Auric

A purchase is made. Gold, and blood, both. What is left when everything is already won?

AURIC

AURIC

The sky was a golden arch, and it seemed to Nezue that it might rain gold. He savoured the thought, his head bent low and meek within shadowy silk: what might that be like? Would the weight of that heavy rain dislodge the whole world?

Perhaps it would.

The crowds were sombre. They often were, when subjected to the whims of the Merchant King and his displays. His performances. The man was mercurial and would often surprise his subjects with grandiosity and delight, but also cruelty. Sometimes the hot streets of Palermo ran with blood, but more often they ran with the power of coin.

For the King had the power of alchemy.

That is why the people assembled, despite their trepidation, again and again. Blood was fear, yes, but coin – and the avaricious delight of even more coin - was everything.

Nezue surveyed them – the thronging, wary crowds – as they surveyed him back. They did not know what part Nezue would play in this latest delight, though they likely suspected that he was an alchemist.

He surveyed them and he judged, though his heart felt hollow. Where had it all gone wrong?

That golden arch was setting behind the Teatro Massimo, casting its columns and white pediment in a more august and richer colour: as if blood and gold were mixing, both. Perhaps they were indistinguishable now.

That was rather the point, wasn’t it?

“It is well known that our great lands,” the King began, his voice an unearthly rumble, “owe their glory to the judicious application of that strange and magnificent tool known as alchemy.” The rumbling effect of the man’s voice, cast wide over the assembled masses, was known to Nezue: it was the application of his own device, which Nezue had painstakingly wrought from air and earth. The celestial voice, he had once described it to the King. Now it, too, seemed hollow.

Nezue dared to peek further from his silk hood. A great marble dais had been established at the head of the piazza, solely for this purpose. For this solitary display.

Nezue’s magnum opus.

The man who was King, garbed in the finest purple woven from the breath of elements beyond, continued in his heavenly rumble. “And today’s display shall serve as a reminder. Not just of the power of that great tool, but how judicious we – of the Merchant Kingdom – have been in its use.” Even at this mid-distance, and with the shimmer of heat still lingering in the air, Nezue could see the man’s smirk. His power was absolute. “It is no secret that we here in Sicilia – the heart of the Merchant Kingdom – hold sway over that great power. An idea arose – to demonstrate to you their power all at once, in concert. So that you may watch and revel as they do what was once thought impossible – to create something from nothing.”

The crowds gaped and a murmuration rippled throughout. Now that the tone was set, it was possible to respond to it in turn. Several women draped in finery clutched their pearls with affected histrionics. Nezue wondered how many of those pearls had ever touched a drop of water, and how many had been summoned – from nothing – by him, and his cadre of alchemists.

From nothing.

It was not quite true, was it?

Everything had a price. Perhaps not directly, but somewhere along the way.

He surveyed the crowds once more, even as he rubbed with his left hand the stump of his right. The skin there was scarred and leathery. He had restored it, once, but it had not felt the same. It had not been him: it had been other. And the pain had always remained, nonetheless. Memories like that, of the brutality of the King, could never be erased, even with alchemy. So he had excised, bloodily once more, the intruding, phantom-like hand – which had never really been his.

The crowds focused on him and his cadre as they sat prostrate on the hot grass. An old fig’s nearby shadow did not extend to him, though its coolness would have been welcome. Nezue found himself somewhat dizzied by the colours of the garb of the assembled throngs: silks and cotton, and other materials that had been summoned but the King had not yet seen fit to name. The newer buildings away from the historic piazza, borne of exotic alchemic crystal, screamed their light, eclipsing even the natural beauty of the Sun itself.

He wondered how many of these people still owned slaves.

He wondered how fat they grew from their honey and wine and bloody meat.

He wondered whether they knew fear at all, anymore, now that they had everything.

The Whisperer sat to Nezue’s left. The man had not spoken in many years, to Nezue’s knowledge: only seething a low and endless rasp. More brutality.

The Parthian rested to his right, her eyes closed. Though she donned the same dark silk as he, her distorted spine was evident even beneath. Her eyes were closed and her breathing shallow. She had been plucked here, and her name removed from her; she could create anything the King desired, but she could have no identity.

But it would all end. Perhaps in golden rain.

It would end in a magnum opus.

“My alchemists will demonstrate their power. As you watch, remember who it is that allowed you to have everything you ever wanted.” The King’s rumbled trailed off; the man satisfied at his own glittering hubris.

There could have been no more fitting epitaph.

And so, it was Nezue’s time to begin.

The task was simple. To plate the grass in gold, and to allow the attending population to sigh at the grandeur of it all.

A simple thing, perhaps. Nezue had no tinctures, or admixture. But raw alchemy did not require this. And with several alchemists together…?

Broken alchemists. Tired of the price that they had paid, unwilling.

Nezue placed his stump to the grass, feeling its scratch. It had to be the stump first: that felt right.

He felt the impurity of the grass, of the beating breath in each blade. More importantly, feeling its connection to everything. To everyone.

That was the secret of alchemy. Perhaps it was the secret of life, if there ever was one. They said that no man was an island, but the truth was more than that: islands were an illusion. All life – all matter – was a droplet in a singular ocean. Transmutation was naught more than rearranging where those droplets surged within the greater whole.

The Whisperer and the Parthian touched the ground, as well. They felt the connection.

They felt the purr of the gold lying within everything. And was gold not everything that they had ever wanted, all along?

Nezue felt his mind be absorbed by those of his fellows, as he absorbed them both in turn. He felt the life of the grass not expire, but become something else between heartbeats. It became hard and smooth and forever.

The crowds gasped and clapped furiously.

That hardness and smoothness continued to flow, like syrup. Like forever syrup.

The fig tree was golden, as though it had been itself subsumed by the golden evening light.

A worried muttering emerged from the crowds, but Nezue paid it no mind. He was no longer there: not really.

A river of gold-shadow splashed across the streets and pavements.

It was only when the first skin was touched that the screams began. The gold grasped the unwitting observer’s ankle, a precious manacle holding her.

Forever.

The screams continued, and sped along the streets, and roads, and the country. The screams travelled fast.

But the gold travelled faster.

Nezue’s mind hovered in the alchemical soup of air, wind, fire, and water. And blood, and gold. He did not know when the King was taken. It did not matter, for the King was just a droplet – the same as everything else.

It would take the three of them last, but only once it had encased everyone and everything in its auric embrace.

This is what they had wanted above all else. This was, in many ways, not a price. It was a purchase.

--

Nezue did not know how long it had been. Even the unified fingers of alchemy could only travel so fast. And yet something felt complete. Felt smooth, and dense. The world felt silent, and free.

No birds called.

The winds that once rushed now echoed across strange golden substrates.

Finally, Nezue allowed himself to drift away. He wondered if his thoughts would remain his own, within the golden world that he had created, or if they would become as droplets into the ocean.

The clouds in the firmament were the last to turn, as though the new gold order was a scintillating ocean filling up from the bottom. The last movement on Earth was the hard fall of golden water across golden buildings. Though none were left to hear it, it was indistinguishable from the sound of tinkling coins.