When Micah was twelve, he asked his father something about alchemy.

“Dad, what are fire potions made of?”

It was Sunday morning and his father was reading a magazine, a thin type of book, in the sitting room while he and his mother swapped out the flower boxes perched outside of their windows. It was close to Autumn, after all, and these flowers apparently weren’t the right decorations for that time of year, or so his mom said.

As always, Micah thought of alchemy while they worked. He’d found a few new successes in the last few months, but he was still a little bummed out that he hadn’t made a fire potion work the first time around, and it hadn’t even worked the second time either. It was especially annoying since the liquid was ubiquitous in the city. From stove to lighters, to street lamps, it was like alchemists had nothing better to do than brew the stuff. So why couldn’t he figure out how it worked?

And so he asked the question casually, feigning all the curiosity with the fading enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old. Inside, the truth showed by his thumping heart.

“Ha, good question,” his father simply said and turned a page in his magazine. He didn't even look up.

“Wait, you don’t know?” Micah asked. He felt cheated.

“I don’t know everything, son. They use some kind of chemicals, I’m sure.”

“Why do you ask, dear?” his mother said behind him, and Micah back peddled his apparent interest a little.

“Oh, you know ... It’s just that everyone uses it for everything, the lights, the stoves, Mr. and Mrs. Chester’s new room heaters, so I was wondering how it’s made ... ”

He shrugged for good measure, hoping that would keep the conversation casual. Micah still remembered the last time he’d asked his parents something like this, about how plants grew, and they invited a friend of theirs, an [Agery-something] or other, over to explain it to him.

For hours on end.

The man wouldn’t stop talking about it. It was like school on the weekend. Sure, it had helped with his alchemy a little—he still remembered the way the last set of flower boxes had overflowed because of his fertilizer potion—and yeah, it was boring and awkward, but that wasn’t even the problem.

The problem was, his parents would jump on any apparent interests Micah showed nowadays and try to support it, hoping it would lead to a good Path for him. Micah thought it might have something to do with how his elder sister, Prisha, and how she hadn’t had her Path by the time she started attending school full-time. They were acting all weird about her nowadays. Either way, Micah couldn’t let them know he had discovered his already.

“It depends on the type of fire potion,” his mother said suddenly. She was busy brushing wet soil off the newly planted flowers. A breeze brought their scent into the room, and it smelt surprisingly nice.

Micah made a mental note to see if he could find them outside of the city the next time he went foraging, for his next batch of perfume potion. But for now, he gave his mother his full attention since she obviously knew more than his father.

“Alchemists make some fire potions with chemicals they refine themselves like your father said. I think they use things like wood and coal, water or oil mainly. Olive oil, maybe? I don’t know how they do it, though,” she finished lamely. “I assume they have some kind of special Skills from their Class, and equipment, too.”

“So they don’t use anything from the Tower?” he asked. That was important. There was no way Micah would be able to mimic something from the Tower with normal ingredients, like sticks and flowers, after all.

Neither of this parents answered though. His mother was busy pushing the flowers around inside their boxes until they looked just right. His father turned a page in his magazine. Hadn’t they heard him?

“Mom?” he asked.

“Hmm?” she glanced at him. “Oh, it’s fine. I can do the rest, sweetie. Why don’t you go wash up and we’ll make lunch?”

“Uhm, sure,” Micah said, frowning. Wasn’t it a bit early for that?

He went to do as he was told and mulled the conversation over with a frown. It hadn’t really been helpful, to be honest, but it did reassure some of his own suspicions. In his room, he pulled out the journal his father had given him for his twelfth birthday and went over his notes from last time.

This was Micah’s third time trying to make a fire potion, and his twenty-fourth attempt. He wanted to get it right because no matter what else he tried, he always came back to the idea of it. Fire. He couldn’t help it. There was something mesmerizing about the way it acted. From embers to flame, the way it glowed, pulsed, swayed, and grew and consumed—Micah was twelve years old; fire was simply cool.

He knew it was dangerous, too, so he never did it outside of his house. But whenever he got the opportunity, he would jump on it. Before dinner, he would ask to light the stove. In the winter, he would stoke the flames in the fireplace. And his father owned three different lighters, so he didn’t have a hard time borrowing one to play around with it.

Clink, scrape, flick, and there was light. Its essence made it all the much cooler since it had tiny teeth made of flames. The way it behaved sometimes, though, was more cute than fearsome. Micah liked to throw things into the fireplace and watch it gnaw on them like a dog on a bone, before gobbling it up and leaving its droppings in the form of soot.

He was pretty sure his fascination came in part from his stubbornness. The only reason he wanted to make a fire potion was that he didn’t know how. Even if that were true, it didn’t change a thing. Micah was going to have to learn how to make one eventually. Might as well do it now to get it over with now. This time, he thought he’d figured out the problem and solution.

It boiled down to this—Water didn't burn.

All potions Micah had made up until now were water-based, but only because he had assumed that all potions were. But water didn’t burn. Oils did. Of course, he couldn’t use oil for many reasons, the top two being that he’d have to waste a whole bunch of it before he figured anything out and that he’d have to almost boil oil right next to his bed, which didn’t seem like a good thing to do—but that was beside the point. Micah’s solution was something different.

Maybe, the reason why his potions didn’t work was that the ingredients themselves got wet from the water before he infused them? It seemed stupid to him, but it was kind of obvious if you thought about it. Water doesn’t burn, and neither do wet things. So he just had to keep them dry.

Micah was willing to try. A few days later, he had everything he needed.

He set up his equipment behind his bed—cutting board, a few candles, tripod, bottle. The first thing he added was a thick layer of sawdust. Micah had gotten it from a nearby carpenter with an open workshop. When the man asked him what he needed it for, Micah lied and said he wanted to use it as confetti during a birthday. He didn’t believe that for a second, so Micah lied again and said he wanted to dump a bucket of the stuff over a classmate’s head. That got a laugh, and the carpenter happily let Micah scoop up as much of the stuff as he could handle before he left.

Atop of the bottom layer, he added a second one of crushed coal powder, and slowly filled the rest with water, as to not disturb either of the two. Then he held the candles against the side of the glass and let it heat.

He’d thought of the idea when baking with his older sister a week ago. She poured water over the flour, but small pockets of it still remained dry inside the bowl. You had to really stir to get all of it wet. Micah banked on that while he waited for the water to be just right. Then he finally started stirring and used [Infusion] over and over again, catching the hopefully dry bits of essence before they could get wet.

When it was done and cooled off, he marveled because it didn’t look like sludge at all. Well, it did, but only because it was filled with coal and sawdust. The glimpses he got of the wood and coal essence inside, on the other hand, looked just fine.

Time to find out for sure. Micah held the burning candle over the potion’s surface, hoping it would catch fire like the stove. The flame essence licked the surface of the water at first, seemingly happy, but they didn’t catch. It just kept on licking.

He didn’t understand. Why wasn’t it working? When Micah pulled the fire away a little, its essence stretched towards the liquid as if it wanted to ignite it, just like it did when he held it near the lighter fluid. They were both things to be burned. What was the problem, then?

[Basic Alchemy] nudged him. Even it agreed. Wait, no. More nudging. Micah frowned and looked past his black sludge at his wooden floorboards. Did it want him to…?

Oh. Oh.

Micah rushed downstairs with the potion, checked again to make sure his parents weren’t home again and poured the liquid over the logs in their fireplace. It wasn’t a fire potion at all, he thought. It was a firelighter potion, to help get one going.

Micah stacked some tinder underneath the logs and lit them with his father’s lighter. Then he watched in anticipation as it grew. The flames underneath the wet logs made the black liquid hiss and sputter, but then it just evaporated. The steam almost drowned the flames out themselves.

Huh.

Micah sat back and frowned. It hadn’t helped at all. It had almost killed the fire, even. Another failure.

He was used to it by now since alchemy was mostly trial and error, but he’d really gotten his hopes up this time. What was worse, he couldn’t begin to see where he’d gone wrong. Maybe he had to use oil after all? But the potion had a healthy pattern, it should have worked a little. And if he wanted to use oil, he could just as well set the oil itself on fire. Maybe he just had to mix water and oil? Wasn’t that supposed to be bad though? His mom always said it would make pans explode.

Maybe he needed a higher concentration of essence inside the fluid? How was he supposed to do that …

He put his father’s lighter back, went upstairs and cleaned up his room. By the time everything was ready again, his parents still weren’t home. Maybe he could try again?

No.

No, Micah wasn’t in the mood. He put his things under his bed behind some old toy boxes and wrote down notes on what his twenty-fourth attempt. Afterward, he did his homework for the first time in a month. Might as well, he thought. When his parents came home, he could at least tell them he’d done it.

Then it was evening and he was staring at his ceiling in bed. Clouds hid the moonlight and the Tower’s essence along with it.

It should have worked, he thought as he fell asleep.

In his dreams, he was in a space of complete darkness, save for a fireplace with no patterns or essence. Micah blinked but stepped closer. It had been a while since he saw a normal fire. Why was he seeing one now? As he got closer, the swaying shadows warped and shifted, though. Apparently, they did have essence. Long rows of black teeth munched down on bark patterns, threw them into the air (along the ground?) and gobbled them up. From that, they burst into the shadowy flames.

Flames don’t throw shadows, he thought and woke up.

[Alchemist level 3!]

[Skill - Candle obtained!]

He sat up with a start. He’d leveled up again. Already. How? The potion hadn’t even worked, hadn’t it?

No, that wasn’t important right now, because Micah had gotten a new Skill!

He threw his legs over the side of his bed and held up a single finger, grinning from ear to ear in excitement.

Candle, he thought and watched a tiny adorable flame shoot up atop of it. It even had eyes, unlike normal fire essence, and a small mouth that was a deep red on the inside. It stared at him and reached out with even tinier arms. Aww, Micah thought, but then he saw that it was just hovering there. He turned his finger over and frowned. The flame followed to face him.

What was it running on? What was it burning?

Eventually, the flame started gnawing on his fingertip and he quickly shook it out with a curse. When he summoned it again, he admonished it before going back to staring.

Candle, he thought.

Suddenly, he knew what he had done wrong.

Water doesn’t burn, no, he thought, but essence does.

Micah had tried to ignite the essence inside the potion with a normal flame outside of it. He’d need an incredibly large flame to do that, though, with lots and lots of fire essence to spare or else the flames would just push into the water as heat.

When his parents left for work that morning, Micah snuck back into his room and brewed a firestarter potion as quickly as possible. When it was done, he practically dumped the liquid over the wooden logs in their fireplace, confident that it would work either way.

He was quickly proven right. From a step away, he thought candle and watched the logs catch flames.

After putting the fire out, Micah had to sprint all the way to the classroom to arrive on time. Almost. He stepped through the door right after the teacher had. The elderly man admonished him for his tardiness, but Micah happily apologized.

Winded, he sat down in his seat near the top of the rows and thought of all the things he could do now with his newly discovered potion. His smile faltered a little as he realized that it wasn’t much. It was still just an inferior fire potion, after all. It would need something to burn and [Candle] to even make it work.

Still, it was his inferior fire potion. He couldn’t help but smile.

Then, by the end of class, he’d grown bored of it already. Bored with fire potions at least. What was he going to do with them anyway? But definitely not of [Candle].