Alchemists rarely tested their own creations.
Mostly because the good ones lived longer that way.
Elias Varrow considered himself a good alchemist.
Which was exactly why he was currently staring at a bubbling green potion and wondering if drinking it would kill him. He had been staring at it for approximately twenty-three minutes. He knew because the clock on the wall ticked very loudly, and he had counted every second of his own cowardice with perfect clarity.
"Statistically speaking," he muttered, adjusting his cracked spectacles, "this should work."
The liquid glowed faintly inside the flask. A pale, pulsing green, like something alive and faintly annoyed about it.
Universal Antidote Prototype #47.
Three years of work. Forty-six failures before it. Ingredients that had cost him more money than he cared to admit, sourced from places he cared even less to remember. The theory was sound. The reagent balance was sound. The binding agent — a stabilized extract of moonveil root suspended in distilled iron water — was exceptionally sound.
If it worked, it could neutralize almost any poison in existence.
If it didn't…
Elias glanced at the row of small cages lining the wall. Twelve of them. Neat little wire boxes, each one labeled with a date and a prototype number in his cramped, precise handwriting.
The test mice inside them were all very dead.
Some had gone quickly. Others had taken an educational amount of time. Prototype #31 had produced results that Elias still occasionally saw when he closed his eyes, and he had written do not repeat in the margin of that page with such force that he'd torn the parchment.
"…well," he said quietly, "progress requires sacrifice."
He looked at the mice. The mice ran away.
He looked back at the flask.
It smelled almost pleasant. Crushed mint, clean and bright — and underneath that, something else. Something that sat at the back of the throat like a question you weren't sure you wanted answered.
He pulled out his research journal, uncapped his pen, and wrote: Prototype #47 — self-administered field test. If this entry is incomplete, I was likely killed.
He considered that for a moment.
Added: The mice looked peaceful. I hope.
Then he lifted the flask.
"One sip."
He drank it.
For a moment, nothing happened. The lab was very quiet. The clock ticked. A mouse shifted in its cage. Elias stood with the empty flask in his hand and thought: huh. Just that. Huh.
Then his entire body felt like someone had poured fire into his veins.
He slammed the flask onto the table and grabbed the edge of the desk as pain ripped through him, white-hot and everywhere at once, crawling under his skin like it was looking for a way out.
"Ah—!"
The world spun. His heart hammered like a war drum that had also caught fire. His vision went sideways, the workshop tilting and blurring into a smear of brown wood and amber glass and the distant, mocking green of the remaining potions on the shelf.
Poison.
He had definitely poisoned himself.
Which was strange. Because this was supposed to be a cure.
He staggered toward the sink, knocking over three bottles and a mortar, one knee hitting the corner of the workbench hard enough that he'd feel it for a week — assuming he survived the next thirty seconds to have a week. His hands scrabbled at the basin's edge. His spectacles slid down his nose.
"Note to self," he wheezed, breath coming in short, burning pulls, "Prototype forty-eight… needs adjustments."
Significant adjustments.
Fundamental-rethink the entire binding agent adjustments.
The pain peaked — a sharp, crystalline moment where every nerve in his body seemed to decide simultaneously that it had to burst — and then, without warning:
It stopped.
Just like that. Between one heartbeat and the next. Gone.
Elias stood over the sink, sweat cooling on the back of his neck, breathing like a man who had briefly visited somewhere he wasn't supposed to go and had been firmly turned around at the door. He waited. He counted his own breaths. Ten. Twenty.
Nothing exploded.
No organs liquefied.
His skin was still attached.
"…Did it work?"
He poked his arm. It poked back, in the passive, indifferent way arms always did.
Encouraged — or at least confused, which was close enough — he crossed back to the cages and reached in to pick up one of the surviving mice. It was small and brown and looked deeply unimpressed with everything about this situation.
"Scientific verification time," Elias said.
The mouse squeaked angrily.
He held it. Waited. Watched its small sides heaving with small breaths.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Twenty.
The mouse went rigid.
Then it fell over in his palm.
Dead.
Elias frowned at it. Poked it gently with one finger. Poked it again.
Still dead.
He set it down slowly on the workbench and stared at it. His brain, the part of him that had spent three years cataloguing failure in precise and merciless detail, began producing a hypothesis. A horrible one. A hypothesis he very much did not want to be correct.
He looked at his hand.
He looked at the mouse.
He looked at his hand again.
"Oh no," he whispered.
BANG BANG BANG.
Elias nearly dropped the dead mouse.
The knock was enormous, cheerful, and completely without mercy. The kind of knock that had never once worried about what might be on the other side of a door, because it had never needed to.
"Master Elias! Are you open?"
He knew that voice.
Everybody knew that voice.
He crossed to the door on legs that had not entirely decided to cooperate and cracked it open.
Standing in the afternoon light, golden armor gleaming like it had been specifically polished to make the sun feel inadequate, was the last person Elias wanted to see while holding a theory about his own hands being lethal.
Sir Alric the Radiant. Hero of the Kingdom. Chosen Champion of the Valenfall Prophecy. Slayer of the Wyvern of Thornmoor, the Undead Siege of Calder's Pass, and a minor demon general whose name the bards kept mispronouncing.
He smiled, and it was the kind of smile that made people in crowds point and whisper to each other. Not because it was false — it wasn't false, which was somehow the most disarming thing about it — but because it radiated something. Warmth. Certainty. The specific energy of a man who had never once doubted that things would, fundamentally, be alright.
"Elias!" he said. "Good timing!"
Elias blinked. "Sir Alric?"
Alric stepped inside without waiting. He filled the workshop in a way that had nothing to do with his height — though he was tall, broad-shouldered, unreasonably proportioned — and everything to do with the sheer amount of presence he carried. The clutter of the lab seemed to rearrange itself slightly in deference. The potions on the shelf looked more organized than they had thirty seconds ago.
"I need supplies for the Demon King expedition," he said, scanning the shelves with the easy familiarity of a man who had been in enough campaign preparations to know what he was looking at. "Healing potions, stamina tonics, the usual. Enough for six, maybe eight days on the road before we can resupply at the eastern garrison."
Elias had not moved from the doorway.
Right. The expedition. The campaign everyone in the capital had been talking about for two months — the final push, they were calling it. Alric and his legendary party, departing in three days to end the Demon King's reign and fulfill the prophecy that had been following the hero around since birth. The bards had already written seventeen songs about it. Elias had counted, because he had been counting things lately instead of sleeping.
"You…came here personally?" Elias managed.
"Of course!" Alric looked at him with mild surprise, like any other answer would have been strange. "You make the best potions in the capital. I'm not going into the Demon King's fortress with anything less than the best." He grinned. "Besides, always good to support local craftsmen."
He crossed the room toward Elias and clapped him on the shoulder.
A firm, friendly, completely well-intentioned clap. The kind of greeting Alric probably gave everyone. Warm. Real. Human contact offered without hesitation or calculation, because that was simply the kind of man he was.
And Elias felt it — the exact moment it happened. Not in his shoulder. In the air around his skin. Something passing outward, quick and quiet as breath.
"Wait—" Elias started.
Alric blinked. "Hmm?"
Elias watched the hero's face. Watched the easy smile hold for three seconds, four, and then flicker at the edges. Something confused was moving behind those bright eyes.
"That's strange," Alric said.
"What is?" Elias heard himself ask. His voice came from very far away.
"My arm." Alric flexed his hand, frowning at it with the mild annoyance of a man dealing with a muscle cramp mid-breakfast. "Feels numb. Probably just fatigue from—"
He stopped talking.
His gauntlet hit the floor.
Just — fell. His hand went slack and the gauntlet struck the wood with a sound like a bell, loud in the sudden silence of the workshop.
The color left Alric's face so fast it was like watching a candle go out. His legs went next, that easy, solid stance crumpling all at once, and Elias lunged forward without thinking — hands out, instinct overriding the screaming, horrible logic of the last thirty seconds — but he wasn't fast enough, and the Hero of the Kingdom hit the floor hard.
Elias dropped to his knees beside him. His hands were shaking.
"Sir Alric." His voice cracked on the second word. "Sir Alric, look at me."
No response. Alric's eyes were half-open, staring at the ceiling with the unfocused blankness of a man whose thoughts had suddenly gone somewhere else entirely.
"Hey." Elias grabbed his shoulder — then recoiled, horror flooding through him, because he could feel it, whatever the curse was, whatever it had made him into, sitting in his palms like a held breath — and he let go, pressed his fingers instead to Alric's jaw, his neck, searching desperately for a pulse. "Come on. Come on. Open your eyes, Sir Alric, please—"
He found the pulse point and pressed two fingers there and waited.
Nothing.
He shifted his fingers, adjusted, tried again.
Still nothing.
"No." The word fell out of him, flat and small. "No, no, no—" He pressed harder, knowing even as he did it that it wouldn't change anything, that the body lying beneath his hands was entirely and perfectly still, that he had checked his own prototype on a mouse not ten minutes ago and he knew, he knew exactly what this looked like. "Please. Please wake up, you can't — you have to wake up—"
But Alric the Radiant, Hero of Valenfall, chosen champion of prophecy, the man who was supposed to save the world in three days, did not wake up.
He was simply gone.
And Elias knelt on the floor of his cluttered, ink-smelling, alchemist's workshop, with his hands hovering over a body he had killed without meaning to, and the silence pressed in from every direction at once.
Slowly, he sat back.
"I may have made a mistake," he whispered.
Outside, the city bells began to ring.
Three sharp chimes, carrying over the rooftops of the capital — the palace signal, used whenever the Hero departed the city gates. Someone had spotted the golden armor moving through the merchant district. Someone had dutifully reported it. The bells were ringing to honor him, the way they always did.
Elias stared at the floor.
Then at his hands.
Then back at the floor.
"Oh," he said, very softly.
"I'm going to be executed."
Because the Hero had just died.