I’ve always wanted to see an alien on cocaine. Promising a Mad Alchemist eighty percent of a perfectly preserved fire dragon seems to be close enough. I just sat there and chuckled as Saltheen FLEW into a craze, opening up side caverns full of supplies that were so perfectly hidden that it would’ve taken me a month to find the stuff. With a blood sample and some sort of infrared scanning Alchemy tech, the insane genius muttered on about ‘perfect compatibility’ and ‘unprecedented opportunity’ while unceremoniously darting around the room.
Alien concoctions and artifacts were pieced together and subsequently thrown onto the ritual platform before Saltheen worked his magic. Alchemy was cool to watch. I say this from the perspective of someone who did crazy ass things with magic every chance I got, from sunstone golems to magic armor to arcane fortresses, and I’m not even old yet.
Each time Saltheen approached his Alchemy platform, golden light shone directly upward from the center and the outer raised edge glowed a mysterious blue. And then, Saltheen’s hands in contact with the outer rim would hum and then the entire surface of the platform would flash and any item that was within the borders inexplicably became something else. I watched, fascinated like a child at the zoo for the first time, barely able to hold my excitement in. Things I had no name for became other things that I had no name for until an hour of furious work went by.
Maevana and her guards had already been shuffled off to wait in another room, much to her dismay. The prep work was already too classified for someone who didn’t have any business participating in creating my Grimoire. For me, Maevana was just the avenue of meeting the Mad Alchemist and getting it created, along with paying for it. I know she was doing this for my benefit, but she wanted to get out of the weird Sun Aelf marriage customs anyways and getting a grimoire and becoming a seriously fantastically powerful wizard was her best bet to being independent. To me, she was just a means to an end.
An end result of getting a kickass Grimoire.
Saltheen turned to me with a grimace. “Am I to assume you are the reason Goblinoids are knocking at my front door?”
I gave the alien my own evil grin. “Oh yes. Yes please. Let them in.”
Five minutes later, a large glass tank of light green fluid filled with twenty perfectly preserved brains sat next to a small table piled high with mostly whole Centauri de-scripter disks. The Goblinoids gladly shuffled back out of Saltheen’s lair as if their mangy tails were on fire and I was happy to see those disgusting fucks go. At least they were useful enough for me to consider not burying them a hundred meters below the surface of the earth.
Gathering up the pile de-scripter disks and putting them in the ritual circle, I turned to Saltheen. “Okay, step one of your service, Alchemy these all so that they’re fixed and condensed into one serviceable unit with all of the memory on there. Then,” I grunted, slamming a few bars of metal next to them, “duplicate it so I can have a copy of of my own.”
I stepped back and Saltheen at least had the good grace to not roll his eyes at me. But I could feel it. I could feel his soul doing it.
With a warm flash of light, and subsequent humming that dimmed back into silence, two perfectly whole de-scripter disks sat in front of me. “Score!” I said, putting one away inside of Gungnir before pushing the cart holding the tank of brain and sliding the vat onto the ritual platform.
“Now these! Please!” I said, rubbing my hands together as I felt my inner mad scientist rear his balding head. “I want all of these brains condensed into one brain, but all of the emotion and animal instincts removed from them. I just want the processing power and any and all information they might have in there.”
Saltheen just stared at me but acquiesced. Miraculously, twenty fleshy brains condensed down into a small version that was unusually knobbly with many many folds. Carefully, sliding the Centauri rune de-scripter next to the mostly empty vat, I nodded at Saltheen while clapping my hands together once. “Now, load all that data into that lil’ ass brain.”
Another flash and another step down.
“This seems to be a rather strange way to go about fashioning a Grimoire,” Saltheen mused. “I believe one would normally start with a book of some kind.”
“We’re getting there,” I replied, rubbing my hands together again. Picking up Gungnir, I held the spear by the very end of the butt and extended the spear blade over the center of the platform. Soundlessly, a large pile of strange leather fell out along with twenty mana-bricks and then a pile of magically condensed beast cores. “Condense the bricks together, the cores together, and make those leathers supple like vellum. Then make the vellum pages nice and page-like in shape and size.” I said, using my hands to show Saltheen the rough dimensions.
Three slow flashes of light and it was so.
Pulling out the little marble gifted to me by Hermes, I consulted the unceasing flow of memories to review my list of steps, muttering to myself as I ran through to make sure I wasn’t missing any steps. Having the Alchemist here to just wave his hands and manipulate the ingredients at the fundamental level saved months worth of effort. To be fair, the fucker’s getting most of a real dragon out of this and that’s dead weight off my hands that I couldn’t personally use. Besides, my flesh golems could synthesize dragon material any time I needed it.
Putting the marble away, I went to the other room and pulled out the boxes supplied by Maevana and her generosity. “One hundred half sheets of fine gold, fifty pounds of purified liquid mana, seven rolls of living leather from a Bloody Gnarlwing, five untainted memory orbs, Gruelsnag tendon fresh from the body, and all of the blood from two desert ye-heers,” I said proudly. “Not that I know what the fuck a ‘ye-heer’ is.”
Saltheen tapped his ringed fingers against his chin. “Rare and very magical creatures that consume gems crystallized by the deadly sun from their realm. The longer they live, the more the haunting moon enriches the arcane forces within their blood. As a general rule, powerful potions and even more magical reagents can be fashioned with just a drop of their blood.”
“Works for me,” I said with a shrug. “Take the gold, thin it out until we have five hundred pages of gold, then soak them in the ye-heer blood. Then, I need those to be inserted inside each page of vellum. The finished pages need to be soaked fully in the liquid mana. When that’s done, each layered page needs to be a perfectly bonded whole.”
“Gold, while it is not the best mana storage material,” Saltheen lectured calmly, “It is the best material at remembering mana impressions. It can hold resonance within it for millenia, even better than how paper holds onto ink.”
This next step took five whole minutes, a veritable eternity compared to the last couple steps. As soon as the light receded, I stared at a stack of perfectly manicured vellum pages that crackled with hidden potential. I breathed heavily, gazing at the first true completed step. Pages. Real pages that will soon hold the full sum of my arcane knowledge.
Saltheen tilted his head, glancing back at me.
“Oh, yes!” I said. “Combine the memory orbs, the de-scripter, the brain, along with this bar of silver to form the spine of the book.”
Saltheen continued his commentary. “Silver is the perfect material to transmit magical energy with zero loss, almost making it a perfect superconductor. Your pages will be able transfer, transmit, and store magically infused data between them through the spine of the book.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Make the spine extra thick and have the excess silver weave into the Gruelsnag tendon.”
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“Obviously.”
Ignoring the calm sarcasm, I paused, consulting my orb again. “Yup, I said that right even though-”
The Mad Alchemist grumbled under his breath about ‘ignorant sorcerers’ and pointed at the orb in my hand. “While it is the correct step to take, you might want to give that to me so I can properly follow instructions. Gruelsnags are deadly giant spiders that make their web canopies in forests that surround mana vents. Not only are their webs infused with pure mana, but every part of their body to include their innards become synced to the building blocks of the universe. Their tendons are excellent binding materials for magical books.”
“Right, right,” I said unconvincingly. “Of course they are. Now, like I said, with the spine bonded together and the excess flowing into the tendon to serve as the thread to bind the pages together, and these three things need to have their essence infused into it before the last step.”
From within Gungnir’s storage space, I pulled out a large vial of my own Flesh Sorcery infused blood, a pile of leaves from Yggdrasil that still hummed with life, and several strips of bark from a recently killed dryad, courtesy of the merchants.
Saltheen didn’t miss a beat, placing the leaves and bark so that they wrapped around the almost complete Grimoire before he quickly and carefully drizzled my own blood up and down the book. I watched as he pieced the book together, pushing the stack of pages up to the amalgamation that was to serve as the spine of the book. Taking the living leather of the Bloody Gnarlwing, three sheets on top and three on the bottom and rolling up the seventh piece up and placing it next to the spine of the book, Saltheen looked at me for confirmation.
“This is almost complete,” he said, scratching his chin. “Do you have anything else to add?”
Hesitantly, I pulled the memory marble from Hermes out of my pocket and handed it to Saltheen. “This is last.”
He rolled it around in his palm for a minute before placing it next to the book lying in front of him in several groups of pieces. Sighing deeply, Saltheen pulled a small silver ring off of one of his many necklaces. “In the spirit of our agreement, and considering the fact that I’m being handsomely overpaid, I will add one ingredient of my own.”
Crushing the silver ring in his hand to dust, Saltheen’s hand dropped a few inches as a large, thick tome appeared in his hand. His other hand slapped the platform and all the ingredients he’d put up there slowly liquified until the base Grimoire appeared.
Sighing heavily again, Saltheen stared at the thick tome in his hand before placing my memory marble on top of the new Grimoire on the platform and then placing the tome on top of it to make a book-marble sandwich. “I grant you the only Grimoire in my possession as I cannot use it. It was formerly of a Sorcerer of Knowledge, mind bent in ways that drove him to the edge of madness because of his gift. I’ve purged his book through Alchemical means and yet I still cannot open it. It needs a true master, one connected to magic on a level removed from me.”
Placing his right hand on top of the book sandwich and his left on the platform’s raised edge, Saltheen closed his eyes, poured out torrents of energy, and screamed at the top of his lungs.
“BLEED ON IT SORCERER! GIVE IT YOUR ESSENCE!”
I snapped to, galvanized into action by the scream. Gungnir slashed my palm open and crimson lifeforce drizzled down directly into the seething mass of reconstituting molecules.
Kraken whispered from the depths of Gungnir. [Stick Gungnir’s blade into it!] He hissed.
[Where the fuck have you been?] I snapped back, forcefully twanging our mental link.
[Sleeping! But that doesn’t matter. Do what I said and STICK Gungnir’s blade in there! This process needs just a hint of Chaos and even some of Gungnir’s bleedoff will do.]
Not sparing the time to complain, I leaned forward and willed drips of energy to condense off of Gungnir and purple drops that seemed to carry a twisty weight all their own fell from the curving three sided blade and slammed into the molten concoction that was soon to be my latest weapon.
Drop after drop of my blood and Gungnir’s essence fell in tandem, infusing deeper parts of myself into the creation, streaks of purple and red light brightening up the room like a Halloween rave.
Saltheen straightened, gasping for air. “It needs more mana!”
It was my turn to not miss a beat. Perfectly willing to drop my accumulated wealth into this experiment, I pulled out thirty more bricks of fully charged mana batteries and let them slam into the platform.
“Yes!!!” Saltheen shrieked, allowing the transmuting force to envelop the batteries.
It was over faster than I realized. It was like the cops cut the power to the rave. The lights went out. The deep humming stopped. At one moment, it felt like we were next to the livewire of the universe as everything sang with an unnatural charge. And then, silence.
Saltheen picked himself up off the ground and crumpled another small silver ring, downing the contents of the potion bottle as soon as it appeared. Myself, I healed my palm and sheathed Gungnir, eyeing the Mad Alchemist.
“Normally,” he said hoarsely, pointing one shaky finger at the platform where mist almost obscured the dense book sitting in the center. “Normally, so much mana is simply not required.”
I took a few bold steps forward and picked up the steaming Grimoire. “Let me guess,” I said, hefting the book with a thick, dark brown leather cover. “This is the first time you’ve done something like this?”
The Mad Alchemist seemed like he had aged a decade due to the experience we’d just gone through. “Not exactly. I have defused cursed Elemental Compendiums, combined tattered copies of aged spellbooks, even removed rarified tomes from within the depths of the souls of my enemies, but never have the energy requirements been so great.”
Kraken rode shotgun in my mind through our link as I rubbed my hand once over the cover whose brown was so dark that it was almost black. I gave the moment the respect it deserved and opened to the first page.
“It’s empty!”
Saltheen’s countenance actually cracked, letting out a snort unbecoming his stoic demeanor. “You backwards dolt. It’s a Grimoire. You must fill it with knowledge. You must teach it, embed your understanding within it . . . this book is not a shortcut to unknown knowledge.”
“But can it be?” I asked, keeping any and all hints of desperation from leaking through. “You got any old books of magic you don’t want or need that I can stick in here as a starter?”
Saltheen just stared at me. “Did you just ask me for forgotten arcane knowledge that I don’t use just because I’m an Alchemist?”
I stared at him pointedly. I didn’t have to bring up the fact that Mr. Mad Alchemist was getting a fucking dragon out of the deal which also meant the slimy bastard was getting paid twice. I’m not above a proper scheme but getting skinned alive. That’s where I draw the fucking line.
Huffing was too low brow for Saltheen to indulge in but I could see it in his eyes. To him, this was like pulling teeth. It was akin to a king dealing with a filthy rich peasant who had no reason to be wealthier than the king.
“One Centauri primer on gray magic, one intermediate instructional manual on Centauri rune-scripts, one Dwarven codex, three Aelven treatises on the nature of magic, and three Wizard spell books that I have never managed to decode.”
Nine books dropped onto the platform with dull thumps and Kraken whispered in my ear, [Argue for more! You’ll never get a chance like this. Don’t forget, your Grimoire will only make copies of the information inside, so the mercenary isn’t losing out on the deal at all.]
Not letting my inside knowledge give it away, I looked at Saltheen and deliberately coughed.
“Stop holding out on me.” I rested my hands on the books and straightened them into a nice column. “Stingy isn’t a good look on you.”
My words got underneath his skin. I could tell by his grinding teeth and good god I wanted to smile. I wanted to jump for joy but holding myself back took everything I had. Five more books appeared next to the first column.
“Two Codexes from before the fall of Atlantis and one portal tome complete with a spell book of interdimensional travel theory and a map book full of coordinates.”
This time I rushed. This bundle was too good to just leave sitting out so I carefully followed Kraken’s instructions, laying my Grimoire down and placing a book on top of it. Gripping both of them together, I let my Grimoire drain mana from me until I could feel that the process was complete. I didn’t stop until all of the books had been copied and my own personal Grimoire hummed with contentment.
Wearing the world’s biggest smile, I turned to Saltheen and gestured at the pile of books. “Got any more?”