Alchemy has a reputation for grand gestures. A pinch of grave-moss, a vial of moon-condensed dew, a hair from something that used to be a person, all tipped into a vessel (usually an ornate iron cauldron) at once with great ceremony, to the delight of the audience or client. I want to be very clear with you: this is not alchemy. This is theatre, and theatre does not require you to have functioning eyebrows or both your eyes left in your head after the dust settles.
Every reagent you will work with in this course has a nature. A temperament, if you like the poetic word for it, though I prefer tolerance. Wolfsbane ash wants heat, but slowly, and in the presence of something binding, or it does not steep, it seizes. Quicksilver is patient with almost everything except itself. Two measures of it in the same vessel will fight for dominance rather than combine, and the vessel, and the hands holding it, generally lose that argument. You are not required to memorise every tolerance in the first month. You are required to accept, as an article of faith until you can verify it yourself, that they exist, and that ignoring them is not boldness. It is arithmetic you have chosen not to do.
There are three guiding questions you should ask yourself before anything touches your mixing bowl. Write these down, underline them if you must, tattoo them on your skin if you cannot remember them.
- What does this reagent want to react with, and in what order? Sequence is not a suggestion. Half of you will be tempted to treat a recipe like a shopping list, tossed in together because it is faster. It is faster. It is also how we no longer have an East Wing.
- How much, precisely, and why that amount? "A bit more couldn't hurt" is the last sentence most aspiring potion makers will utter before they met their god. I would highly recommend you worship one of the nicer ones that are sympathetic to clumsiness. A reagent that behaves at one measure may not behave at three. This is not a linear art. Do not treat it as one.
- What is your escape, if this goes wrong anyway? Every working bench in this facility has a water trough, a smothering cloth, and a door you can reach in five steps. Four if you're particularly fast. I will ask you to locate all three before I let you light a burner. This is not paranoia. This is the entire reason our particular school of knowledge has survived long enough to have someone teach it.
I want to be clear that I am not asking you to be timid. Alchemy rewards curiosity more than almost any other discipline, and I would rather teach a room of the reckless than a room of the incurious. The reckless, at least, can be taught caution. What I am asking is that your experimentation be deliberate. Change one variable at a time. Record what you changed. Small batches before large ones. A thimble of a new combination will tell you everything a cauldron full would, at a fraction of the risk.
The reagents do not care how confident you feel. They only care what you actually put in the vessel, in what order, and in what amount. Respect the proportion, and the discipline will, eventually, respect you back.
- Lecture Notes On the Discipline of Reagent Craft for First-Year Alchemical Theory by Professor Viktoria Vole
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