The Portkey Madame Maxime gave them deposited them in a garden outside of a large castle. To Hermione's surprise, there were muggles about.
"Is this the right place?" she asked Fleur. "It looks… not."
"It is," Fleur assured her. "Le Château de Roquetaillade. The Flamel have lived here since…" she hummed. "Well. It has been many centuries. The muggles know it is privately owned, but they presume it just stays in a family. They opened it to the public some years ago, to tour the lower floors."
They went to the entrance, where a young girl was lingering. Fleur held up the Portkey token Madame Maxime had given them, and the girl nodded, turning wordlessly and indicating they should follow.
The girl led them through two rooms where muggles were drifting about, reading plaques on the walls or taking photos, before she suddenly stepped through the wall behind a hanging tapestry. Fleur followed without hesitation, tugging Hermione through after her, and Hermione wondered if it was the same spell that was used on Platform 9¾ at King's Cross.
The other side of the wall (the magical side) was cleaner, prettier, and more well-lit. There were a few large wizarding portraits that watched Hermione as she and Fleur followed the young girl up the stairs. When they reached the top, the young girl knocked smartly, before pushing open the door.
"Vos invitées sont là," she said, rather unnecessarily.
Hermione peeked inside, eyes growing wide.
The room looked to be a large workshop, with a stone floor and large stone desks jutting out from the walls nearly all the way around the room. Large, arched windows above the desk let in copious amounts of light, illuminating everything, and the desks were cluttered with parchment, ink, quills, and more strange ingredients than Hermione had ever seen before. There were a couple bookcases on one wall that held old, heavy tomes bound in leather, their pages fragile and aged. The ground was cluttered with assorted ingredients, a small cauldron made of solid gold, and chalk symbols and lines written all over the floor, emanating out from the cauldron like a spiderweb.
Abruptly, Perenelle Flamel was suddenly there, appearing from nowhere, examining Fleur and Hermione with sharp eyes.
"Welcome," she said. A faint smile touched her lips. "You may come in."
Fleur and Hermione gingerly stepped into the room, careful to avoid the clutter on the floor and the chalk drawings as they took two vacant stools. The small girl who had guided them left, closing the door behind her.
Perenelle Flamel was an odd-looking, ephemeral sort of woman. At a glance, she looked to be a young woman, with smooth skin and few wrinkles, but there was a darkness under her eyes that made her seem much, much older. She wore a muted green dress over a white underdress, very medieval in style, and she had a circlet of steel and silver on her head that her hair was woven into, keeping it out of her face. Her hair was a faded ginger sort of color, like Ginny's fiery red but with all of the life sucked out of it, and there were streaks of silver throughout. Some of the streaks actually looked like they were growing out, with red roots coming back in, to Hermione's astonishment, but other streaks were fully silver.
She was rather short, several inches shorter than Hermione, and she had a slight frame. Something about her manner made her seem like she was a very tall woman who had just been shrunken, as if by a spell, her presence taking up more room than the room taken up by her body.
Perenelle waited for them to stop staring before she gave them a warm smile.
"You are the budding alchemists from Beauxbatons and Hogwarts," she said. "I am so happy to have you! Welcome to my laboratory."
She spoke English with a very slight French accent, to Hermione's immense relief. Though, Hermione supposed, having lived over 600 years, Perenelle would have had plenty of time to become a master polyglot.
"You are hoping to learn Alchemy, are you not?" Perenelle inquired. "Madame Maxime was not terribly specific in her letter."
"We are," Fleur said. She glanced at Hermione. "We had questions on the Elixir of Life. We were hoping to learn from you."
"The Elixir of Life?" Perenelle's eyebrows rose. "Well. I can certainly teach you the theory, but if you're hoping for eternal youth and immortality soon, I daresay you'll be disappointed."
"No, no, I'm hoping to learn the theory and how it works, how the Philosopher's Stone worked to make it," Hermione said hastily. She withdrew parchment and a quill from her bag, settling herself on the floor. "I'm terribly curious how it all worked."
"I as well," added Fleur. "I am eager to learn from a skilled teacher for Alchemy."
Perenelle looked them both over, evaluating, before shrugging and giving them a smile.
"Then I shall teach you," she said. She conjured a chalkboard as if from nowhere, and her eyes were light. "I am always pleased to discuss Alchemy and teach curious students."
Perenelle Flamel, as ephemeral as she had seemed upon meeting her, was very matter of fact and grounded when it came to Alchemical theory, and Hermione hurried to follow along, ink spattering on her hands as she took notes.
Perenelle had started by giving a brief overview of Alchemy – that it was the field of magic that dealt with changing things at an atomic or molecular level – and how it was intricately tied to many other fields, including muggle chemistry and biology. The Elixir of Life worked by healing damage done to the body, she explained, including reversing aging. It left a person open to sudden, violent death, but it removed health concerns from the picture as a mortal threat.
"The Elixir of Life was made with magical theory and much trial and error," Perenelle told them, smiling faintly. "The Philosopher's Stone made it possible. It was only recently did muggle science catch up and explain to me how it worked, so it could be reproduced without the Stone."
"Trial and error?" Hermione asked, puzzled. "How did that work?"
Perenelle smiled. "We threw an apple in a cauldron of gold to see what would happen, and it worked."
Hermione's mouth fell open. "An apple?"
"An apple," Perenelle confirmed.
After Perenelle and Nicholas had completed the Great Work and created the Philosopher's Stone, they began experimenting to discover what was needed to create the Elixir of Life. They'd turned to muggle legends, legends of creation, and Perenelle had found a myth about an eternal garden of Babylon, where humanity had been forbidden to go after tasting of an apple they should not eat.
"'Forbidden Fruit' seemed an apt place to start," Perenelle said, smiling. "And so into the cauldron it went."
"And… that was all?" Fleur said, astonished. "It just worked?"
"It did." Perenelle sighed. "It's much more difficult to transmute without a stone. But I can now explain how it works."
The Elixir of Life, she went on to explain, healed not just damage done to body, but healed damage on a molecular level, including the telomeres of DNA. Reversing the shortening of telomeres during DNA replication stopped aging. She sketched an apple on the chalkboard, drawing rough diagrams of several elements below it, and Hermione wondered if she'd somehow stepped into a university Chemistry class.
"…we get carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, which can be repurposed into forming nucleic acids," she explained. "It facilitates healing DNA, while the lingering negative ionic charge and magical charge helps counter free radicals."
To Hermione's surprise, Fleur was nodding along. She knew Fleur was smart, but she was somewhat astonished to realize Fleur understood muggle chemistry and biology. When would she have learned things like that? Did Beauxbatons teach a primer on Biology in Potions or Healing class? Did Hogwarts teach such things in the N.E.W.T. level classes?
"It seems as if this is not Alchemy, though, is it?" Fleur posited. "If it is rearranging just molecules, not changing one molecule into another…"
Perenelle gave her a smile.
"Technically, perhaps. But it is too precise of a Transfiguration to be done through Transfiguration alone." She gestured to the ground. "You see the runic diagrams and arrays it requires without the Great Working? One could never do it with a wand and Transfiguration alone."
"This is for the Elixir of Life?" Fleur looked interested.
"In part," Perenelle sighed. "There are many stages. It is a lot of work."
"If it's so difficult, why don't you just make another Philosopher's Stone?" Hermione asked. "You did it once before."
The room seemed to chill, and Perenelle grew still.
"It is not something I would do again," she said quietly. "We were ambitious, and we were determined. But for the Philosopher's Stone, we had to obtain the prima materia – the quintessence of creation and chaos." She shuddered. "Obtaining the prima materia… there is a reason few alchemists ever complete the field's magnum opus. A Philosopher's Stone is not worth what one must endure to make it. There are some scars left on the mind, on the soul, that even the Elixir cannot heal."
Hermione's eyes went wide. There was a silence for a long moment.
"I have a question," Fleur said. She shifted, pointing to something on the floor. "When you choose the runes for your arrays, do you ever use them merkstaved?"
The atmosphere in the room seemed to loosen, and Perenelle shifted to see what Fleur was pointing at, answering her question.
With Fleur asking questions about some of the runic diagrams Perenelle was using, and Perenelle pleased to explain, pointing out different groupings and diagrams, Hermione was free to fade into the background. Hermione briefly struggled to keep up and quickly got lost, but that was okay, she reassured herself; Fleur was two years over her, and utterly brilliant in her own right. It made sense that Fleur knew more about Ancient Runes than she did, and just because Fleur knew things she didn't at this point didn't mean Hermione would never catch up – it just meant she still had more to learn.
Leaving them to it, Hermione sketched out her own plans on her parchment while Fleur and Perenelle chatted, writing underneath of the notes she'd taken earlier.
• Cauldon of solid gold
‣ Buy? Transfigure?
• Apple
‣ Try multiple types – House Elves
• Water
‣ Purified from a magic spring? Tap water?
• Testing
‣ Feel different?
‣ Old wounds healed?
Hermione looked at her list, considering. Tom Riddle was right – having the Philospher's Stone was essentially cheating, skipping all of the hard work. Dozens of runic diagrams and various transmutations of water over a period of weeks seemed impossibly difficult. Throwing an apple into some water, and then pushing her magic and intent through the Stone, though… that was something she could do.
For the first time since she'd been kidnapped by Sylvia, Hermione felt the band of tension around her lungs start to loosen. Maybe this wouldn't all blow up in her face after all.