“I brought you more Olzas,” Becky said, strolling to the back of Olza’s alchemy shop.

“More what?” Olza replied, confused.

Becky poured the purple flowers onto the counter. “Hans said you named these Olzas.”

“No, I did not!” the alchemist said forcefully, making sure that the Guild Master chuckling around the corner could hear her.

“It’s a good name,” Hans said, joining the conversation.

Olza rolled her eyes and asked Becky where she found them.

“Same spot. Fresh bloom too.”

The alchemist asked the Druid several questions about the flowers, mostly pertaining to potential differences between the first batch of flowers Becky saw and this one. Nothing stood out. They were the same size and color as before. They grew in the same specific area too, little more than a patch at the edge of the mountains.

Olza sighed. “I guess new information was too much to ask.”

Wrinkling her face, Becky added, “Well, the flowers are near where we found the squonks. Didn’t make the connection until I was coming home on the same trail Hans and me used.”

“How near?” Hans asked.

“Half a day from where we camped with Roland the first night. Give or take.”

“Do you think there’s a connection?” Olza asked, posing the question to both adventurers. They shrugged.

“It’s a big forest,” Hans said. “Lots of stuff is nearby. The only thing I see that they have in common is that they are unusual. I’m not saying to discount it completely, but we should be careful about rushing to conclusions.”

“Can you take me to the flowers?” Olza asked.

“I don’t think that’s a–”

“Of course!” Becky said.

“Let’s back up. We don’t know if the squonks and the flower are connected, but that doesn’t change that we just saved a lifelong hunter from monsters in that area.”

Olza thought. “You’ve never escorted an alchemist or a mage while they gathered reagents?”

“Well, yeah. But those were guild jobs.”

“Okay. I want to post a job with the guild.”

Hans stared at her, mouth open.

“Got you there, boss,” Becky said.

***

Becky wanted to leave right away, but Olza had potions to finish. She was in the midst of brewing four strength potions to fulfill an order from the merchant caravan. The obvious benefit of the potion didn’t come easily, though. The ingredients were expensive, and brewing a single strength potion took more than 13 days of steps and stages.

If she left immediately, she’d waste the ingredients and her profit potential.

Despite the rain, Becky didn’t want to wait in town. She said big cities made her feel trapped, and Hans didn’t argue with her definition of big city. Promising to return when the strength potions were complete, she and Becki trotted back into the forest, unbothered by the rain.

Olza used the time to conduct more experiments, putting the fresh delivery to use immediately. She intended to pursue the similarities between rose silk and the purple flowers. That research direction might not pan out, but it was a direction nonetheless. The only one she had.

Lacking expertise in spells, she enlisted Hans’ assistance in choosing spell components to test against the purple flowers. The characteristics of those components were in her reference books, so she could compare her flower’s reactions to what had been recorded, with a focus on summoning spell reagents.

Essentially, if a spell called for rose silk and another five ingredients, Olza combined the rose silk and one of the other ingredients to observe the reaction. Emphasis on one. That was the safest way to research an unknown component with the limited equipment and resources of a town like Gomi. One known ingredient against the unknown, in very small quantities.

The flowers were most reactive to the ingredients used for infernal summoning–changing colors, producing smoke, all minor reactions. To a neophyte, that might sound significant, but they had only explored a fraction of several hundred known components, so it was too early to draw a conclusion. They might discover that the flower was equally reactive in healing spells and illusion magic with more tests.

“Should we look at mending spell components also? That school is adjacent to summoning, right?” Hans asked Olza.

“Couldn’t hurt. What’s the first spell in the school of mending?”

Hans flipped through one of the books he had brought to Gomi, a guide to beginner spellcasting. “Create Stone. Soil, quartz shard, rose silk.”

“Soil determines the spell’s element, right?” Olza asked.

“Yeah, for Create Water it’s the same except soil is swapped for water.”

“I wish alchemy worked like casting. I’d love to get good enough to make potions without ingredients.”

“Casters might not need the component crutch for those early spells for long, but the higher tiers still do. It’s not quite as unfair as you make it sound.”

Spellcasting required mana manipulation, shaping and directing the force to create spells. Mana was delicate and precise, capable of miraculous results if channeled in the correct ways. In theory, a mage could cast any spell with their will alone, bending mana with their mind and spirit to create the desired effect.

That required an immense amount of control, but that difficulty could be reduced with incantations, physical gestures, and spell components. A guild mage once explained it to Hans like this: words and hand movements were like giving finely crafted paintbrushes to an artist. The improved tools made it easier to achieve the lines and gradients they desired. Working without them was like fingerpainting, clumsy and crude and awkward. It was possible to achieve the same effect with fingers rather than brushes, but it was radically more difficult.

Spell components were even more helpful, like a cookie cutter for a baker. The baker could trim intricate shapes by hand, but stamping the template into dough was fast, easy, and consistent. In this analogy, the dough was mana, shapeless but highly malleable. The ingredients were the cookie cutter, premade templates for types of mana effects.

Hans wasn’t a mage, but he selected a dozen or so basic spells to master when he was a young adventurer. His natural affinity for magic and the depth of his mana pool were limited, but with practice he learned to use spells like Create Water and Create Fire with gestures and incantations only. He could also use spells like Summon Light (conjured a glowing orb to function as a torch), Giant’s Voice (a voice amplification spell), Find North (pointed the caster to true north), and Create Food (a versatile spell capable of all sorts of foods in the hands of a mage; Hans could summon bread).

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He lacked the skill to use them in combat, but they proved their usefulness in job after job despite that limitation. Never having to worry about water or food enabled him to be more aggressive on a hunt, saving him trips back to civilization for supplies.

Hans scolded himself for not sharing those comparisons and explanations during his retelling of Theneesa’s encounter with the meddybemps howler. That distraction, yelling at himself within his mind, almost cost him.

Olza took a pinch of quartz and sprinkled a few grains into a beaker with ground purple petals at the bottom. When the first grain landed, the glass of the beaker exploded outward with the boom of a thunderclap.

Slowly rising from ducking behind the counter, Hans and Olza looked to where the beaker used to be. In its place sat a piece of obsidian as large as a cob of corn, jagged and glistening. Shards of glass embedded themselves into the walls, ceiling, and shelves of Olza’s shop. Aside from those fragments, the beaker was gone.

“I’ll put the flowers away in case you have quartz on your fingers.”

Olza stared at her fingertips. “Okay.” She stood very still.

Hans removed the flowers first, sealing them in a glass jar. Unprepared petals shouldn’t be reactive based on the tests they had done thus far, but that reaction was too potent to risk it. Next, Olza inspected the counter top, looking for any leftover speck of ground petal or quartz that might make another thunderclap. Hans checked her work and found nothing also.

“Ideas?” Hans asked, still not brave enough to touch the obsidian.

The alchemist shook her head. Her face was pale.

Seeing her in shock, Hans quietly studied the obsidian until Olza was ready to talk.

“I don’t know what this reaction means.”

“Me neither.”

“I know that I’m intrigued.” Olza smiled.

Quest Update: Finish studying the purple flower without exploding.

***

When Becky returned, she asked two questions: Could she have one of the strength potions, and could they repeat the experiment so she could see?

Olza said no to both.

“Had to try,” Becky clucked to herself.

In the time that Becky was away, the rain had stopped, and the weather looked like it would stay clear for their journey out to where the flowers grew. They would be away when the next caravan arrived, so Hans left instructions with Mayor Charlie to have his items stowed in the guild hall with the provisions he ordered. He left behind the guild credit he owed the merchants as well.

The hike out would take two days, and they had supplies to stay for five before they had to come back to town to restock. They weren’t sure what they would find, and Olza wanted time to conduct studies in the field. The alchemist had recovered from her near-miss, but she knew to be cautious. No need to rush anything unnecessarily. No need to test dangerous ingredients anywhere near Gomi.

Hans was still against heading into squonk territory with a civilian, but Becky assured him that she hadn’t seen any sign of the weeping gray horrors.

She also added, “Not even smelled gnoll piss in over a month.”

With several boxes of supplies and testing equipment strapped to Becki’s back, they set out to the flower patch with the druid in the lead.

Walking the same trail for the third time was good for Hans’ familiarity with the land around Gomi. There was a lot of it to explore, and learning one route well was a good start. Summer was beginning to wane, but the heat was still oppressive and relentless. Hans found himself giving thanks for every small breeze and every spot of shadow, even if the escape from the heat was fleeting.

The first time Hans took this trail, he half-jogged while scanning intently to find signs of Roland. It was tiring and left little room for conversation. The return journey wasn’t as focused, but the group still needed to move quickly, and casual banter when one party member barely clung to life didn’t feel appropriate.

On this journey, Olza pointed out various plants and fungi to Hans, and the party exchanged anecdotes and questions, learning more about each other to pass the time.

When Hans noticed that Becky and Olza both seemed reluctant to dig too deeply into their pasts, he realized he felt the same. To spare them all more discomfort, he changed the subject back to the purple flowers.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll have a letter from Mazo waiting for us when we get back,” he said. “She’s not an alchemist by trade, but she has done more unusual experiments with spell components than anyone else I know.”

“Unusual?” Olza asked.

“When she was in Hoseki, she had ideas for how to advance blue magic. Since learning abilities from monsters was so dangerous, she spent a lot of time looking for ways to ‘neutralize’ the effects of a spell without stopping the spell itself.”

Becky knew that Blue Mages needed to experience a monster’s ability to learn it. “Wouldn’t a stronger protection spell do the same thing?” she asked.

Hans compared protection spells to armor. Like physical materials, protection spells had a limit to what they could stop and how much force they could endure. The protection spell had to be as strong as or stronger than an attack to withstand it, magical or physical. At a certain point on the monster power scale, only the grandmasters of protection spells had a chance of surviving an attack. Even then, the known height of protection spells could never endure the breath of an elder dragon or the attack of another creature at that level.

Plate armor could deflect an arrow, but a ballista bolt would punch right through.

Mazo’s idea was to nullify characteristics of the spell instead of trying to endure them. For the dragon’s breath example, she wanted to “turn off” the part of the spell that made the fire burn skin, but not completely. It just didn’t need to burn her. As long as it burned everything else, she was happy.

“Wow,” Olza said, impressed. “Did she get it to work?”

“Nope,” Hans said, “But she got a few publications out of it. If you want someone to think outside the box with spell components, though, I can’t think of anyone better than Mazo.”

“I dated a Blue Mage for a bit,” Becky shared without prompting.

“Want to tell us some stories?” Olza asked.

“No,” Becky replied.

That’s probably for the best, Hans thought, trying to imagine what dating Becky would be like.

When the conversation fell flat, no one bothered to revive it. They seemed content with moving through Gomi’s forest, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of a mountain wilderness trending toward fall.

Soon, they made camp for the night. The peaceful journey led to a peaceful evening by the campfire. Tired from the hike, conversation within the party was limited, but they each seemed comfortable with silent companionship. Olza boiled vegetables and smoked venison to make a stew, and the three sat around the fire slurping at the broth and poking soft carrots with their forks.

Becky volunteered for the first watch. She would alternate with Hans until the morning. Olza offered to take a shift, but the Druid and the Guild Master insisted that keeping watch was their job. As the client, Olza should enjoy her rest.

Some time later, a distant howl roused Hans from his sleep. He sat up to find Becky facing away from the fire, her axe across her lap.

Without turning, she said, “Gnolls. Sounds like they are across the valley.”

“How far is that?”

“Day or two, depending.”

“I thought you said–”

“I said I hadn’t seen ‘em. I didn’t say they were extinct.”

That was fair.

When Becky rotated off of watch, she fell asleep immediately, her head resting on Becki’s belly. Hans didn’t have the sensitive ears of a Druid, but by his estimate, the gnolls weren’t moving toward them. Like a wolfpack, a pack of gnolls was capable of great violence, but like their wolf brethren, gnolls were opportunists. They might snatch a moose calf lagging behind a herd, but they would never attack a herd head-on.

Food was plentiful in summer months, so hearing gnolls howl was not a sign of immediate danger for Hans’ party. If they heard the same howls in the depths of winter, however, they would be readying themselves for a fight instead of waiting quietly.

The howls continued on the second night. They were closer than before, but Becky said that alone was not cause for alarm. She heard no signs that they were moving toward the party, and the tone of their howls was social rather than predatory. They were seeking companionship, not food.

To Hans, every gnoll howl sounded the same, the bay of a wolf mixed with the haunting moan of a human in pain. He had to trust that Becky could tell the difference.

Olza’s sleep that night was more restless than before, her eyes darting awake at particularly loud gnoll calls before closing them again. Hans found himself doing the same when he wasn’t on watch. When he was, he kept his mind awake and engaged by reviewing his knowledge of gnolls, especially with regard to how gnolls hunted.

He found that the mental exercises made him more alert, as if the watch process was active rather than passive. Whether that was actually the case didn’t matter to Hans. He had learned the trick from an older adventurer when he was Iron-ranked. When he found that it kept him awake and aware, he continued the practice.

Seemed to help Devon too.

Hans shook his head and went back to reciting gnoll knowledge. He couldn’t let the past distract him while he was on watch.

Later the next morning, as they closed on their destination, Becky raised a hand.

“I smell gnolls,” she said.

***

Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.

Mend the rift with Devon.

Complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."

Pick up the guild provisions from the caravan after next.

Identify the unknown purple flower from Olza.

Prepare a booklist for Mayor Charlie.

Grow the Gomi chapter without attracting outside attention.

Prepare for winter, and don’t forget the beer.

Brainstorm ideas for safe approaches to training on uneven terrain.

Design a winter curriculum.

Acquire winter adventuring gear.