"The spirits are with us always little one. They drift along the wind and dance in the breeze. They slumber in the ground and play throughout the trees, each one ever-whispering the truths of existence written into their very being." I take an old wooden spoon, gnarled and covered in oiled splinters leading away from the handle.

Idly, I stir at the pot below me and add in a few sprigs of crushed dwarves' lily and continue speaking, though admittedly it was mostly to drown out the sound of chewing. "The animals and plants listen, constantly enveloped in a symphony of the world's truths. In time, with luck and intent, these truths change what a being is, and what it is capable of.

 The first phoenix was a songbird, the weakest in all the world. So small and dainty that nothing even bothered to hunt it. It gazed each day into the sun, wishing to soar as beautifully as the glorious idol it obsessed over. Each night it contemplated the endless cycle of the moon's phases, it's new rebirth each month and it's existence reflected in the holy sun's light."

The cauldron bubbled, an acrid smoke breaking through the depths of it's contents to befoul the air around my little treasure and I. 

The youngling is grabbing at the slivers of fruits and dried meat in the bowl before him. Small fingers a shade of dark lilac grasp a berry and bring it to lips a few tones lighter. Green juice and pink skin are squished between pearly white teeth with just-extended canines. 

"This is the basis of magic. Understanding reality, and using that understanding to exert influence. Not control, never control. Anyone that thinks they can control reality is a fool. You cannot stop the wind, but you can build a wall to protect yourself from it. You can use a sail to harness it's power, or even a simple clothesline to utilize it's natural properties. Never though, may you deign to command the wind to cease, such is not the way of existence."

Carefully, I lift the corpse of a rat possessing fur the color of gangrene and pus, behead the creature, and drop the body into the tar-ish liquid below. "That unpleasantness aside, the whispers of the spirits are often very faint to mortals. Even as they screech with all their might, we hear naught but their weakest echoes. Today, we shall open your ears."

Turning to the table at the far side of the room, I hobble across on an ancient cane half as old as I am. Sorting through a pile a herbs and carefully preserved and dehydrated limbs, I pull out the ribcage of a small bat-like creature with the abilities to become translucent and flatten themselves immensely.

Reaching to the wall-"Eat your food, not the dirt, child."- above the woven wooden table and pulling loose a bundle of hag-spawn hair from a corded rope set amongst others of various species, I look back to see my ward in the process of experimentally licking a rock. Whether it was a normal rock or one of my reagents that had fallen to the floor was hard to say.

"Now then, should I let you choose from this batch or the next..." At this point, I observe as the child pulls the rock into it's mouth with a violet tongue. "...that settles that. Ugh." 

Looking behind me, I decide to grab the foot of a blood hare. The boy would need luck and likely some fortitude of stomach.

Placing my current assortment onto the small glass prep-station beside my cauldron, I take a few moments to make sure they are of adequate quality before lowering them into the concoction one by one. Many alchemists require extensive work to prepare their ingredients, but this particular cauldron is able to do all of this within itself. Such was the nature of a divine artifact, though it sometimes gave me the barest sense of imposter syndrome despite their spiritual nature being of more import in the choice of items.

I then move around to a row of shelves and begin perusing. "Vellibas, gulbrus, Felidrus."

Light shines under the boy, first as a perfect circle, but that soon gives way to a simple sprawl of intertwined runes that create a basic lattice that raises into the air and brings the child with it. A flick of a finger and the magic construct brings the youngling to my heel.

"Vellibas, gulbrus,...jars." with a mirthful smile at the (at times) absurdity of my particular magic's interaction with normal language, I pull down all of the ingredients lining the shelves and neatly arrange them in categorical rows in front of Felidrus.

Then, with all the grace I manage, I nudge the three year old forward with my foot.

Some likely would have noticed he had been giggling at the little display of arcana before, but I had long since learned to tune out the voices of children with a slight application of the magic of stubbornness and frustration.

To his credit, the boy only stumbled a bit before righting himself and looking back at me with a questioning expression. His eyes, a hazel mix of tangelo, vermillion, and the purest yellow, a rarity of his species from what I remember. His left ear, elongated and tipped, flicks twice. He then turns back to the array of near-and-priceless alchemical supplies, yet unlike many would at his age, he observes for several seconds before stepping forward.

"Yet he still licked a rock not a minute ago."

The thought almost brought forth a chuckle, but it was best not to distract the child now. This stage of ingredient gathering was rather critical in regards to how the resulting elixir would turn out. It wasn't often that I allowed those in my charge to take part in this step of the process, but listening to the slight pulses of meaning and fate naturally released by this workshop had always guided me true. The way such nudges manifest were never able to be truly explained to one that doesn't have the sense, but the slight feeling of rightness and purpose as I take each action is almost a friend after all this time.

 Perhaps allowing a child to choose the catalyst of it's power based on it's own lack of understanding was shallowly thought to some, but at the least it wasn't cruel. Besides, Lady Fate often enjoys a chance to interact with children, even with her fickle ways.

Pulling myself off a line of thought I had been through during nearly all of the four-hundred and nineteen ceremonies I had conducted this far, I focus again on the boy.

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 Even still, some small part of me feels a tension at the pit of my stomach knowing why we were truly here. He would be powerful, as all the other Champions before him had. Yet he would also change the world in one way or another, or die to young to truly have lived. It's difficult not to feel responsible.

Felidrus approaches a jar of troll eyes first. Not entirely special, but even without squatting down each one was easily half the size of his body. He then turned to a collection of eggs pulled from a hydra only days away from depositing them. Admittedly I had never had a taste for their effects, as the amount of nutrients required to fuel the abilities granted often left the host...well, feral. 

Luckily the child turned away from these as well and quickly lost interest in this row of items after a few more cautious glances. Not entirely surprising since many of these ingredients were objectively disgusting. 

The next contained even larger jars, though the contents inside where not always of equal proportion.

The first jar stood as tall as the boy, it's cap rusted from how little it had been used. I likely should replace that soon, having a product spoil would be quite a hindrance.

As the boy stepped up to the murky reflection of himself he faced, I muttered another cantrip to stir the cauldron once more, then another so the process would repeat every few moments until I was able to give it my full attention.

It was about the time the boy's reflection began to reach out to him and he stepped back that I refocused on what was happening. Yes, I could intervene, but that was not something I personally felt as my place.

The child had none of it though, and quickly moved on to the next row, hardly sparing a glance at anything else near the container, but I felt their minds connect for the barest of moments before the binding seals that contained it flared with a barely perceptible light. The fact the, ahem, thing in there was able to attempt to communicate at least let me know the tyke had some psychic ability.

And so it went, Felidrus would stop to look at the claws of a gorgon, or lock eyes with the head of an undead pixie, fawn over a mushroom that shown like the stars before shirking away from the still-beating heart of a wrathful demon that took the form of a bipedal cow in a small pasture in the middle of nowhere for some reason.

 "The strangest thing was that the minotaur that brought me this item had insisted repeatedly it was just a cow and not a facade of his own race. The citizens of the hells never seem to hold to the logic of the mortal plains, but it tickles me even now thinking of the bovine man's utterly flummoxed expression."

He caressed the glass of a jar holding a flower so purely white that you never again saw the color the same. He seemed particularly amused by a pink velucian-snaptrap plant attempting to bite him through he glass of it's container, but had a rather nasty jolt as it suddenly tripled in size and covered itself in a chitinous shell of purest crimson.

Finally though, his eyes settled on a single jar and did not waver. One I hadn't even noticed until he brought it into his own focus.

It was small, enough so that it would fit in even his tiny hand. The glass was colored, as many others had been, this one a pale magenta. It's cap was silver, decorated with a slight flourish and a tarnished amethyst cut into a square.

I had known of this bottle for many years, as had my Mentor before me, and his before him. We only ever saw it once, on the day we were granted apprenticeship to this sacred role.

It had sat in the middle of this very room, as we had been told it would be. We entered alone, and the door was barred behind us. We picked it up, dedicated it's image to memory, then closed our eyes and held it before us, as though it was a sacred treasure we had been allowed to see, but not have. Exactly as it was, though we didn't understand why at the time. That truth, that responsibility, was lain on us only as our predecessor lie dying within this very room.

Then, gently, silently, it was taken from us. Instantly, we opened our eyes. Still, we were alone. Magic cannot overright reality. Demons cannot alter the laws of being. Only the divine, and a select few at that, would ever be able to give and then take from existence freely.

Like each of the Mentors that had come before, our beliefs and our realities were changed with such a simple thing.

The boy approaches the bottle.

 He kneels.

 He slowly picks it up and holds it to the chandelier of candles hanging above the cauldron.

 His face is slightly stained by the light reflecting through the glass.

 A speck of a shadow aligns itself with the center of his forehead.

His eyes shine with a vermillion light of magic.

A connection is formed.

 I doubt he even notices. Then again...the rock, perhaps doubt is still to kind.

Inside is a single shard of bone, suspended in blood. A fragment of a fragment. It's in his eyes, I can see it even in the muddled reflection of the glass. The certainty. As he turns to me, he is already walking. Slow, a totter more than anything. What he holds has more weight than a boy his size should hold, even as small as it is. Yet even though the boy couldn't yet speak, something in him knew that this was why he was brought to me before he ever even opened his eyes to the world.

I gave a silent prayer, for Lady Fate was watching. A child, a baby should not move with this conviction when before they had at best aimlessly wandered through the myriad of items clustered in batches across the floor. It had happened to several of my charges before, but watching a critical moment of such potent destiny was as awe-inspiring as the first time it occured before him with a spriggan sapling that had originally been brought in as a ingredient. 

"I do hope that Ywr is doing well, he should have reached adulthood by now, it's been some time since I visited and slept amongst his branches. I'll have the plan for it, but for now...."

As Felidrus reaches my feet, his eyes have never left the item gently clasped in his hands. As his head rises and his gaze locks with mine, I only offer the slightest of smiles.

"Very well, little one. You have chosen something very special," as I speak, I kneel, the first time I lower myself to his level in the short years he's been in my care, "just as it has chosen you. Know this, little one, it will bring you more pain than you will ever be able to imagine. Are you sure?" The slightest intent in the words, enough that even without language the meaning is clear.

His eyes lock with mine. I know he doesn't understand me fully, but something in the way he holds the bottle out to me says more than even words can convey. The act is not a reflection of the child, but instead the pull of destiny before him. 

I feel the edges of my eyes crinkle, and ever so slowly I place my hand on his head for a moment and take the bottle from him with the other.

Standing and feeling more strain than I have in centuries, I turn back to the cauldron and make my way across the room, a cantrip returns the rest of the assortment to their respective shelves.

My master, the seventh Brewer of Fate, once told me that in truth, the cauldron does not belong to whomever holds our title. It was much the opposite from his perspective. I have never been able to quite understand what he meant, not fully.

 Standing here now, holding a fragment of the literal devil and preparing to infuse it into a child....it finally makes sense.

Unclasping the simple lock holding the lid tight, I can almost feel the fabric of the space around me shudder with recognition of this moment.

Tipping the bottle, an eternity and a second pass as one as the last remnant of Satikisha, the first and true Devil, is devoured by the Hod of Kismet and transformed into to pure and unfiltered influence.

Felidrus is beside me now, even the bowl of snacks forgotten in the youngling's mind as he is pulled into the importance of this event.

Where before the cauldron contained tar, it now settles into an abyss. 

Looking down at the boy beside me, I steel my resolve for what comes next.

"Just...one final ingredient. A drop of blood. Give me your hand," I say gently as I can through a suddenly hoarse throat while I extend my own.

As he does, I feel only a moments hesitation before lifting him. This was always the most disquieting part of the ceremony, but necessary. 

I see the moment he questions what's happening. I see the recognition dawn in his eyes. I watch as his face warps in fear once he is held over the lip of the gurgling liquid. I see his trust in me break as I release him. I bear witness as he is swallowed whole, falling through the surface without so much as a ripple.

Some of the children found it in themselves to forgive me eventually...many have not. Felidrus...would not. The small part of me, the one I had hidden and tucked away, the one that grew to see these children as my own given the circumstances of my position, wept. As it had every time before.

 I often wonder if my own Mentor had the same weakness.

As the gargled screams begin, I silently pray for forgiveness as I settle back and wait for the elixir to infuse itself into Felidrus' mind, body, and soul.

Then, after several minutes of silent contemplation admist a chorus of agony I say aloud, "Ladies of Fate, Luck, and Perseverance, I believe it is time I find a new apprentice, this...I believe shall be my last brewing."

The air hummed around me, a physical force. Then, like a blanket placed over a sleeping child, I feel a weight of reassurance settle across my shoulders.

Felidrus has absorbed enough of the elixir by this point that I can see his hands flailing above him, desperately trying to find purchase on the edge of his prison, but I simply close my eyes and do my best to drown out the horrendous shrieks of utter suffering still emanating from the vat. Both of the present, and days long past.