Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99201 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 496(@200wpm)___ 397(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Ire, though, is still a mystery to me. How did we hook up with this guy? Why does he stick around? He’s the only pegásius I’ve ever known personally, so I don’t have enough information to figure it out. All I know is that he’s special. They didn’t make many of his kind. The pegási have no human in them at all—they were made from the crossing of raptors, horses, and a pinch of rhino. Animal crossings like that were common in the decades and centuries leading up to this time here in Glory Rome. It was how the alchemists cut their teeth on the genetic code, so to speak.
You can make lots of mistakes genetically engineering animals before people put a stop to it. But do that with humans and feathers get ruffled real quick. There needed to be justifiable results. Any mistakes needed to be recorded and explained before a committee.
Especially after what happened with us.
The whole god project was both a grand success and a splendid failure.
That was the whole point of the Glory War.
Gods on the loose.
It’s a relief to get back to the inn. Callistina and I both let a breath of air as soon as we enter our room. She was tense the whole ride, her fingertips gripping the muscles of my waist as we swayed to the rhythm of the beast below us.
“OK,” she says, flopping down on the divan couch and looking way too much like a lazy lioness when a beam of sunshine flashes across her face, forcing her to close her eyes as she repositions to find a shadow. She wants to sleep, I can tell. “Now what?”
“You start the potion, I’ll write the spelling.”
She sits up a little, blinking her eyes like she’s trying to stay awake. “It’s been so long. Perhaps I should think about it for a while?”
“You’ll be fine. It’s not a hard spell.” I take the saddlebags and place them on the low table in front of the couch where Callistina is sitting. Then remove the book, the wooden box with the bottle in it, and the little paper bag with our magiceuticals. I sit down next to her and open the book, showing her the recipe.
She leans forward, sighing again. Like this day has exhausted her. She reads the recipe and looks at me. “What happened to this page?”
I feign ignorance. “What page?”
“This one.” She taps the page opposite the recipe. “It’s been ripped. Look.”
“Well, so it has. But it doesn’t matter. This is the page we need.” I tap the page with the recipe.
“But what if it was a spelling that went with the recipe?”
“Even so, we need a new spelling. A custom one. Not some generic bunch of words meant for the masses. I’ll write a new one.”
Satisfied, Callistina looks at the recipe. “Seems pretty simple.”
“I think the magic is mostly in the celestial décima.”
“What is that, anyway?”
“It’s a ten-line poem with a very specific rhyming structure.”
“Well, you better not mess it up. We’re opening doors in space and time using three very powerful ingredients.”
“Seven, actually.”
“What are you talking about? It’s only three. Acetic acid, sharptongue, and goldberry.”
“You forgot the bottle. You. Me. And the poem.”
“Oh.” She smiles, then chuckles a little. “Right. I’m tired.”
I place my hand on her leg and give it a squeeze. “We can rest when we get home. I promise. We’ll just go back into Savage Falls and have a good think about what happened here and what we’d like to do next.”
I was thinking about the next move all the way back from the Sphere Market and this really is the best course of action. I know Callistina is gonna put up a fight, since the whole point of walking through the door in the first place was to put that place behind us.
But she doesn’t object. She actually agrees. “Yeah. I think that’s a really good idea.”
And this surprises me. “What changed? I mean, just a few hours ago you loved it here and wanted to stay.”
“Nothing’s changed,” she insists. “It’s just… I need to gather my thoughts. That tern-girl in the bottle shop?”
“What about her?”
“I think she’s where we started. The royal beasts, I mean. It’s just so weird to think that all the magic we use is just…”
“Technology and science,” I finish for her.
“Yeah. It’s not very romantic.”
She has no idea just how unromantic it all is. She came from the House of Fire, after all, a place that reeks of ceremony, and pageantry, and tradition. Books handwritten in real ink, not manuals printed up on a machine running off the spark of ether. Glass bottles were not purchased in a market, but blown by the spellcaster’s own mouth. And herbs were carefully grown with intention.
That’s magic. Real magic that comes from the alchemist’s own soul and it’s all very romantic.