The Monument

 “They're coming this way, we have to get our students out!”

  Edith collapsed in the guild's doorway upon delivering the urgent message.  The two dozen alchemists inside turned to her in alarm.  They thought they'd been covert enough in their meetings to avoid detection, but if they were being targeted now?  Disaster must be close on Edith’s heel.

  Aldous, a boy of eighteen years, rushed to his mentor's side.

  “Edith, are you alright?” he knelt by his teacher and prepared to help restore her, but she grabbed his hand and pushed it away.

  “Save your energy, you're soon to need it.  I just...need a moment to breathe.” Edith looked at her guild, her family, with a mournful gaze. “We have to prepare.  They're not far behind me now.”

  The room burst into chaos as it's members packed bags for their young apprentices and bundled them for the autumn's chill.  Those without students adorned themselves with any alchemical stores they owned.  They were preparing for a battle they didn't plan to win.

  Aldous pressed close to Edith's side.  

  “Shall we fight, or flee?” he asked, fear in his voice of an answer he didn't wish to hear.

  “You'll flee.” Edith responded, rising to her feet “And we'll make sure you have the time to do so.”  She cupped her student's hand in both of her own. 

   “W-wait-” Aldous started, but Edith continued with misty eyes

  “I was going to graduate you, you know, at the next festival of light.  You have grown so wise and so strong.  I'm sorry I didn't have that chance.”

  Aldous shook his head “Graduate me now then!  I'll fight by your side.  I can't leave you.  If I'm strong as you say, let me stay.”

  Edith shifted her gaze away from her student and towards the rest of the apprentices.  The oldest of them was just turned fourteen.  The youngest, only six.  She glanced back to her own student.

  “We can't send them alone into a world that's after them.” she said softly “They'll need your strength to survive.”

  Aldous's protests died on his lips.  She was right, but…

  “If you won't flee, then...you...just don't sacrifice yourself here, please.” Tears were forming in the young alchemist's eyes.  Edith had been his family, his guide, his best friend, for seven years.  The guild, it's members, were all a part of him, and him of them, their life energies intricately entwined.   To lose a single member of that would be to lose a piece of his soul, but Edith?  His mentor held a larger place in his heart than all the others combined.

  Once again, Edith shifted her gaze away from Aldous, this time casting it towards the heart of the tiny keep.  In its center, a roughly-hewn onyx obelisk stood proudly.  The stone had been passed down through the generations, imbued with their life, with the life of their mentors, and their mentor's mentors, so altered and empowered with energy that even through the dark opaque stone, a bright blue glow pulsated from it's core.  

  Aldous followed Edith's stare, and understood.

  “There has to be another way.” he whispered.

  Edith shook her head.  “We can't let them have it.  They don't understand it.  If they used it wrongly…” she shivered. 

  Aldous gave in to a sob.  He couldn't fight Edith's plan.  There was no time, and no alternatives.  

  Edith pulled her student close, hugging him tightly to herself, letting him cry briefly into her shoulder.  She didn't envy him the responsibility she had burdened him with, nor the pain near at hand, but it was imperative the next generation survive.  

  Not bold enough to put it off a moment longer, Edith pulled away from her teary apprentice.  She cupped her hand to his cheek.

  “I am so, so sorry for what's to come.  But I will always be so very proud of you.  Keep them safe.  Remember our ways.  In time, all things will heal.”  

  Aldous could only nod through his tears.  

  “Now swiftly,” Edith instructed, urgency rising in her voice “take what you need, and run.”  

  The young alchemist needed very little that required packing, but very much of something altogether different.  He ran to the heart of the keep, resting his hands and forehead against the radiant stone pillar that would be the end of this place, and took in as much alchemical energy as he could.  He'd never taken so greedily before.  He pulled the life force into his soul, until he could feel the individual energy of every alchemist who formed the heart.  For a single moment, his world was reduced to the presence of every generation of his guild family, the warmth of their love.  He tried to lock it inside of himself, a hasty armor around his heart.  

  The moment was all he allowed himself.  He gathered the guild's scared and confused children away from their battle-ready mentors, six apprentices aside from himself, and knelt in their midst.

  “We're going to go on an adventure together, ok?  As soon as I open the back door, we're gonna run to the forest as a group, and I'm going to follow behind all of you.  Understand?”

  A few of them were too old to be charmed by this.

  “What about everyone else?” 

  There was no time for panic or dissent.

  “They'll be right on our heels.” Aldous lied, guilt rising immediately for not preparing these young ones for their fate.  

  The children were hurried out.  Aldous gave a final, longing, loving look at the family he'd leave behind.

  “You will be remembered.  The world will avenge you.” he promised.  

  Wiping tears away, he disappeared after the young students into the cover of midnight.  

  Edith gathered her peers to the heart of the keep.  They all knew what must be done.  No words were needed.  Their resolve, their love, it was felt in them all.  They stood in silent solidarity, taking in for one last time the beautiful thing they'd created in this place.  It was all but a minute before they heard the approaching squadron.  The alchemists held their ground around the obelisk as the doors to their keep were knocked in.  They held hands as their adversaries rushed in and surrounded them.  

They smiled sadly.

<><><><><><><>

  The students were almost at forest's edge when it happened.  

  First, there was light.  A brilliant explosion of blue, bright as a lightning strike, flashed from the keep.  Then, as quickly as thunder follows, the sound.  A crack, the shatter of breaking stone so loud it reverberated in the bones of the fleeing apprentices.  And with it, something else reverberated within the students, something agonizing.  Aldous felt it the strongest.  His head and chest felt like they were trying to tear themselves apart.  He cried out, a sharp yell of pain that ended in a sob as his soul shattered, and left him with a sudden, unbearable loneliness.  Aldous fell to his knees, clutching his chest, making no effort to rein in his sorrow.  His heart had been torn from him in an instant.  His guild was gone, all but the confused, whimpering children by his side.

  For some of them, the moment wasn't as terrible, just a vague, uncertain, empty feeling.  For others, the sudden, unexpected pain and loss was impossible to process, nearly paralyzing them.

  The teens in the group realized what happened, and cried out their mentor's names as they turned to run back to the keep.  Their shouts shook Aldous from his sorrow enough to catch them.

  “We have to keep going” he cried softly, holding two of his peers to him, restraining them from turning back “we have to or it's all pointless.”

  As he rallied the children into the shelter of the woods, Aldous finally allowed himself a single glance back at his home.  

  He gasped.  The keep, with everyone and everything within, and the grounds around the building itself, had all been transmuted into smooth white marble, glittering in the moonlight.  A monument preserved in the moment of battle.  

  Aldous couldn't bring himself to look back again.  He marched forward, guiding what remained of his heart through the night.  Seven broken souls, searching for shelter.

  

<><><><><><>

  The next weeks were spent on the move.  Aldous did everything in his power to hide his identity, and the identities of his half a dozen charges.  He wasn’t strong enough to alchemize gold on the road, but any time they came by a town, Aldous would alchemize a little silver to exchange for fresh food stores.  

  The group made their way from province to province, searching for alchemists.  The keeps Aldous had visited as a child when it was still safe to connect with other guilds were gone.  Some were emptied out, surely evacuated at the first sign of crisis.  Others told a darker story.  Raided and half-destroyed.  Aldous made sure they fled quickly from those provinces.  

  With each ruined guild they discovered, Aldous’s shattered heart grew more bitter.  What was he to do in this broken world with six children?  Their legs couldn’t run forever.  Their luck couldn’t last a lifetime.  Their souls couldn’t survive alone.

  There was a fear growing inside each of the students, a fear that grew stronger the longer they were on the road.  What if they were the last alchemists left?  No one could afford to articulate the concern, for what hope was there if everyone was gone?  No, no, better to just keep moving.  The next town would have some safe harbour, or some news.  

  The next town never did.

  Aldous began to second-guess his approach as they travelled closer to London.  The city had been home to some of the largest alchemy guilds in England, and he’d hoped some of them had managed to defend themselves.  The nearer they got to the great city, though, the worse the carnage at former keeps seemed to be.  There was more than one keep that had suffered a fate similar to their own, transformed to some stone or element by the planned destruction of its heart.  Some of the transmuted keeps were already being demolished or desecrated.  It turned Aldous’s stomach to see it.  Would the same happen to the great marble monument that’d been his home?  He couldn’t afford to worry about it, but in his nightmares, he saw Edith’s image destroyed at the hands of soldiers and hunters.  His restless dreams were an endless landscape of white marble, breaking all around him in a nonstop cycle of monotone destruction.

  After a month of walking, the group finally stumbled across a keep raided only the night before.  The town was alight with the stories of it.  It was the final red flag.  London wouldn’t be safe.  

  As desperation overtook the group, Aldous made the only choice he could.  They turned back.  

  It wasn’t safe to take the same paths they’d travelled before, so Aldous led the group through the wildernesses.  There was nowhere to go for new supplies, and even if there had been, they would have little to trade.  Alchemy was growing harder.  The children had never had to perform transferences outside of their guild during their apprenticeships.  They were used to the guiding hands of mentors, the shared help of a group, and the radiant energy of a keep’s heart.   Aldous was growing too tired to provide for them all on his own.  Soon, the group would run out of food.  Each moment started to feel like a steady march to their doom, and the seven alchemists were far, far too aware of that march.  The rhythm of it ran on loop in their heads, and played in the beat of their footsteps.

  In the absence of better solutions, Aldous began eating less, saving everything he could for those in his care.  It only took a few days for him to start feeling the effects.  He grew dizzy as he walked.  Sleep found him sooner, and took longer to release him.  He wondered how long before it refused to release him at all.  It was the only conclusion left, and he hoped and prayed that he could find some shelter for the children before it came to pass.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

  The world was barren and colorless and shattered.  In every direction, it was nothing but broken, shimmering marble.  There were towers of it.  Chasms of it.  

  There was no time.  This nightmare had begun an eternity ago, and eons had passed, and not a moment had passed, and it wouldn’t pass for eons to come.  It was cold.  

  Aldous shivered.  The part of him that’d been steadily falling to despair was now frozen in panic.  He was vaguely aware that this was different from the other marble nightmares.  Maybe this one wasn’t set to end.  He was trapped in place, unable to move his heavy dream limbs to see them, but he already knew that if he could look, they’d be marble too.  Tangled thoughts tried to form a conclusion about this.  Perhaps he was dying now.  Perhaps it had already happened, and that’s why everything was so very cold.

  He struggled against his own eyelids.  The idea that he could close his eyes in a dream was wholly absurd, but he craved to try, to see something besides the shifting landscape of broken stone.  He wanted to see black.  Black like the obelisk he’d once pulled life from.  Black like the long hair of his dead mentor.  Black like the nights when sleep had still been rest.  

  Eternity passed, and no time passed, and with a final scrap of will, Aldous closed his marble eyelids over his tired eyes.  All was black.  

  Then, blue.

  Aldous found he could move again as the dream shifted.  He tilted his head curiously as a pulsing blue glow called to him from the dark, and he followed.  

  Time still didn’t exist, but with every footfall in the void, the blue grew closer, and Aldous’s heart grew lighter.  The cracks in his soul drained out their despair, and began to fill with a familiar presence.

  “Edith?” the apprentice called softly.

  There was a burst of light, and Aldous was brought to tears as his spirit was flooded with an old joy he never thought he’d know again: the life and love of his guild.  Everything was energy, and comfort, and radiance.  The world was all the most familiar glow of blue.

  “Aldous.” a soft voice rang clear to the alchemist “What do you think you’re doing?”

  It was Edith.  Aldous felt her close to him.  He couldn’t answer her question.  He had too many of his own.

  “Where are you?” he cried out.

  “I’m right with you.  Didn’t you know?” was the soft response “Or did you forget why we store away our lives, why you took so much of that store for yourself before you left?”

  Aldous sniffled.  “It didn’t matter.  I failed them.  I failed all of you.  That life will die with me.  There are no more alchemists in the world.”

  “How dare you say that?” Edith chided, firmly but not harshly “You are an alchemist.  Your charges are alchemists.  And have you truly given up on everyone else?”

  Aldous was answerless.  He waited, as he often had growing up, for Edith to continue her lesson.  She'd never left him without an answer for the questions he couldn't respond to himself.

  “Even now,” Edith said, softer “Hope is close at hand.  You must survive to see it.”

  “How can that be?” Aldous sobbed “I’m dying, Edith.  And you’re gone.  You left me!”

  His words echoed in the empty light around.  He was angry.  He shouldn’t have been left alone.  He shouldn’t have been left in charge. 

  A soft sigh surrounded him.

  “I am not gone.  I am here.  I will always be here.” Edith promised.  Aldous could swear he felt her hand on his cheek “Now trust me, like you always used to.  There is hope for you.  I wouldn’t leave you to die alone.”

  Aldous tried to respond, and choked on his words.

  Edith spoke again, kindly.  “Now my prodigy, there’s not much time.  Take your strength and remember my love.”

  Aldous nodded.

  “Wake up.”

  Aldous started awake with a pained gasp.  His lungs stung as they filled with freezing air, and as he exhaled, his breath became great clouds in the wind.  There was a thin layer of frost on his skin.  Winter had arrived in the night.

  A new urgency within him, Aldous woke the shivering children at his side.  They’d been saved from freezing only by each other’s body warmth, and the woolen cloaks on their backs.  

  “We have to keep moving, it’s not safe to sleep in this cold.” Aldous explained gently as he roused them.  They’d not been given nearly enough time to rest.

  There was nowhere warm to go, but for the first time in a month, that didn’t seem to matter.  Aldous felt something, a pull, a direction to follow. 

  And he followed.

  They hiked for an hour.  No one spoke much, aside from an occasional soft complaint from the freezing children.  They were doing their best to stay strong, but the elements were proving to be a cruel test of their endurance.   Aldous couldn’t feel worry over it.  A different feeling was growing stronger and stronger as he pressed on, a familiar draw, as if warmth was waiting just ahead.  Aldous was on the verge of breaking into a sprint for whatever force was pulling him ahead, when he heard a rustling sound near in the forest.

  Caution tempered his desire to push on.

  But as it turned out, Aldous had nothing to fear.  As the sound drew closer, now the clear footfalls of several humans, he finally caught a glimpse of them.  There were four people, all young adults, hiking through the forest with archery equipment.  They wore a symbol embroidered on their thick coats that Aldous recognized instantly.  The alchemical symbol for metal, followed by the circular rune that indicated gold.

  There had been a guild when Aldous was young that had used those same runes as their keep’s seal.  These were alchemists.  Fellow survivors.

  Aldous could have cried as he called out to them.  As they turned to behold the seven ragged alchemists that’d now joined them, Aldous finally let himself collapse.

  The next hour was a blur.  Aldous had found what needed to be found.  He and his charges were swept into the care of their fellow alchemists.

  The goldrise guild had fled before the raids had started, and began work on a new, hidden keep far from the borders of society.  They’d managed to retain the small heart of their guild, and as their hunting party brought Aldous into the warmth of their stone-hewn keep, the restorative energy of that heart was already at work in his weary limbs, bringing him back to life.

  Though sizable, the keep was well-camouflaged.  It’s entrance lay between the cracks of cave walls.  Inside was lit with massive fires, lending flickering warmth to the humble hall that was home to 18 alchemists prior to Aldous’s crew arriving.  

  The four archers gathered the children around the fireplace, warming them, as older guild members came to sit by them and offer restoration to their weary souls.  Aldous they laid by the heart of the keep.  They gave him the opportunity to take from it, but also sensed that he had something inside of him to give, the lifeforce of his obsolete guild, given a second chance to live on for future generations. 

  Aldous gazed on the heart with half-lidded eyes, basking in it’s healing golden glow.  It was so different from the core of his own guild.  Where they had kept a massive, dark, pulsing pillar, this guild had a radiant, sunny hunk of gemstone only slightly bigger than Aldous head.  Less size, more light.  A fair trade, though Aldous knew he’d soon come to miss the glow of blue.

  Dreamlessly, Aldous slept the night on the floor, absorbing the radiant energy from the heart.  He awoke feeling well-restored, though it would take time to heal his body of all he’d deprived it of.

  And there was another matter of healing that needed tending to.  Aldous couldn’t possibly bear the idea of using everything he’d taken from his own keep for himself.  It was all that was left of the mentors to the children he’d protected, and they would need that one day.  He had to give what was left of it to some store so it could be shared, and the heart of this guild felt an appropriate choice.

  The members of goldenrise agreed that the urgency was appropriate, and welcomed Aldous’s contribution to their heart.  The transference was a bit risky for one in such a shape as Aldous was in, but with a guild to lean on, everyone was confident it would be alright.  Even as Aldous prepared himself for it, the guild was transferring their own energy to him, to give him something to hold onto as the last of his old guild was drained from him.

  Aldous laid the palms of his hands on the warm surface of the heart.  He had a passing feeling that perhaps, this was what he’d survived for.  To let something of his guild survive, and be joined in such a way to alchemy’s future.  

  “You were right, Edith,” he whispered, as he gathered his strength, wisps of blue surrounding his hands “Thank you.”

  He made the transfer.

  The goldenrise members around him gasped.

  In an instant, the bright yellow glow of their heart shifted.  It swirled with blue, growing brighter as it absorbed such power, then blended entirely.  

  The heart beamed in bright, beautiful green.  The keep was transformed in it’s light, its amber glow replaced with beams like sunlight filtering through leaves, a beautiful change.

  Aldous cried.  Joy and sorrow and exhaustion swirled like gold and blue and green in his heart.