“You have a report for me.” The words flowed out smoothly. It was not a question.
Factor Kael spoke without looking up from his experiment, his voice devoid of any inflection that might suggest he cared about the answer.
Lorc’s throat was a desert. He swallowed, a dry click that brought no relief.
“Yes, my lord. At the western shore… we believe we encountered an alchemist.”
The change was instantaneous. Kael’s head snapped up, his pale, watery grey eyes fixing on Lorc with an intensity that felt like a physical weight pressing the air from the room.
“Oh, you believe so?”
Lorc swallowed again. He could hear the razor-thin edge of the threat beneath the words. If his report was a hoax, there was no ‘then.’ There was only a swift, unceremonious end.
“I do, sir,” he managed, his voice tight.
“An Alchemist. Here.”
Kael’s tone was still quiet, but the flatness was gone, replaced by a sharp, probing interest.
“Which Archonate? What is his purpose?”
“That’s just it, sir,” Finn stammered, finding a shred of courage in his partner’s paralysis. “No robes. No sigils. He looked like a castaway. A boy. Young, thin. Dressed in rags.”
“But we saw him perform a Great Work,” Lorc interjected, his voice dropping to a fearful whisper.
Kael’s gaze shifted between them. He leaned forward, the only command he gave a single, softly spoken word that hung in the silence.
“Speak.”
“H-he turned our prod into rust-dust. By touch. Just… by touch.”
A profound silence thickened the air, broken only by the faint hum of the nearby power coils.
“You are certain of this?” Kael’s voice was a blade of ice.
“Y-yes, Factor,” Lorc confirmed, the memory of those calm, unnerving eyes in a young face sending a fresh chill through him. “No reagents. No incantation. He only laid a hand on it, and… it dissolved.”
Kael's mind, honed by decades of Chrysic doctrine, a philosophy of absolute control, meticulous process, and a profound, institutional paranoia of the anomalous, raced through the terrifying implications.
A disguised alchemist. A covert probe from a rival order.
He ticked the possibilities off like a grim ledger, his expression darkening with each one.
The Spagyrics, field-testing a new, flesh-triggered corrosive?
The Physis, assessing the material stability of Residuum’s defenses for a targeted, geological sabotage?
But what is the objective? The question was a cold pit in his gut.
Infiltration?
A demonstration of power?
The first stroke of a silent war?
Theorizing would bring about nothing.
The question was would he inform the master about this incident or not.
He made up his mind rather quickly. At the end he was just an acolyte in charge of the Residuum.
It was far below his station or authority to meddle in the dealings of a true Alchemist.
Soon.
His grey eyes shone with conviction.
His gaze fell upon a section of the chamber wall. There, the network of glowing copper veins converged into a dense, pulsing comms-sigil, the primary nexus for all secure transmissions in and out of Residuum.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
He pressed his palm firmly against it. The metal flared with a sudden, actinic light, and a soft, clear chime resonated through the room.
The air in the room shivered, warping like a mirage over a crucible.
It coalesced, not with a sound, but with a sudden pressure change that made the ears pop, resolving into the gaunt figure of a man clad in robes of true gold.
His hood cast his features in deep shadow, from which gleamed the unsettling, featureless surface of a polished brass mask.
Only two narrow slits broke its perfect symmetry, revealing nothing of the consciousness behind them.
Yet it was his hands that took the spotlight, despite being covered in metallic gloves there was an eerie orange glow that captivated one's eyes.
The Factor, Kael gaze settled on them, a hint of longing flashing through, just as quickly lowering his head.
Lorc and Finn did not think.
A lifetime of Instinct, hammered into them took over. They dropped as one, pressing their foreheads to the cold stone.
They stood in the presence of a god.
A true Chrysic Alchemist.
The projected figure ignored them completely.
His gaze descending on somewhere else, someone else.
The ground creaked as Kael stuffed the growing pressure of the alchemist gaze. He could tell he was annoyed at the sudden disturbance.
In the next second, as if to prove his point, the figure spoke.
“You have interrupted a sublimation, Kael.” The Alchemist’s voice was the sound of a steel file drawn slowly over bone, dry, rasping, and utterly devoid of patience.
Kael bowed, his posture a perfect study in feigned submission. “My most profound apologies, Master. The interruption is unforgivable, but the matter is… unprecedented.”
A moment of tense silence hung in the air.
“Speak”
He chose his next words with precision. “An entity, presenting as one of your brethren as we believe, has appeared on the island, possibly headed towards the Residuum as we speak.” he paused, looking for any change but found none. He continued.
“He demonstrated a great work on a scavenger’s prod. I believe he may be here to conduct an assessment.”
The Alchemist went silent for a while, it was unknown what he was thinking but when he came to, only two words left his mouth. “Describe ‘It’.”
“Huh?” The scavenger found themselves confused by his words, thankfully Kael was smart enough to know what he implied.
“A boy, Master. Dressed in the rags of a castaway. I believe he commands a principle. My men are simple, but their certainty is absolute.”
“A Grand work manifested so overtly?” the Alchemist whispered, the dry rustle of his voice now sharp with something colder than curiosity
The brass mask turned, its dark slits seeming to drink the light from the room. “Where was ‘It’ sighted?”
“The western shore. He may be probing our defenses.”
“No.” The Alchemist’s voice was final, cold even. “If ‘It’ is what you suspect, the land itself will not hold ‘It’.
‘It’ will be drawn inward. To the main resources.” No words were spoken and Kael knew what he meant.
The gaze fixed on Kael with absolute command. “Your Residuum is now under full quarantine. No one enters. No one leaves. Mobilize every Enforcer, guard your reserves. Though I very much doubt you can't mount any resistance against ‘It’.”
For the first time, the Alchemist’s gaze seemed to truly see Kael, scanning him with an intensity that felt like being disassembled.
“You are almost ready for the Pilgrimage.” The words were a statement, not a question.
Kael gave a single, sharp nod, his heart hammering against his chest. This was the recognition he had craved for a decade.
“Good… Do nothing against It.”
A deliberate, weighted pause filled the air, thick with unspoken consequence.
“Do you comprehend your instruction, Factor?” The Alchemist’s voice was flat, yet it carried the finality of a closing vault door.
The latter nodded in response.
“Good. Any interference could be the spark that ignites a war we are not prepared to fight,”
“The Wandering Crucible is a year out,” the figure intoned, its form beginning to waver like heat haze.
“I will come to see if It can be parlayed with. Do not fail this task, Factor.”
With that, the projection collapsed into a shower of dying light, and the hologram ended with an abrupt, silent snap.
Silence rushed back into the chamber, thick and smothering. The two scavengers on the floor trembled, their earlier fear now magnified into pure dread.
Lorc, in particular, looked as if he might be sick.
Twice in one day.
He couldn’t decide if they had been blessed with an impossible audience or cursed with a lethal secret.
No. There was no question.
They were definitely cursed.
—
Close the gates
The command from the Factor was a whip-crack, rippling through Residuum’s command spires and sending the entire settlement into a state of alert.
The residents were used to such drills, periodic lockdowns were a fact of life, a small price for safety in a hostile land.
But this was unscheduled. There had been no tremors, no horde warning, no scheduled purge. This was different.
Tongues began to wag almost immediately, weaving speculative fictions in the lower corridors.
BAM
The heavy gates of the Residuum slammed home on brass hinges, sealing the residents inside with the stink of their own panic.
Such concerns would never reach the sanctum.
The Enforcers walked in pairs, marching across the Residuum. Their mere presence swiftly putting a swift end to any unrest.
In the quiet, Factor Kael let silence pool like acid, scouring the last echoes of the commotion from the polished walls.
The two scavengers were already carried away by the Enforcers.
He caught his own reflection in the obsidian surface of his desk,
His pale grey eyes were distant, seeing not the room with its pulsating copper veins and softly chiming pressure gauges, but a problem.
A problem that had just landed on shore. Yet the Master’s command was absolute.
Do nothing against ‘It’.
The order was no different from locking oneself in a cage while a wolf roamed the edges.
Something felt wrong.
And why did the master keep referring to the Alchemist as it.
He wasn't sure, but now he thought back to it, it felt oddly suspicious.
Was he mistaken?
He replayed the information once more, this time devoid of fear.
After all, fear was an illogical response, a failure of comprehension, and comprehension was an initiate's singular purpose.
To learn the secrets and inner workings of the world.
He was not an Alchemist himself, not yet. He had not ingested the Alkahest, he had not felt his flesh and ego burn away as he passed through the Ash Gate.
He breathed out.
Before the distinction of a Factor of the Residuum, he was an initiate first and foremost, with knowledge earned through years of grueling Chrysic study in the new world before shipped off to this hellscape.
All for the glory of the Chrysic Archonate.
He endured years marked by the constant, deep-bone vibration of the earth-piston and the sting of acidic fumes that still sometimes haunted his dreams was to see the world as it truly was
A vast, interlocking system of equations.
Where others saw a rock, an initiate saw stability and potential energy. Where others saw an enemy, they saw a set of capabilities to be catalogued and dissected.
Their mind was a crucible for logic.
The Scavengers report
The figure, a boy dressed in ragged.
The shipwreck.
The undeniable act of a great work.
There was something quite fascinating about watching a true Alchemist perform a great work
It wasn't brute force, it was an elegant, brutal persuasion. A single, unanswerable argument made to the material's essential nature.
Ah.. to have witnessed a Great work.
he thought, a pang of pure, professional yearning cutting through the moment tension.
For a moment, the thought that the scavengers might be lying did not even occur to him.
It wasn’t a possibility he entertained.
If Alchemists were gods, then an initiate like himself would be considered a demigod.
Lying to an initiate. They weren't bold enough.
Wait… the shipwreck.
His pale grey eyes sharpened, all distraction burned away by a sudden, crystalline clarity.
How had he missed it?
A shipwreck meant a vessel. A vessel meant a crew. A crew meant possible survivors.
Survivors that might possibly be inside the Residuum at this moment.
His gaze brightened.
“Get me a list of all the entries into the Residuum in the past 72 hours.”
His voice boomed across the sanctum.
