Ramblings of Gold, the Wind, and Rivers of Beautiful Rain | Winston Yu (9)

She sits at the chair of her new desk, covered in dust.

The whole tower sinks in it,

Suffocating her,

Drowning her out in the dry stagnance that grips her heart in a chokehold.

How ironic.

In finally understanding alchemy,

It is no longer magic, the arcane drained out of it.

It is just math and sciences, every miracle that used to shine like a comet in the night sky, Reduced to formulas as dull as stone covered in ice.

In immortality,

Life loses its meaning, the desperate passion bled out of it.

It is a liminal eternity, trapped in this one shallow world,

Every phenomenon plotted out on the graph made by the grooves in her brain.

Surrounded by gold, it feels cheap as wood.

Gold sparkles a bit brighter, bends a bit softer,

But it is only a metal, not much different from lead or iron.

—-----------------------------------

Through stained glass windows, the world outside is merely sections of color dancing around the sunlight. 

This world is hers to perfect, to mold, to make.

In her tower filled with useless things and useless turns, she is free to create useless dreams. In her mind, rusted iron crippled and jaded from the cruel wars of the world finds itself, becoming shining gold.

It’s perfect.

She imagines the greatest tonic, that she could hone her skills to harness poisons and reign them into the ultimate cure.

She’s seen what the royal alchemists can do, how they build and change matter like the wind,

How it flirts with the leaves in autumn, how it freezes the rain and rivers into ice and snow so dry it feels oddly like summer heat.

So she worked tirelessly,

Fought mother Gaia and father Uranus alike.

—-----------------------------------

Blurry nights under the dim lamplight,

She can’t keep this up.

Starving, she scrambles from revelation to disappointment like a pharoah left buried in the sands,

Scraping his burnt preserved

Skin across the dry grains,

Gorging in the poisoned water of 

Beautifully painful cacti.

—-----------------------------------

She doesn’t remember when, but every one of those nights pay off

In the same way that a cave grants a miner his final rest

Within the darkly calming holes

Bored into it like eyes.

She does it.

She “rescues” chipped metals, covering them in a new plate of sheer and shining armor,

But now weeps like Midas,

No river to rinse her possessions clean.

She searched far and wide, turning the deadliest poisons into little remedies,

Now shamed for her meaningless regret,

After all, convenience is the soulmate of man.

But she is man no longer,

She is a god.

Gods understand the beauty in nightshades,

The shine of rust and the necessity of the

Reaper’s cold hands.

After all, rain is the blood of evaporating rivers,

And rivers are veins of fallen rain.

—-----------------------------------

Now the dust teases her, her begs for an end nearly fulfilled,

But pulled away by gusts of Wind from

The open window.

clink. 

A knock at the door.

It’s no one, no thing

Probably, but

She still hopes it’s the devil,

Come to serenade her into the flames.

clink-kk. 

Another.

The devil is not shy, and she is nowhere near senile.

Her three legged chair creaks a sigh of relief, 

Atlas relieved of the sky for a short moment.

The wooden doors look meager and small now,

Nothing like the walls she had to push past to transform the earth when she was a child

And yet, she is filled with a sense of foreboding,

The taste of something almost

Like fear rushing into her,

The most satiating meal she’s had in decades.

—-----------------------------------

“Hello?” calls out a muffled voice behind the door.

She opens them and peers down at 

The small figure of herself.

No, not herself

This one has different hair,

A taller figure.

But strangely, she can’t shake the feeling that

The strangest type of mirror has been planted right in front of her.

“Are you the Alchemist?”

She tips her hat cheesily as if to say

Yes, that would be my title.

The little girl’s eyes light up like little fires,

“Can you please show me?”

The Alchemist’s eyes widen

Just a crack,

Her dust-filled throat coughs out a snarky 

“Do you not have a chemistry teacher?”

She uses the new name for a much more

Sterile, precise arcana.

“I mean magic, not math! I wanna see you do the cool hand stuff, not just press a button!”

“Oh, uh, you know what a button is right?”

The Alchemist lets out a snort at this, before

Guiding the Wind once more, taking

The hand of a dead man and

Dragging it down her spiral stairs.

With it flies the

Gleaming corpses of what was once sparrows and dragonflies,

Mockingjays and butterflies.

In the secluded field circling her tower, 

Runes inscribed deep

Into skin hum with power

For one more show,

The Wind bends to follow her fingers,

Moisture condenses on their tips before

Freezing

Into crystalline ice, clawing deep gashes into

The autumn air,

Lifting leaves into a brief kiss.

Unsure of the extent

To which “chemistry” has been taught,

The old magician decides to show off her finest tricks.

Gathering methane from the surrounding air,

A burst of flame

Joins in the march,

And suddenly with a snap

Every squadron

Comes to a halt,

Pierced through by pure Gold,

Bird and Bug fluttering like

Useless little trinkets

Around and around the army.

The ground quickly

Rises up

Like the maw of a hungry animal

Snapping the curtains shut  and swallowing whole.

Focused on her solo-act,

The performer only hears the applause

After the lights dim.

The girl’s cheers should feel empty, like that of an onlooker watching a dumb party trick.

Instead, they feel genuine,

Tangible, right there 

As real as the

Dying grass they stand on.

The girl seems to have one last reserve.

She asks a question so simple that

The Alchemist feels as if she should have a response ready

Right then and there.

“So, the flashy stuff is cool and all, but what’s your personal favorite?”

She stops.

The drip-drops of sudden rain

Accompany her mind

On the train of thought.

Eventually, once

The rain has grown,

Her dusted robes are washed clean by the downpour,

The tower freed of its grime.

She presses her hand to the now sopping ground,

A god staining its perfect sheen

With the messiness of existence.

The muck grinds its way into the cracks of her hands,

And the cool feeling is like

A soak in a river after a long journey.

She has not used this scale of precision in a long while,

Not even when

She bled out poisons so that

Mankind would never have to do the same.

The grass raises

On edge

Petrified,

Aurum overtakes its dried-out veins,

And flowers of pure gold grow out of their stems.

For the first time in

Many long years,

She feels a sense of beauty within her exploits.

But the grass is still dead,

Funeral interrupted by a flashy display.

Out of nowhere, a river forms, grows, and

Feeds the starved statues with a taste of life.

The Alchemist looks up, awe-struck.

Standing where cheap imitations once created impurities in the earth,

Flora and grass waves in the Wind like a dream,

Rain beating down their petals and leaves in such a perfect way,

Too good to be true.

The girl suddenly seems oddly understanding for her age,

Looking down at the Alchemist with a soft smirk,

And the torches in the Alchemist’s retinas are

Finally lit once more.

Amazed,

All she can manage to whisper is a small, weak

“Can you please show me?”