Page 11 of Elixir of Strife
“Someone’s shopping. These are all samples. They’re picking favorites out of a lineup.”
Turning the corner, Max pursed his lips and nodded. “Looks like you’re right. Check these out.”
More bottles, this time set out on what could have been a display stand or a very fancy cocktail table. Transparent, definitely the right height for either purpose, maybe acrylic or plexiglass. On top of it sat some of the loveliest bottles we’d seen yet, their bodies sculpted like faceted crystal, palaces with delicate towers, like rare and impossible fruit.
“That explains why they bothered filling the bottles. It’s supposed to be a showcase, so the customer sees what they actually look like in use.” I chewed the inside of my cheek irritably. “But still no Aqueous Elixir in sight.”
The essence of purest water, or so Daniel Lyon claimed. Highly coveted, according to Edel Wise, even in the depths of the prime hells. And very effective when used in alchemy, they claimed, or in its even more obvious applications for gardening.
A little bit of this perfect liquid would go a long, long way, a drop added to larger quantities of regular water enough to brew up hundreds of potions, to nourish hundreds of plants. The elixir was difficult and dangerous to make, allegedly, so much so that only a few really existed in the wild at any given time, traded in secret by talented alchemists, by powerful elementals.
Limited edition, really — again, like those perfumes were meant to be over at Atomica. Sorry. Still pretty bitter over the debacle. Still, no sign of the elixir, a swirling, tumultuous liquid, ever turbulent, a whirlpool in a bottle.
But something was happening.
The bottles were shuddering right on their shelves, all along the racks. I took a beat to calm myself, measure my surroundings. This wasn’t an earthquake. The ground wasn’t shaking. The room wasn’t swaying around us. Something was affecting the bottles, and only the bottles.
“We should get out of here,” Max muttered, his hand on my wrist.
I stumbled after him, still staring at the shelves, at the glass phials as they shivered and rattled. “Something tells me we’re too late for that.”
Sometimes I hated being right. Every bottle in the room exploded. Hundreds of them, all at once, almost musical if it wasn’t so deafening.
The ones lining the shelves, those selected for display, even those inside the crates, the sound of their shattering muffled. Shards of broken glass tinkled onto the ground, the air momentarily filled with sprays of misted liquid, puffs of glittering pulverized glass.
It reminded me of Max’s obfuscation spell, these sprinklings of diamond dust. And yet that remembrance did nothing to pacify me. My legs shook as I followed Max unsteadily, something about the senselessness of this destruction unsettling me, though I couldn’t understand why.
This was bad magic. Who would be attacking an entire warehouse full of regular glass bottles? They’d have no reason to, unless they knew that the Aqueous Elixir was among them. But why go full scorched earth? And then I realized why this bizarre nuclear option left this pit of unease in my stomach.
What if someone was trying to frame us?
No time for thoughts, for analysis. We turned a corner back toward the door. Fuck. Straight down an aisle bordered by yet more shelves of bottles on either side, all unbroken.
“Let’s make a run for it,” Max said, tugging on my arm.
I knew it was going to happen, and so did Max, but we had no choice. Nowhere else to run. I took a deep breath, heart racing as I anticipated the crack of glass.
The first bottle shattered. I reached deep into my psyche, pulling on the fibers of the sea dragon’s presence.
“Emanate!”
Bakunawa roared from the depths of my soul, answering my plea with twin walls of water. They rushed from the ground and up to the ceiling like geysers, like a series of broken pipes pouring with such force that they blocked out both the sound and the danger of breaking glass.
We stumbled out onto the docks, darted into the shadows, our clothes soaked in seawater. At least we were safe.
Max panted, eyes huge as he grabbed my shoulders, examined my face. A single streak of blood dripped from a cut on his cheek. Damn it. Some of the glass still got him.
“You’re okay,” he said, hands cold and wet as he ran a thumb along my jaw. “Good. But since when did you know how to conjure water? And with the same spell word, too?”
I answered with a chuckle and a nervous shrug.
“Um. Maybe I’m more versatile than you think?”
6
MAX
“Ouch. Hey, I said ouch.”
