“No, no, what are you— don’t add those— Claudia!” Francine’s whine of frustration rang from the stone and wood walls of her private workroom.

A small room with tall windows, the workroom overlooked the reedy south gardens of the Alchemists’ citadel. The space was fitted with sturdy hardwood benches, atop which stood a wide collection of glass and copper apparatus.

A bubbling, tacky liquid of effervescent orange spilled over and across the waxed bench top as Claudia stepped back from her crucible of quartz.

“Sorry,” Claudia said brightly. “I really thought the pollen would pair well with the powdered sun quartz.”

“Why in the realms would you think that?” Francine marched over, donning a pair of thick bark-leather gloves, to help peel the gum-like substance from the bench before it crystalised.

“Well, the nature of their correspondences work so well together, you see. Or, at least I’d thought the pollen of sunflower would amplify the power of the sunstone, and I suppose I wasn’t exactly wrong but it didn’t seem to—”

“Claudia!” Francine’s bark silenced her younger sister, who was dumping the congealed mass into the waste well with a sheepish demeanour.

“Just—” Francine drew a steadying breath, before lowering her voice to a more level tone. “Just follow the instructions as they’re written. As they are known to work.”

Abashed, Claudia nodded, peeled off her gloves, and started her tincture anew as Francine returned to her own work.

~~~

“Francine! Look at this!” Claudia clapped her hands in glee as Francine reluctantly dropped her papers and strode over with a distracted frown.

“What is this?” Francine peered down into the diamond-blue sparkle of the liquid simmering in Claudia’s quartz beaker.

“This,” Claudia exclaimed with an exuberant flourish, “is colour changing ink, only it changes within the spectrum of black, mercury, and quicksilver light—”

“Which we can’t see…” Francine frowned.

“Well, no,” Claudia continued unperturbed. “But when you cast a fire with clear flame clackstones, the fire will reflect back from the ink and cause them to glow. Or at least, they will in theory—”

“Clear flames? Claudia! That is extremely volatile fire, only ever used to heat the most resistant substances!”

“Oh, I know, but that’s why I’ll use the cobalt crucible—”

“Claudia!” Francine huffed, exasperation furrowing her brows.

“Just, please, just let me try it!”

“But to what purpose could an ink be that is unseen, unless by fire that can only be lit in a crucible that only an alchemist would own, and a highly specialised one at that…” Francine trailed off as Claudia’s face turned crestfallen.

“I… no, you’re right, I just thought it would be something of a splendour, and that maybe… no, never mind, sorry.”

Claudia moved to take her beaker off the flame, shoulders hunched as she clamped her brass tongs around the quartz.

“No, wait.” Francine sighed as Claudia glanced up, hopeful.

“Let’s just see if it actually works.” Francine thumbed through Claudia’s notes. “Theoretically, it should, even if it isn’t particularly…No, it should work, and this is some really creative theory, Claudia.”

Claudia grinned at the praise and clasped her hands together. “Really? So you’ll let me try?” Francine nodded and Claudia embraced her with a squeal.

~~~

“This is so much more difficult when I can’t even see what I’m painting, and I was never much of an artist to begin with,” Francine grumbled as she drew her brush along the dark wood of the workshop’s ceiling.

Claudia giggled as she tottered on her stepladder, dipping her own brush in a jar of clear liquid. “Well, that’ll make it even more fun when we reveal it with the clear fire.”

Approaching midnight, it worked in their favour that the night was moonless. The less ambient light the better. Claudia began to extinguish the candles illuminating the workroom, the warm waxen gleam of the workbenches diminishing as each flame was snuffed.

The ceiling above was dark, the efforts of their artistry completely invisible.

Francine had set up a small round plinth in the centre of the room, atop which sat a small crucible of polished cobalt filled with chips of pine bark. After a moment’s consideration, Francine added a handful of quartz shards threaded with silvery lines.

“The mercury quartz should help keep the heat stable. Just in case...” Francine explained.

Claudia nodded and stood back from the plinth as Francine handled the clear flame clackstones herself. The one absolute condition she had imposed for Claudia’s safety.

Claudia understood why a moment later, as Francine clacked the small, glittering stones of quartz together and set the bark aflame. Or, presumably aflame, given there was no evidence of fire but for a few tendrils of smoke and a growing sensation of heat.

Francine added a measure of fine, chalky powder to the crucible, yet another safety measure. Abruptly, the edges of the clear flames sparkled with a vicious-looking rainbow hue. Claudia was so transfixed by the fire in the crucible that she almost forgot the purpose of it.

However, at Francine’s gasp of wonder, Claudia raised her eyes to the ceiling, and drew in a sharp breath at the sight.

A constellation of hand-painted stars shone like an aurora in the lightless illumination of the clear-coloured flames. The arched ceiling beams bore a freckled patchwork of glimmering stars, like rigid arms of their own private galaxy.

The stars shifted chaotically, fading from one luminous hue to the next, a splendour of fluorescence.

“Claudia,” Francine breathed. “It’s so beautiful.”

Claudia smiled and twined her fingers through Francine’s. “It is.”

The two sisters stood side by side, hand in hand, admiring their own secret cosmos in awed silence, until the flames burned out.

~~~

“This just doesn’t make sense, I don’t—” Francine muttered to herself furiously as she scratched several notes onto the page before her.

“Francine?” Claudia approached her sister, hesitating a half-step back from the table, wary to intrude.

Francine appeared not to have heard Claudia, for she remain hunched over her notes, intermittently inspecting several gems and a bowl of charcoal beneath a brass-rimmed magnifying lens.

“What am I missing? There must be something—” Francine glared down at the smoky stone in her hand, comparing it against the inscribed plate of bronze bearing symbols of elemental transition.

With its circular diagram of spidery symbols, the plate reminded Claudia a little of her charts of pigment transitions, colours all bleeding together in an eternal rainbow wheel.

“Francine?” Claudia spoke again, a little louder.

“If ash is simply an archetype, a representative of a primordial principal of cosmic order, then if I applied change at the nexus of ideation and material manifestation, then surely it should—”

“FRANCINE,” Claudia half-shouted, and Francine dropped her stone in the bowl of charcoal.

“WHAT?”

Claudia stumbled back a step in the face of Francine’s ire at the interruption.

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“Sorry, I just, it’s only that, I need some help, is all.” Claudia squinted one eye shut, scrunching her nose to brace against Francine’s wrath.

Francine sighed and rubbed her face, smearing charcoal across her chin. “I’m sorry, Claudia, I shouldn’t have snapped like that.” Francine offered a tired smile. “What do you need help with?”

Claudia grinned as Francine rose to follow, beckoning her sister to a bubbling apparatus of looping glass tubes.

“So here is the snakeheart dye, and I’m up to this step of the mixing—” Claudia pointed to a diagram in a heavy tome laid flat next to small piles of diced herbs. “Only, I added some copper beads to the stewing, and I need help to—”

“You added copper? There’s no copper called for in the recipe...” Francine frowned at the tome, running her finger down the page of ingredients inked in faded sepia scrawl.

“Well, no, but with the powdered boa blood, I reasoned the copper would strengthen the shine of the scale pattern once applied to leather, only the next step called for acid salts, and I wasn’t sure if maybe I should take the beads out before I add them, or if you think—”

“Claudia!” Francine whined between gritted teeth. “Why can you never just... The instructions do not call for copper. Therefore, you should never have added the copper in the first place, why do I even...”

Claudia twisted her fingers together as she watched Francine silently fume to herself for long moments.

“You know what? I’ve had enough of this. It’s been months, MONTHS, of your ill-conceived, childish dabblings of trial and error, breaking the rules before you even bother to learn them well enough in the first place, wasting materials, wasting MY TIME, when I COULD BE MAKING PROGRESS IN MY OWN WORK. I’ve HAD. ENOUGH.”

Claudia’s breath caught, her heart pounding in her chest as her fingers began to tremble. She had never seen her sister so livid. Francine’s dark eyes glittered with a furious light as she breathed sharply through her nose, almost panting with frustration.

“Against my own better judgement, I took you under my wing, into my Guild, as my own apprentice, and you refuse to take anything seriously. I don’t know why I expected any different. It’s always been this way with you, just doing exactly as you please with no thought to responsibility or respect FOR OUR CRAFT.”

Claudia stayed silent with effort, choking down sobs that threatened to escape her throat. At the sight of Claudia’s distress, the light in Francine’s eyes dimmed. She seemed to fold in on herself, like a star burnt out.

“Just... leave. Go home, Claudia. I just can’t even look at you right now.” Francine snuffed the flame beneath Claudia’s failed solution. Then she turned on her heel, shoulders stiff as she sat herself back down at her desk and put her face in her palms.

Claudia fled for home.

~~~

Claudia ran through the cobbled streets and winding lanes towards the tall, narrow house that was the Hollycouth ancestral home. Barely able to see as tears streamed down her face, Claudia stumbled into the gutter several times before reaching the weathered familiarity of the front gate. Dashing through the small front garden and up the stone steps, Claudia struggled with the heavy brass of her skeleton key before spilling herself across the threshold. With her mother and father still at work, Claudia was the only one home.

Treading up the stairs to the very top of the house, Claudia kicked off her boots and sank onto her bed, sobbing.

Why was she like this? It’s not that she didn’t take anything seriously, she just had so many ideas. She was so curious about what might happen if she could only tweak this or that. There were just so many things she wanted to try...

She always intended to follow the recipes, so well defined and ordered as they were. But then an idea would occur to her. A sparking flare in her mind as she saw some connection or other, bright and impossible to ignore, something new and begging to be tested. She couldn’t help it...

She didn’t want to fail. She didn’t want to cause waste or disappointment. Least of all for Francine.

But that’s all she ever seemed to do.

Claudia cried until her eyes were dry and scratchy, laying prone on her bed, struggling to breathe through the down of her pillow and her own clogged nose.

Turning her head, Claudia’s gaze landed on the journal resting on her side table. Hoisting herself upright with effort, Claudia flipped through the pages, filled with doodles and scraps of poetry, pressed flowers and descriptions of dreams she no longer remembered.

Claudia flipped through with increasing agitation, an ember fanned to flame with each turn of the page. This is why Francine calls her childish. This is why she keeps failing, keeps disappointing, keeps wasting...

With a growl, Claudia tore out a page, the crisp sound viciously satisfying as she crumpled the paper and threw it towards her cold hearth. Page after page followed, a hail storm of torn thoughts and half-realised ideas.

With a blazing sense of self-spite, Claudia struck two golden clackstones together, sending sparks flying across the logs stacked in the small stone fireplace. As the fire crackled to life, Claudia began to gather all her torn pages and fed them to the flames, watching them burn to ash.

She unpacked her journals from the boxes under her bed, items strewn across the wooden floor of her room as Claudia continued her war on the child she no longer wished to be.

Page after page, journal after journal, consumed by the golden maw of her hearth.

With soot-stained fingers, Claudia began tearing at another page, by now a cleansing, rote sort of action. Though, glancing down at a painted wheel of rainbow colours, Claudia paused. She remembered her art classes, learning the way certain songs could sometimes coax forth brilliant colours from dull pigments.

“Like calls to like, pitch calls to pitch, tempo to tempo,” Claudia’s art tutor had once said to her as together they stirred powdered pigment into solvent. “Watch...” Joscelin had then proceeded to hum in a clear, unwavering tone as she stirred a dirty-looking blue powder into the clear, gel-like binder.

As Joscelin had stirred, Claudia had watched over her shoulder in awe as the hue clarified into something vibrant.

Claudia had used that exact paint in this pigment chart. She brushed her thumb over the blue, tainting it with a faint smear of charcoal.

In the margins of the page, Claudia had scribbled notes about the songs used to brighten, to dim, to warm, to cool, and even, in some special cases, to shift a pigment’s hue to another entirely.

If only Claudia could whistle a song and fold ash into fire or to air or to water...

Perhaps something of this principle might help Francine with her great work, Claudia thought, as she carefully tore the page from her journal. Perhaps she might be able to help, instead of hinder for once.

Or perhaps Francine would declare it another waste of her precious time.

Resting on her haunches, Claudia wrestled with indecision. Uncertainty was a familiar pain. But this... if there was even the chance it might spark some insight Francine could use... then there was no decision to be made.

Resolved, Claudia folded the page and tucked it into the pocket of her skirt. After washing her hands and face, Claudia pulled on her boots once more and raced down the stairs, leaving behind her disarray.

~~~

“Francine?” Claudia called, taking tentative steps into her sister’s workspace. Francine was standing in the middle of the room before a bronze table littered with fragments of quartz, scattered pages, and thimbles of ash. The rainbow-bright edges of altered clear fire burned in the midst of it all, cradled within the cobalt crucible. Francine was hunched over the far edge of the table, muttering as she scribbled furious notes into her journal.

Claudia withdrew the folded page from her pocket, thumbing it nervously, afraid to interrupt Francine as she worked.

“If the nature of the ash is key, then perhaps...?” Claudia heard Francine mumble as she approached cautiously from behind. Though, perhaps what Claudia never learned as Francine tossed threads of mossmire into the flames, along with a handful of sharp-looking quartz shards.

The clear flames flared then, as the mossmire was consumed to ash. Francine stepped forward, raising the crucible’s lid to smother the flames. Before she could, there was a sudden, ominous crack as quartz snapped in the heat. Francine stumbled back, raising a reflexive arm to shield her face as more shards began to crack.

“What? No, this isn’t...” Francine mumbled. The clear flames roared higher, their hazy rainbow edges a menacing halo, then abruptly diminished to nothing.

All was still, and Francine sighed in relief. Setting the lid on the bench, she turned to inspect the dried threads of remaining mossmire.

At first, Claudia thought the flames extinguished. However, as she inched closer, Claudia saw the shards of mercury-threaded quartz continue to break into yet thinner, sharper pieces with barely audible pops.

The shards began to glow, hotter and brighter, as the silver threads of mercury radiated an oily rainbow light. As though they had consumed the fire and were now burning from within.

“Francine?” Claudia spoke, her voice quiet and hoarse. “The quartz...”

Now intent on her notes, Francine appeared not to have heard her.

“Why did that... shouldn’t have happened...” Francine muttered, unaware as the shards began to tremor within the crucible. “Could it be tainted..?” Francine peered at a small tangle of plant pinched between her ash-blackened fingers.

Claudia cleared her throat, a sound masked as the quartz began to rattle in earnest, incandescent with heat.

The rattling caught Francine’s attention. With a cry of alarm, Francine fumbled once more for the cobalt lid, rushing to the crucible though there were no flames to douse.

“No, Francine!”

“Claudia?” Francine started, panicked confusion on her face, as Claudia dashed forward and pushed her away from the table. Francine lost her footing and stumbled to the floor.

The crucible exploded.

Claudia turned to the side as she was showered in burning shards of quartz and chunks of cobalt. The burning bite of hot stone seared across her neck and half-raised arm.

Claudia noted, in the small moment before she fell to her knees, that shards of burning quartz had lodged into the walls and tables, charring stone and wood.

“Oh,” Claudia breathed as she sank.

There were shards, too, embedded in the ceiling, Claudia saw as she fell back. Sharp little stars now clustered amongst the invisible constellations.

“Claudia! No, no, no no no, Claudia!” Francine’s arms were around her, holding Claudia close. A hand was on her neck. Claudia tried to push the hand away, her neck hurt so terribly. But her arm wouldn’t move. When she tried to speak, she could only cough. Blood spattered across the front of Francine’s dress, mixing with the stain of ashes.

“Claudia, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” Francine wailed, her narrow frame wracked with gasping sobs as she held Claudia tighter. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t, I didn’t mean any of it, I’m sorry— No, Claudia, NO, PLEASE!”

Claudia’s heart broke at the sound of Francine’s distress. She tried to speak again, to tell Francine everything was alright, but her throat burned.

Francine’s voice began to fade, like some distant call heard underwater. The sound was replaced by a new call; a song. A rising chorus echoed in Claudia’s mind, in her heart, thrumming in her very bones, soothing Claudia’s pain. Dulling her urgency.

But she had come to Francine for a reason. Hadn’t she? Claudia frowned as she fought to remember... The chart. Inch by inch, Claudia shifted her hand towards Francine, page crumpled in her shaking grip, blood smearing the paper.

“Colours... and songs...” Claudia tried to whisper, choking on the words and the taste of copper.

“Claudia!” Francine’s cries were so very distant. Claudia smiled as the new chorus drew ever closer, louder, rising like a creature from deep waters. It washed away all other sounds, pulsing with the promise of rest.

Claudia closed her eyes and sank again.