Chapter One
The best thing about extracting the essence of sorrow from a child's discarded toy was that it didn't scream.
Kaelen's fingers, stained a permanent, grimy brown at the tips, worked with a surgeon's precision. The doll was a pathetic thing, one button eye missing, its porcelain face cracked in a web of fine lines, its dress a faded memory of pink. It reeked of the universal scent of forgotten things: dust, slow decay, and a specific, sharp tang of loss. This was his canvas. This was his ingredient.
His workshop was a basement, because of course it was. The air was thick with the ghosts of a thousand concoctions, the reek of sulphurous resentment, the cloying sweetness of distilled nostalgia, the metallic bite of pure rust. Jars and vials lined rough-hewn shelves, filled with things that would make a normal man's stomach turn: a swirl of grey fog that was the captured silence of a murder scene, a lump of iron that wept black tears of oxidation, a small, beating heart of solidified fear that pulsed with a dull, violet light.
He was in the final, most delicate stage. A small brazier, filled with not coal but slow-burning, melancholic peat, glowed between him and the doll. Suspended over it was a coil of copper wire, and from the wire hung a vial of cloudy glass. His tools were laid out on a stained cloth: a silver needle to prick the memory, a blade of obsidian to sever the emotional tether, and a spoon of lead to collect the dregs.
He took the needle. He didn't look at the doll's face; he looked at its history. He saw the little girl, her name long lost, clutching it as her family packed their belongings in the dead of night, fleeing the rising taxes and the creeping blight from the east. He saw the moment the doll slipped from the overfilled cart, landing in the mud of the Ironvale outskirts. He saw the single, heartbroken wail swallowed by the rumble of wheels. That wail was what he was after.
He pricked the doll's chest, right where a heart would be. There was no physical rupture, but the air in the room grew heavier, damper. A single, glistening tear of pure, liquid sorrow welled up from the puncture point. It didn't fall. It hung there, defying gravity, containing a universe of childish grief.
With the obsidian blade, he made a gentle slicing motion above the tear. A faint, silvery thread, visible only to his alchemically-attuned sight, snapped. The tear was now free, a discrete ingredient.
Finally, the lead spoon. He slid it beneath the hovering tear. Lead was inert; it wouldn't react with or judge the emotion. The tear slid into the spoon with a sigh that wasn't a sound, but a feeling. He carefully decanted it into the cloudy vial suspended over the peat-smoke. The moment the sorrow touched the glass, the vial cleared, becoming as transparent as a diamond, filled with a liquid that was the colour of a rainy twilight.
He allowed himself a breath. A slow, satisfied exhalation. Sorrow's Rain, a potent reagent for memory-alteration tonics or truth-serums for the terminally nostalgic. It would fetch a good price in the right circles.
A fist hammered on the door above, a brutal, percussive sound that shattered the basement's sacred silence. "Kaelen! The rent isn't paid with ghost stories! You have till sundown or you're on the street!"
Kaelen didn't jump. His hands remained steady as he corked the vial. Annoyance was a colder, sharper emotion than any he'd handled today.
"I hear you, Master Grish," he called back, his voice a low rasp from breathing too many toxic fumes.
"You'd better! I'm not running a charity for gutter-witches!" Another bang, and then the heavy tread of boots moving away.
Kaelen looked around his basement. On the street. It was always a possibility. Ironvale had no patience for failures, and an alchemist who worked with dregs was always one misstep from being a failure. He was twenty-seven, and his life was a collection of things in jars, all of them worthless to a landlord.
He packed his newest acquisition into a padded crate alongside his other wares: a small pouch of Rust-Lichen (good for weakening metal and resolve), a bottle of Echo-Wine (which allowed one to hear the last conversation spoken in a room, a popular item with jealous spouses), and his masterpiece, a single dose of Regret's Respite—a pitch-black tar that, when smoked, would grant the user one hour of truly forgetting their greatest shame. It was also fiercely addictive. He tried not to make it often.
He pulled on a worn, hooded cloak, the colour of the city's perpetual grime, and slipped out into the afternoon.
Ironvale was a city being consumed by its own ambition. The sky was a permanent, bruised twilight, stained by the smoke from a hundred foundries and alchemical mills. The buildings, once proud stone, were now streaked with soot and a strange, metallic green moss that grew only in places of high industrial magic. The air tasted of coal, hot iron, and the ozone tang of spent thaumaturgy. The streets were a river of humanity, all sharp elbows and desperate eyes. Hawkers shouted about spell-wards and luck-charms, pickpockets moved like eels through the crowd, and the occasional enforcer of the Guild of Artificers marched past in clockwork armour, their steam-driven limbs hissing.
This was the world of "proper" magic. Clean, industrial, powerful. It lit the streets with glowing crystals, powered the trams that rattled overhead, and built the soaring spires that pierced the smog. Kaelen's world was the one underneath: the gutter, the rust, the things they swept away.
His destination was the Shattered Scales, a tavern that leaned so drastically it seemed to be listening for secrets in the cobblestones. It was a place for transactions that didn't need the Guild's approval.
He pushed open the door and the familiar blanket of smoke, cheap ale, and whispered deals settled over him. He nodded to the barkeep, a mountainous man with a brass jaw, and made his way to his usual corner table.
He didn't have to wait long. A nervous man in a clerk's robe, fingers ink-stained, slid onto the bench opposite him. "Do you have it?" the man whispered, his eyes darting.
Kaelen didn't speak. He placed the pouch of Rust-Lichen on the table.
"It will… it will work? On a Guild lock? It's rune-etched adamantine."
"It won't melt it," Kaelen said, his voice low. "It will make it forget what it is. For about ten minutes. It will become brittle, confused. A good hammer blow will shatter it."
The clerk swallowed hard and pushed a small purse of coins across the table. Kaelen didn't need to count it. The weight was right. The clerk snatched the pouch and scurried out.
Next was a woman, face hidden by a veil, who bought the Echo-Wine without a word, leaving twice the standard price. The economy of guilt was always profitable.
He was about to leave, the purse feeling satisfyingly heavy in his pocket, when a shadow fell over his table. This one was different. It didn't slink or scurry. It stood with an authority that was out of place in the Shattered Scales.
Kaelen looked up. The man was tall, wrapped in a travelling cloak of fine, dark wool, but it was frayed at the edges and stained with dust that wasn't from Ironvale. His face was gaunt, pale with a sickness that wasn't physical, but something deeper. His eyes held a feverish intensity.
"You are the dreg-monger," the man said. It wasn't a question.
"I'm an alchemist," Kaelen replied, his guard instantly up.
"A distinction without a difference." The man sat, uninvited. He placed his hands on the table. They were the hands of a nobleman, long-fingered and elegant, but the nails were cracked and dirty. "I am Lord Valerius. I need your… particular skills."
"I'm listening."
"I am poisoned," Valerius said, his voice dropping to a hollow whisper. "Not by hemlock or arsenic. It is a spiritual poison. A blight upon the soul. It feeds on hope, on light. The Guild's physikers are useless. Their purges and radiances only make it stronger."
Kaelen leaned back, feigning a nonchalance he didn't feel. A nobleman. A real one, from the old families of the Sunset Hill district. This was far beyond his usual clientele. "I deal in components, my lord. Not cures."
"I have been to every charlatan and miracle-worker between here and the Sunken Sea," Valerius hissed, leaning forward. A faint, sweetish odour of decay came from him. "They speak of balancing humours and cleansing auras. They do not understand. This poison is… alien. It is from a place where the rules are different. I was told… in a dream… that only an artist of the base, the forgotten, the dregs, could possibly comprehend its nature."
Kaelen's heart beat a little faster. This was the kind of talk that got you noticed by the wrong people. But the purse in his pocket suddenly felt very light.
"Describe the symptoms."
"Cold," Valerius whispered, his eyes widening. "A cold that no fire can touch. My dreams are not my own; I walk in a blighted land under a black sun. I see… eyes… in the shadows. And my skin…" He hesitated, then pulled back the sleeve of his cloak.
Kaelen stifled a gasp. The man's forearm was marbled with a tracery of fine, black lines, like veins of obsidian. They pulsed with a faint, sick light. Around them, the skin was grey and lifeless. It was not a disease of the body. It was a corruption. A stain on reality itself. Kaelen had never seen anything like it, but he felt it. It was a dreg of the highest, most terrible order.
"I see," Kaelen said, his voice carefully neutral.
"There is an antidote," Valerius said, desperation clawing at his words. "The stories say it. A flower that grows in the Ashen Barrens. The Sun-in-Shadow. Its essence is the only thing that can counter this venom."
Kaelen barked a short, harsh laugh. "The Ashen Barrens? That's a myth told to frighten children. No one goes there. Nothing comes back."
"They do not have my motivation," Valerius said, his gaze unwavering. "I am a dead man walking, alchemist. I will pay you. Not in coin." He reached into his tunic and placed a small, heavy object on the table.
It was a lump of raw, unrefined Soul-Ore.
Kaelen's breath caught in his throat. It was a legendary substance, said to be the crystallized residue of a world's untapped potential. It was the philosopher's stone of dreg-alchemists. With a piece that size, he could… he could do anything. He could transmute lead into gold, yes, but more importantly, he could distill emotions he'd only dreamed of. He could create potions of pure luck, elixirs of true love, perhaps even find a way to bottle time itself. It was a fortune beyond imagining. It was a lifetime of security and power.
He stared at the ore, its internal light shifting through colours he had no name for. He thought of his basement, of Master Grish's fist, of a life spent scraping the bottom of the world's barrel.
"The Barrens," Kaelen repeated, the words feeling foreign and heavy on his tongue.
"I will provide a map," Valerius said, seeing the avarice in Kaelen's eyes. "And what supplies I can. But only you can make the journey. Only your… art… can survive what lies between here and there."
Kaelen looked from the Soul-Ore to his own stained hands. He thought of the child's sorrow in his vial, a tiny, contained tragedy. The Ashen Barrens, if they were real, would be a symphony of such tragedies. An entire world of dregs.
It was the most terrifying thing he could imagine.
It was the most tempting.
He reached out and his fingers closed around the cool, vibrating mass of the Soul-Ore. A shock, like a static charge of pure possibility, ran up his arm.
"I'll do it," he said.
---
The sun was a bloody smear on the horizon as Kaelen stood at the Gate, the easternmost exit of Ironvale. Behind him, the familiar stink and clamour of the city. Before him, the Old Imperial Road, which quickly dissolved into little more than a cart track before being swallowed by the gloomy expanse of the Whisperwood.
Lord Valerius's map was in his pack, along with a generous advance of gold coin. The Soul-Ore was hidden in a secret pouch sewn into his tunic, its presence a constant, thrilling hum against his chest. His alchemical kit was stocked and secured. He had told Master Grish he was leaving on a long-term procurement trip. The landlord had merely grunted, already eyeing the basement for a new tenant.
Kaelen took a deep breath of the city's foul air, a perverse nostalgia for it already forming. This was madness. He was a gutter alchemist, not an adventurer. He dealt with the discarded memories of the city, not the living horrors of the wilds.
But as he felt the weight of the Ore, he knew he had already crossed a line. The man who returned from this journey would not be the same man who left.
He adjusted the pack on his shoulders, the vials and pouches within clinking softly. They were his only friends, his only weapons.
He took one step forward, then another, leaving the shadow of the wall behind. The darkness of the Whisperwood beckoned, its leaves already rustling with secrets he was destined to learn.
The adventure into the dark had begun.
---
(Word Count: ~???)