summons; a convenient doorway to a large adamant cell reserved for volatile experiments; and a second large doorway in the name of the occasional need for fresh air.

The woman Cythandria dictated to him.

"Five oils of fiery burning; ten potions of explosion; and ten potions made according to the bottom script." She gestured to a trio of neat parchments on her table. "I have marked this area for you. Frankly, I hate to share my study; you will move when you can prove you do not need oversight. If you can't prove it, I suppose I'll have to invite you to participate in some of my experiments. There are interesting ways to bribe summonings from the lower planes. Or I could simply send you to Semaj."

"Do not doubt my capacity. I have graduated from the finest academies in Thay. (Mostly graduated. Practically graduated.)" Undeniably a beautiful woman; and one who had not witnessed his humiliation to come here. Perhaps he would grant the conjuress a chance despite her insolence. In some ways Cythandria resembled the unfortunate necromancer, though more genuinely and obviously a woman: similarly of a tall and slim, though more well-favoured, figure; fair-haired, and in her study she wore a sleek twist the colour of gold carefully pinned behind her graceful neck instead of wild, loose streaks of light brown; and her eyes had the striking shine of a carefully incised emerald rather than a weird, catlike green. No tattoos ornamented her face; she wore no cosmetics or illusion spells that he could tell, and her complexion was the smooth pink rose of an educated lady rather than the tan of a wandering adventurer, her lips a deep red colour. Cythandria's mage robes were smooth layers of yellow and white, heavy in material but well-fitted about a graceful figure that seemed to float rather than walk. She had already turned her green eyes from him, reaching for one of her own blank books and impatiently paging through it.

He examined the recipes before him, since after all the woman's current posture showed little of her charming proportions. Her hands turning the pages were slender and elegantly shaped as befit a wizard, her fingernails clean and meticulously trimmed. From a woman of her comely appearance he would have expected longer nails and fashionable, attractive paint upon them; but she was a wizard and some concessions must be made.

The first receipt for oil of fiery burning was similar to one he had used as part of his curriculum; local mineral oil instead of the refined oil from Thayvian seals from the north of the country, a lesser charcoal proportion that he supposed would account for the difference, a slightly greater amount of saltpetre preferred. Memory easily returned to him and he felt confident in the instructions before him. The second was a more difficult potion, though of course based upon the basic principles he had undeniably mastered as an intellectual giant among wizard peers properly represented as gnats. Cythandria had taken up an eagle-feathered quill herself, engaged in penning some notes within her blank book with complete indifference to her fellow practitioner of the Art; Edwin used her example, and sketched out a few alchemic equations in order to remind himself of the key proportions and transformations. (He was an Odesseiron heir; it had been clear to his intellect in his academy days that whilst simple alchemy was accounted a certain proportion of the assessment by tutors, in his future he would leave it in its true role as the province of inferiors whilst his studies favoured true spellcasting.) The third account he judged after careful reasoning to be a poison of some particularly virulent variety: adder's venom, cat's eye ichor, basilisk's scrapings. Best to finish reading it, and then to concentrate attention upon the first potion asked of him.

Boiling oil as the base for the first group of potions, heated in a medium cauldron plated in shined tin by a careful cantrip. It was tedious monkey-work as it gradually warmed. (Better to concentrate upon this business than any other present concerns.) Oak sap to be moulded into a paste. He had the correct quantity of saltpetre measured into a beaker of Cythandria's; the charcoal—he spent another cantrip to turn it to the dust required, these things were far from his true abilities. The black dust blew into his face a moment later (this was why he detested alchemy so; the ingredients were more prone to spilling than the standard smaller items of arcane focus, particularly irritating if caustic or dirty). He drew a handkerchief of Thayvian linen and removed the stain; then in due time ceased the oil's heat. The wizardess was chanting, standing near to one of her circles, carefully moving her hands through the intricate gestures of a conjuration. Her motions were deftly precise, and the power she drew upon...adequate. Clearly adequate. Edwin made the seven counterclockwise stirs to blend the sap and charcoal. A motion typical of his studies; the mixture turned the appropriate dark colour of this stage. He drew the phoenix-feather stirrer; pronounced the cantrip; then it transmuted to its due reddish-gold volatility...

Cythandria finished her chant; a dark hemisphere covered the circle before her, and something appeared within it. He saw the glitter of scales below the shifting smoke of the barrier, and heard minor reptilian noises. A summoning spell, obviously; some sort of containment. She added another spell, and her container shrunk. Slowly strangling what was inside, he supposed.

Bottling. Let this tedious monkey-work be over with. He set up the cantrip, and scribbled a little more upon his study of the second potion. Yes, and he could drain the magical residue from the bottling for the second step, just intensify it for the required volatile response... He quickly flung together the sulphur and the wyvern's blood, the iron filings further ground, the saltpetre. Activated; he looked with complacency upon his handiwork. Perhaps he could study his spellbook instead whilst this recipe finished. Balancing it neatly below the third recipe as if he used it to reconcile some concept from it, he traced instead the runes of the precious fireball in his mind; certainly he should practise that one in a space for it. It exploded in his mind, undeniably hot and powerful and anyone who opposed him gaping-eyed and gormless as Garrick or else charred fragments on the ground...

There was the sharp cry of a woman, and he withdrew from his studied daze.

"Fool!" Five green hands grew from Cythandria's frantic casting. Edwin turned, momentarily surprised at one who dared to intervene with his magic; something bubbled in front of him. Volatile eruptions of simmering wyvern's blood; he frantically thought to remember—

"Get the sleepsand as a stabiliser!" Two of the green hands smothered the fire, one lifted the brew away; two more for bearing away the vials. He—could see the reason in that; searched methodically amongst labels, scattered the thin grains amidst the flames and brew, trying to smother.

"I was attempting to save time by relying on Sieg's transference rules," Edwin said sulkily, looking at Cythandria's smoke-stained face; his own was no cleaner, and a portion of his hair lightly singed. "(They misunderstand my genius.)"

"Oh, indeed," she said curtly. "Then that explains—no, would have worked if added lead in time—" She shook her head fiercely, her golden hair slightly loosened at its twist. "Fool! Blockhead! Apprentice!"

"I intended wax treated by the arsenic of the third receipt," Edwin said, "self-cleansing as well—"

"Never work; Mordenkainen's Elementary Brewing, fifth and eight equations, I can't believe you missed those—" Cythandria lectured.

"Would; Szass Tam's fourth treatise—" Edwin told her, irritated at the challenge;

"Not unless one changed the—" Cythandria said, and paused for a moment—

"Yes; electrified the—" Edwin said.

"Iron filings, obviously—" Cythandria finished the sentence, and added; "My eyes!"

"Lose potency quickly following termination—" she said. She opened one of her boxes; a very small and very dead basilisk lay inside, and Edwin saw her neatly cut out the pair of jewelled eyes covered by reptilian eyelids, placing them in a solution of clear potion. "You may scrape the corpse for me later. Now clean properly, salvage the potions you can...and get the door," she added in impatience, slicing at her second child-basilisk. Something had made a knocking noise.

Edwin decided not to object to her treatment of him as if he were a servant; upon the other side of the door stood a grey-skinned monster, and he stepped back in shock, magic already upon his tongue.

"Sherdis, come in," Cythandria ordered it; must be one of her summons, then. "Ignore the cowardly fool."

"(As if you do not wish you'd thought of electrifying the iron filings yourself.)"

"(As if I'd done it I wouldn't have remembered to add the wax in time.)," Cythandria hissed back in kind, and Edwin felt himself momentarily surprised at a simian's perception of his thoughts. She ran a smoke-stained hand across her face; the streaks of black soot by her gold hair rendered the colour more dramatic, the absence of its previous perfection creating a woman of realistic detail.

"I have gained the transssformation of magelight, Lady Cythandria," the monster spoke in a high voice. "In fleshy ffform, no lessss..."

"Then take his form and show me," Cythandria said, pointing to Edwin; who suddenly realised what the creature must be.

Doppelgangers, who could steal a mind and soul away... He'd only read about them, a conjurer ought to know the many beasts he could summon and control, control being not quite present at this moment—

The monster's form melted, and he stared at a copy of himself, backing away—obviously an inferior copy, it was scrawnier and with a less resplendent beard than he ought to have, not quite so gloriously masculine—and then it muttered words below its breath, its hand materialising—those were firefly wings in its palm, or were they manifestations of the shapeshifting power only?—and then a light an icy blue in colour gathered about the monster's hand, of course not the vibrant red of Edwin's own magelights, it was not real...

"Very good," Cythandria said; "your verbals are long, but that is satisfactory. Odesseiron, meet Odesseiron."

"Ssssr'dss," the doppelganger said out of Edwin's mouth. "Perorate commands that I musst collect the potions."

"He managed to complete some of the requirement. Do so," Cythandria said, her hands still busy with her own research.

Edwin passed on what he had brewed to Thayvian standards. "You must be ambitiousss, to be working with the lady wizardesss," the monster remarked, its accent its own rather than Thay's noble voicings.

"Blizok lokotok, da ne ukusish!" Edwin said, denying it by his own language, you're pathetic and weak to my potency, you couldn't even bite your own elbow—it would not defeat him, he was powerful—

"Vidna ptitsa po polyotu," the monster replied after a brief pause—the bird is known by its flight, I am proving to you what I can do—and Edwin staggered back in surprise. Cythandria smirked.

"Sanctus cerebra," she said, and pointed to her head with an icy yellow briefly at her forehead. A protection against mind-magic... "Weak shieldings, Odesseiron. Clever, Sherdis."

"I live to grow ssstronger, as you do," the doppelganger said;

"As do I!" Edwin added in outrage; he was a great wizard, and he would not allow the doppelganger to have knowledge of his thoughts. Carefully he jumbled his surface mind into a hurricane, refusing to allow it to read below. Naked Cythandria—yes, naked Cythandria, a monster wouldn't find that attractive and it was an image he could certainly conjure within his mind, below those heavy robes the balanced figure outlined therein, let surface thoughts crowd out all other possibilities...

"Return at the fourteenth hour," Cythandria instructed the potion-carrying-monster; "I intend further polymorph comparisons."

"Yessss. And I wissh you luck with your apprentice," the doppelganger spoke, shifting to its normal form and blinking those awful silver eyes; Edwin maintained his noble composure. Mercifully, the door closed at last.

"Sherdis claims that its fellows call it akkariss-jheriss, wouldbe-primate," Cythandria said, neatening herself with an embroidered handkerchief of her own, gesturing for a cantrip to rebind her hair with invisible hands. "I use it for experiments. A case study."

"How fascinating," Edwin said, simply out of courtesy whilst his mind still raced in an attempt to think. She uses a doppelganger that wants to pretend to be human—I see, she still maintains power over it because she is better at being human than it—he managed to think, rationalising and understanding.

"You don't seem entirely stupid," Cythandria said—and she was half-smiling upon those dark cherry lips of hers, sensual and yet not overplump in her face of classic proportion, and Edwin thought it was not entirely a gloat... "Continue, Red Wizard. Keep a watch over...improvisations."

Basilisk's scrapings and wormwood tincture, cat's eye ichor and adder's venom... He still had perfect confidence in himself to understand the equations, he told himself, and when Cythandria's green eyes met his across vials handled by both he returned the glance with aplomb.

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