In the dungeon village of Kibosh there was a shophouse, bland in its flawlessness of stone and glass. Its window displays promised alchemical wares and scrolls dense with inked sigils. Meticulously labeled, they ranged from the mundane basics to esoteric and unique creations—some resonant with a subtle touch of divinity, others entirely devoid of any magic.

There was nothing unusual about its upper floors, but the protective spells on the lower floor were, upon close inspection, spectacular. Dozens of interwoven wards were delicately threaded through with temperature and air quality controls, and the whole thing was a gorgeous tapestry to anyone with eyes to see it.

So I was informed, at least. A way to translate magical senses into my own mundane-only sensorium might have been more practical than the work of reforging my soul to allow for that perception to grow, but it was at least a half-dozen inventions down the line. For now, I still had to take other peoples’ word for what my laboratory looked like to arcane vision, because even the snow was somehow undisturbed by the warm vented air.

I could have fixed that lack when I’d chosen my second Class in early Frost. I’d had options in the dozens, many tailored to deeds I’d done—Mana-Ink inscription, enchanting, and runework options, shopkeeping, healing, and divine intercession, among others—and some tailored to needs I had. I passed over the crutches, though, in favor of pursuing the Path that rang within my heart, and when I’d made that decision Kelly had kissed me on pure impulse, and I’d kissed her back, and then we’d immediately backed off and sworn to each other to not do that again for another season.

Godsfriend, Veil had dubbed me, smiling their faintest and truest of smiles, and the System had apparently agreed. Ketka had agreed, and Iōanna had smiled with a placidness that had an infinite depth when she agreed with her teammate, and that had been enough to make it stick.

I became eligible to take my second Class as rapidly as Kelly and I had expected—the day before the last Ease of the season, when I recreated an imperfectly understood variant on Quicktan, one which I hoped would work better on some of the magical skins coming out of the Forest. The woman who’d sold me the skins was tall and skinny and simple, a huntress who moved like the wind and who had a smile like the sun. She was full of uncomplicated joys and could hold about two-thirds of a thought at any given point in time, and when she was kissing me I didn’t care how vapid a conversationalist she was—and Ketka felt the same, which was extremely convenient.

I had already begun meditating on my Path Visions in the fortnight beforehand, having started as soon as Rafa cleared me to do so. It still took me three fortnights to make my choice, fortnights where I’d consulted with anyone who was willing to speak even elliptically about it. Godsfriend had been an obviously terrible fit with Alchemist, despite Kelly’s insistence that such a thing wasn’t truly possible, and I knew full well that Refinement was going to be an agonizing tribulation and crucible. But the path I was charting was one of working hand in hand with the divine as partners just as much as it was one of the practical alchemies that were the forerunners of chemistry, and I would begin as I meant to go on.

By doing so, I was passing up on opportunities and capabilities I’d have traded nearly anything for a year before—Kelly had been outright jealous over the degree to which those visions had me wreathed and tempered in powers beyond the mundane by the time I rose to Third Tier. Even Hitz, when I’d consulted them about one in particular, had shown actual, unguarded emotion. Worst, from my First Friend’s perspective, was that they weren’t hard roads to walk. Even after rejecting the choices whose futures terminated in immediate stagnation, many of the ones which stretched into the untrammeled blaze of light that was my distant future were… not easy, precisely, but in a range of striving that I found comfortable.

Of those, few of those Paths were as forgiving as Alchemical Paragon, and I had passed that one over only by the narrowest of margins.

Your laboratory would be your realm, it had whispered to me. In it you would know all that transpires, in all its breadth and depth; and in it, all would be precisely as you willed.

It would have granted me an uncomplicated perfection of my craft, the perfect fusion of the Technician which would have been my second Class and the Alchemist whose art was the art of creation. I would eventually have perceived magic in all of its splendor and been able to manipulate the metaphysical realm as naturally as breathing, so long as I was within my laboratory. In time, if I rose to Fourth Tier along that Path, anything in my lab would burn if I so willed it—and the wildest, most downhill and inexorable of reactions would still themselves if I forbade their continuance.

All of those, so long as I was within my laboratory. So long as I was willing to be an artisan, to engage in bespoke creation, because the processes by which I did those acts of creation would never work for anyone else.

It would have been spectacularly useful, there was no getting around that. I’d have had an easy road to growth and progress, to pushing the bounds of science and the art of alchemy within not just Shem but Yelem as a whole. I’d seen the way the Class would have granted me insight into the fundamental nature of magical reagents and the essentials that were shards of magic in the same way that the Gods had shards; I’d seen just how effortless the actual labor of the trade would have become, and I was not blind to the immense value of knowing what a process’s outputs could be.

I just had more interesting things planned than being the perfect technician, as petty and unfair to the Class as that feeling was.

I’d qualified for the second of the Paths I gave the most serious consideration to after an intense fortnight’s labor for and with a woman who was both wandering scholar and druidess. Ketka—whose team had unanimously decided that multiple feet of snow and drifts taller than some houses was a wonderful training opportunity—had known her by reputation. My Yarovi paramour had, upon her departure, left me with a list of questions ranging from the practical to the lurid—a transparent, successful combination of ploy and hint—and from the ensuing connection had come a collaboration on the bulk processing of something new the Forest folk had begun finding or making.

She’d slept that fortnight in my workshop, carrying my work forward step by step. She was a true peer in many ways, and I greedily extracted as much as I could of her understanding of magical herbology just as she devoured my understanding of chemistry. She’d also brought a substantial number of craftseeds, as the Forest folk had dubbed them, whose provenance she declined to share but whose tightly-contained power was like a droplet of filtered divinity. Together, we’d taken a wildly impractical range of techniques to imbue that power into liquids and created a prototype for a scalable process—my skills of a decade’s labor put to vastly more fulfilling use.

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It would take someone else, someone who had better equipment and more knowledge of working with magical reagents, to turn that prototype into something that worked reliably. But we’d gotten a batch of it processed in parallel with no involvement on our parts past loading in the reagents, and the System recognized me by offering me more options for my second Class.

Process Expert. Iterator. These and more were… not orphaned, because they still fit within Paths that were suitable enough, but they didn’t beckon to me. Parallelist did, despite being almost a refutation of the work I’d put in, because being able to do two things at once was a dream, and because the Class it and Alchemist would Refine into was utterly wondrous.

Sevenfold Alchemist was centered around spatial and dimensional magic, around operating in parallel. Seven pairs of hands wasn’t just seven runs of a production line—seven pairs of hands was seven experiments run in parallel, and there was something else… fascinating, something I didn’t tell anyone else about because of how utterly bullshit it was to even think about.

Seven pairs of hands was seven personal worlds, collapsing into one at the moment of its completion. Experiments gone wrong, industrial accidents, Gods taking lethal umbrage to something I said or did—destabilize up to six of those worlds, any six of them, and I’d be unharmed when the moment passed and all the possibilities coalesced into the reality of Yelem once more.

It was exactly the sort of thing that would make me able to fight. The woman in the fullness of Third Tier that I saw in that vision would have been the Alchemist of Sevenfold Worlds; seven potion-throws coalesced into the same place and time, seven choices to try as responses to any circumstance… and seven lives, seven chances to survive.

In the end, I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to resist the sheer beauty of that. I’d have gloried in it, and not just because proving Meredith wrong would have been the hat trick to having done the same to Kartom and James. So I rejected it, rejected that Path in its entirety, because I had found a place where I could live in peace and I refused to become someone who lost sight of how wonderful that was.

Besides, there was a reason for what was in the window displays. The central focus of the display, the usual pride of place, was empty other than a cushion and a label with an alchemical symbol I’d long been fond of. It was a succession of shapes: a black circle within a white square, those within a yellow triangle, and last a red circle around it all—a Philosopher’s Stone, in the hermetic tradition. But once the eye drifted away from that, prompted to curiosity, there were the orbs in their ever-shifting pattern.

Space, Classics, Stone, Nations, Pranks. One chaotic meta-stable cycle, maintained by the whims of Tricksters who had once all been strangers to Yelem, before…

Well. Before the starving people of a Remnant League city had risen in sudden wrath, the streets still running red with blood as the death-urns of the nobility were hung from the outer walls. The hungry had feasted on the stores of the wealthy, and the people of Akina had crushed the arrogant armies of Karye in the battle that had followed and made of the battlefield a sacrament to the two Gods whose champion led them. Anansi had become a part of Yelem’s Thousand, and the followers of Naga—who defies, and who seemed perfectly happy to share Adei’s fealty with the Trickster—had declared his adherents to be their siblings-in-faith.

Karye demanded reparations from Shem and blamed Cleric Veil, whose laughter in response would haunt my dreams for years afterwards. My own laughter wasn’t much better, Kelly had informed me primly—but even she had to admit that the dry, scornful mirth that Kibosh’s Pillar for the Thousand had shown for Karye’s concerns was something to which I could only distantly aspire.

I found myself entirely disinclined to blame myself for it, inasmuch as there was any blame to go around. For all that I was remaking myself in the image of a kinder and gentler person, for all that I knew intellectually that sweat made a better lubricant for the wheels of reform than blood, I had only been one pebble in the avalanche that had swept away the status quo of a city.

Only a few fortnights had separated Adei’s quasi-death in the dungeon below Kibosh and the fall of Akina’s elite. Within days of their victory in the field and Anansi’s accession to membership in the Thousand, I’d found myself possessing a bridge towards more… collaborations. I’d made deals with no new Gods, brokered no new connections, but there was an unsubtle sense that I could. I saw more of them in my dreams—some trying to trick their way into the foothold, but the wiser and more patient ones simply circling in the liminal distance, waiting until I was ready or desperate.

I made bargains and honored them, though every afternoon spent practicing the bow and moving in the frozen woods only made me feel farther away from fulfilling my very first one. Artemis warmed to me regardless as I worked at it, which meant that the footing in the Forest was ever more treacherous as my ability to handle the challenge grew. My imprecations didn’t seem to change her opinion of me, but I provoked more than a few delighted laughs out of Ketka with them, which made the bucketloads of snow unerringly dumped in the smallest chinks in my Hephaestus-blessed clothing approximately worth it.

I saved a few more lives, even if they would have been saved by someone else if I hadn’t been around. I grappled with my faith, with my traditions, with the question of God. I watched as a woman named Tiffany, a middlingly talented but hard-working enchanter and runeworker, slipped into village life with barely a ripple. I read through the novels in the Library at a ferocious clip, each of the Librarians delighted for different reasons to share my joys and curiosity about them.

And I hung out my shingle. Kelly’s name, my design, and Tayir’s art—a distillation rig whose burner was a phoenix-feather quill, putting the finishing touches on the manaink glyph of cooling that condensed the distillate into the catchment of the inkwell.

By the grace of the Goddess of the Hunt and the God of Artisans, I’d come a distance beyond measure. I’d been remade and begun the process of reforging myself, a process that would end only with my death, may it be a thousand years in coming—and I’d found what I’d asked for on that afternoon in the woods and more besides: a nicer life in a kinder world, one where there were no asterisks on my womanhood or my choice of lovers, one where I could rest and strive in a true balance. Traveler, inventor, reader, friend; shameless flirt and lover, I was all of these things and more.

To some, I was a distant curiosity—to others, a source of stories and curiosities about a different world, and I was beginning to share those with a growing ease and comfort. To a very few others, though, I was becoming someone to watch or to search for, to collaborate with or to buy from, to sell to or to beg intercession from.

More would come seeking, soon enough. To befriend me, to use me, to bargain with me, maybe even to coerce me. I had most of a year to be ready for them, until the end of the year-and-a-day of my integration period, and I intended to not only Refine but also make my way to Third Tier in that time. Most of them wouldn’t believe any report that I’d made it that far in so short a time—they would be looking for an uncertain young woman in Second Tier, socially still a child, who was still a Mystic Alchemist. They would find the alchemist resident in the Dungeon Village of Kibosh, Duchy of Alqar, Kingdom of Shem; and she would be impeccably an adult in every way, a professional able to stand her ground and stake her claim to her Path and her choices.

And when they found me, when they found Sophie Nadash—when they found a woman in Third Tier, an Alchemist of Divine Mysteries—I would bid them welcome with a smile to The Quill & Still.