“I can’t believe you made a stink potion,” I told Dusk, who was laughing like she’d made the greatest joke in the history of Ddeaer.

“It’s actually not a bad idea,” Kene said. “Demonstrating it was through.”

He glared at her, and she laughed harder.

“I agree,” Meadow said. “With the Blueshade you picked up while looking for blink foxes, you can produce a variety of scents. Overwhelming stink is not a fun thing to deal with. Even if they have a countermeasure, like your spell, it can buy you a moment of distraction. It could also be used to drive off animals.”

“It’s not… A terrible idea,” I admitted. “It’s a decent weapon to add into my arsenal. It’s just also a terrible fate to inflict on us.”

Dusk fell off the counter laughing, and I had to dive to catch her. She probably could have caught herself with her slowfalling spell, but I didn’t want her to fail to cast it in time because she was so distracted by laughter.

Meadow smiled and clapped her hands.

“Well, if we’re to prepare you both for the Idyll-Flume, we’ve a lot to do.”

Kene glanced at her and groaned.

“We’re not going to do any crazy intense training, are we?”

“No,” Meadow said, shaking her head. “Malachi already had to do that once to help him get his full-gate spell ingrained. We’re going to be going over a few potions that you can make for it. Outside of the healing potions you can already make, you should stock up on nutrient potions, just in case.”

“Will there not be food inside?” Kene asked, sounding far more concerned than he had been a short while ago.

“There will be shipments of food each week,” Meadow said. “But if you all decide to go into the tower, you may miss one, and have to barter for food. It’s good to have some backups prepared, just in case.”

“What else should we have?” Kene asked.

“The question is not what you should have, but what you’re able to have. You should be able to find use for just about any potion you can create, be it enhancement potions, resisting elemental attacks, or even simple mana regeneration. You could find a use for potions that allow you to see through the dark, or through mist.”

“I can brew night vision potions,” Kene said. “They’re not as strong as a proper darksight potion, but they’re better than nothing. I’ve also got stuff for energy potions, lots of variants of healing potions, like antibacterial or fever reduction, and I may be able to…”

They glanced at me.

“Still got pointer moss?” Kene asked, then at my nod, they continued. “Between my sound-sage and the pointer moss, and a few other plants, I can also knock together a proprioception enhancement potion.”

“All good ideas,” Meadow said. “How would you like to delegate?”

“Are you willing to help?” I asked her.

She mused on that for a moment, making a humming noise.

“I’ll help you brew a potion you already know how to make,” she finally said.

A bit of strategy later, and we set to work. Meadow would be brewing us a large batch of meal replacement potions in my large cauldron as well as some more healing potions, while Kene showed me how to brew the night vision and proprioception potions, and Dusk brewed more stink potions.

“Night vision potions actually don’t have much in common with darksight potions,” Kene explained as we began draining and reinforcing the less magical ingredients – three oranges, a lemon, strawberries, hazelnuts, and a bottle of milk for the base.

This was actually my first base that wasn’t pure water, though I guess milk was still mostly water.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Darksight potions form an energetic array that’s similar to a solar spell,” Kene said. “It bestows an entirely new sense that allows you to see in any amount of darkness. This, though, is a lot closer to an enhancement potion. It doesn’t give you anything new, just majorly improves your night vision. If we had some eyeball-seeds, or better yet, eye-fruit, we could make some general vision enhancement, but I don’t have any.”

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“Eye-fruit?”

“A soft, spongy kind of fruit, almost like lychee? They look like bloodshot eyeballs.”

“That’s horrifying.”

Kene just laughed and had me start mixing together the less magical components to boil down and connect their arrays, then grabbed the more magical components.

“For the night vision, we’re going to be using these,” Kene said, lifting a bundle of dried flowers. “I don’t have a way to keep them fresh other than my greenhouse, which has a lot less space, so I’d already prepared the arrays for them and dried them. Have you used dried herbs in potion making yet?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“It’s pretty much the same as fresh, but you’ll have to use more, and add a handful of extra Managrass to get it to work. You also have to try and pull the lingering death energy in the plants out with the cauldron.”

They paused.

“Since you’ve got death mana, you can probably do it more efficiently, by flowing death mana through the cauldron.”

It was a little bit difficult, but I did manage to rid the dried plants of their death energy. The circuits of life energy flowed into the potion, and began to connect to what was already in the pot.

The smell was terrible. The acidity from the citrus had begun to curdle the milk, and we were heating it up, and then purging death energies from it. Still, compared to the horror that had been Dusk’s stinkbomb potion, this was a summer’s breeze.

While the night vision potion simmered, we worked on the proprioception potion.

That had a base of water, and then loads of carrot and jícama, tree resin, and more hazelnuts.

“Hazelnuts are great for enhancement potions,” Kene said when I asked why both were using them.

Then we took the pointer moss, cut a section off, cleaned it, patted it dry, and situated its arrays to focus on the spatial sensing it had, before chopping it into rough bits and tossing it in.

Kene had dried the sound-sage too, which was a disappointment to me personally. When it was alive, it could apparently produce different sounds by striking it with differing types of ungated mana, which sounded fun to mess around with for a bit.

As I stirred it into the cauldron and fueled it with Managrass, Meadow turned to glance at Kene.

“It may not be a bad idea for you to store some of your stock of herbs and other ingredients for potions in Dusk’s astral plane, at least for the competition, along with your cauldrons.”

“I’ll need it for now, to help the village, and so that I can set up a big stock to give Alice while I’m gone… Again,” Kene responded. “But maybe we can meet up a day or two before the Idyll-Flume, and store it then?”

“Works for me. When does the boat leave? How do I get on?” I asked Meadow.

“It’s two weeks and a day away – the first Solsday of Frost-Creep. Orykson will meet you that morning and give you the pass, as well as the boat tickets.”

“Neither of you will be coming along?” I asked, and Meadow shook her head.

“We can’t enter the Idyll-Flume,” she said. Then she paused and scratched her chin. “Well, Orykson probably could, but he’d have to shatter the realm in order to do that, which would make the entire thing pointless. Regardless, the point is, we couldn’t do anything but lounge around on the island while staring at the portal.”

I grumbled a bit as I turned back to the potions.

By the time we finished up, we had made six night vision potions, seven stink bombs, four proprioception potions, and forty-two meal replacement potions.

I sighed. Meadow was so much better at this than I was that it was kind of depressing at times.

I cleaned up a little bit, gave Kene a quick kiss on the cheek, and then went to meet Alice at the tea room.

Said tea room was a beautifully charming little shop, run by a sweet old lady.

I marveled at the fact that Kene’s village had so many sweet old ladies – that was three for three so far, between Alice, the tea room, and the proprietor of the Heart-Lizard Inn.

If you counted Meadow’s visit, then it was four for four, and if you counted Kene’s grandma… Well, four out of five wasn’t bad. It was a passing grade!

Realistically, it was just because older people liked smaller town life better, but it was fun to consider some sort of suspicious reason why it was only old ladies. Maybe the entire town was a coven for hags, and that's why Kene had been drawn here.

“Oh, Malachi!” Alice said, gesturing to the seat across from her. “Take a seat?”

She poured me a cup of tea, and I took a sip. It seemed to be plum and ginger, and was quite tasty.

“Thank you,” I said, nibbling at a vanilla scone that was on the plate in front of me. It was good, but ours were better.

Then again, I might be biased, just a little bit.

“So, what did you need help with?” I asked Alice.

“I was going to forward this to the Spiritwatch, but since you’re here, I figured that I might as well just ask you, and cut out the middleman,” Alice explained. “You don’t have to take the job, of course, but I thought that I’d ask.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Well, you may know this, given how much you’ve explored the forest around this area, but this town used to be a part of a powerful clan, a long time ago. Nowadays, we’re pretty much just farmers, but out in the forests you’ll sometimes find the ruins of castles and stuff. When Gregory was digging out a foundation for his new barn, he actually ran into one in the field too, funny enough.”

“Sure,” I said, before she could get too derailed. “I’ve seen at least one of them.”

“Well, last night, when the witch was here and treating Kene’s… incident… all the mana she was throwing around town woke something up.”

“What is it?” I asked, and Alice frowned.

“I’m not exactly sure,” she admitted. “I sensed some knowledge energy, and a lot of death and life and lunar and mental energy.”

“Energy, not mana?”

“I think so,” Alice said, shifting uncertainly. “But I wouldn’t say for sure, either.”

“How strong was it?”

“I don’t know,” Alice continued. “It had some sort of veil up. Strong. But it didn’t have the crushing power of someone like Kene’s grandma. So weaker than her. Stronger than a first gate mage.”

That left it somewhere between second to fourth gate, then.

“We’re willing to pay you,” Alice continued. “We don’t have a ton of money or magic items or that sort of thing, but you’re working on some sort of dimensional cottage, right? We could help get some stuff set up for it.”

Plunging into the unknown wasn’t an amazing idea, but if I was going to do it, helping people I liked was a good motive. And with Kene and Meadow nearby, I could hopefully get healing if anything happened.

Hopefully.