Dead Alchemists

Dead Alchemists is set fifty years before Mage Errant.

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A bold alchemist is a dead alchemist. 

Alchemy is a dangerous science— even in its most mundane aspects, alchemists work with countless toxic substances, powerful flames, molten metal, and other threats to one’s health. Alchemists needed to be cautious at all times— to act brashly was to invite horrible death.

Garen never took risks, and his teachers tended to approve, when they bothered to notice him. 

Better a coward than a risk-taker, in alchemy.

The first time Garen saw someone die was in his second year at Skyhold. One of his classmates was joking around and balancing a vial of acid on his finger, and spilled it into a dish of rare salts.

The resulting explosion wasn’t powerful, but three students choked to death on the fumes.

The joking classmate who had caused the incident survived it. The investigation was short and swift. A mere accident would have been mourned but tolerated, but gross negligence of this sort was utterly unacceptable. The jokester’s exile from Skyhold was immediate and permanent, though some of the alchemists complained that they should have replicated the alchemical reaction for the prankster.

Alchemists weren’t well known for their sense of humor. They had a far stronger grasp of irony, however.

Quite a few of Garen’s classmates left the department altogether after that, transferring to either enchanting or healing— alchemical training had a decent bit of overlap with both. Others dropped out of Skyhold entirely.

Garen didn’t even consider leaving. Healers and enchanters were no more forgiving about this sort of thing than alchemists.

Besides, that sort of major shift in career path was a rather bold move. And Garen wasn’t bold in the slightest.

Ambitious, yes. Bold, never.

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A distracted alchemist is a dead alchemist.

If you didn’t pay attention to your work, you’d ruin it at best. Burns, disfigurement, and death were even more likely. 

Garen was the portrait of perfect focus, and he had absolutely no patience for the rest of his classmates. They were constantly getting distracted by their meaningless social lives, falling in and out of love with each other, and gossiping when they should be focusing.

Worst of all of them, to Garen’s mind, were Mayda and Bagram. She was beautiful, he was handsome. Both were constantly praised by the teachers— more even than Garen, though he deserved it more. Both were somehow athletic and tan, unlike the rest of the pale alchemy students, all withering away deep under the mountain.

They hated each other immediately.

Garen ignored their rivalry at first— he didn’t have time for the silliness of the other students. Garen aspired to more than a mere job in the alchemy labs— he would be great, someday. He would advance the world’s knowledge of alchemy in a way that his petty, distracted classmates would never do.

Still, even he had to admit to Mayda’s brilliance. Garen broke his rule of ignoring his lessers, willing to tutor her. He was, after all, the model of a good alchemist— she could do far worse than to follow in his footsteps. 

Mayda, foolishly, spurned his gracious offer of help, determined to muddle her own way through their classes. Garen didn’t resent her, of course— resentment was beneath him. 

He did pity her, though, for she promptly got distracted by Bagram, as their rivalry transmuted into a whirlwind romance. The girl from Highvale, the boy from Sica, rivals to lovers— it was practically a storybook tale.

It was sickening.

Somehow, their mutual distraction didn’t cost Mayda and Bagram as it should. No, it cost one of their classmates, who, while gossiping about the couple, poured water into acid, instead of acid into water.

The poor girl wasn’t wearing her goggles, and was blinded by the boiling explosion that followed, beyond even the capabilities of Skyhold’s healers to fully repair.

Garen would have normally dismissed the poor girl from his mind— she should count herself lucky her distractability had only cost her her eyes, not her life.

But, for once, he didn’t blame one of his classmates for their own mishaps.

No, this time the true fault lay elsewhere.

Mayda and Bagram.

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An impatient alchemist is a dead alchemist.

Cutting corners as an alchemist was a sure way to die. If you skipped steps, if you didn’t double-and-triple-check every single step of the process, you were going to make a mistake sooner than later.

And if you were lucky, that mistake would only maim or blind you. 

During their final test in their third year before becoming journeymen, one of Garen’s classmates got impatient. Their hopes of getting an important master to study under rested heavily on this test, and one of his classmates— who, to Garen’s mind, should have dropped out years ago— cut corners and got hasty in their efforts to impress.

Unlike other mages, who got their masters in their first year, alchemists and enchanters didn’t get proper masters until they reached the journeyman level. They got masters to help them with their spellcasting, certainly— but as useful as spells could be, they were crude, simple things compared to the subtleties of alchemy. 

Garen’s fire and water affinities were two of the most versatile and useful affinities for general alchemy. Acid, salt, and other obscure affinities were, perhaps, more valued by specialists, but for general alchemy? Fire and water were the best possible options.

So it was endlessly annoying when the instructors paid more attention to Mayda simply for her acid and wind affinities, or more attention to Bagram for his alkali and gravity affinities.

Still, Garen knew this was all secondary. No matter how rare or specific an affinity was, no matter how powerful a mage was, alchemy was, at its heart, about knowledge, skill, and hard work, not mere magical luck of the draw.

And no one— no one— was smarter or harder working than Garen. Even more certainly, no one was more patient than Garen. He would get the recognition he deserved, sooner or later.

When his classmate added the reagents to the alchemical binder he was brewing too soon, before the solvents had finished their work, Garen didn’t spare more than a single glance. He swiftly drew water from the tank nearby himself, and wrapped himself and his workspace in a defensive bubble. 

The wards subdividing the alchemy labs would probably have been enough to protect him, but he wasn’t about to take chances.

Then Garen simply kept working on the set of alchemical catalysts he had been assigned to brew for the test. It was a process that couldn’t be rushed, and the timings required absolute precision.

Garen ignored the shouting, ignored the gouts of sickly yellow gas, ignored his panicked classmates. He just kept watch on the sand timer at his workstation, and made temperature adjustments to his catalysts at the necessary times.

His catalysts came out absolutely perfect. 

The instructors barely paid any attention to them, however. All their attention was, yet again, fixed on Mayda and Bagram, who had used their magic to deal with their idiot classmate’s mistake. Mayda had used her wind magic to gather up the poison gas, while Bagram had used his gravity magic to gather up the spilled caustic liquids, while running in to pull the idiot out of the way of the disaster. 

They would have been better off leaving the idiot to the consequence of his own failure. Their own assigned alchemical concoctions had failed due to the lack of attention on their part.

And yet they still passed. The instructors, caught up in some affliction of useless sentimentality, gave Mayda and Bagram passing grades, despite their failure to complete their assigned tasks, rewarding them for an idiot act of so-called heroism.

And following the test, Mayda and Bagram were invited to learn under Elena of Ruhn, the most prestigious alchemist in Skyhold. She hadn’t even been looking for journeyman apprentices, but the couple’s supposedly heroic actions had drawn her attention. And now they’d be helping her investigate samples of the mysterious toxins of the southern polar regions— the first such to ever arrive in Skyhold.

Garen, meanwhile, was stuck studying under Valarick of Lothal. Any other day, Garen would have been pleased at his new master— Valarick was doing fascinating work developing new eutectics, and was easily the best option among the alchemists who had been looking for journeyman apprentices that day. Most of the other students ended up on a career path that would end with them simply manufacturing glow crystals by the gross or enchantment reagents that would shave decades off their lives.

The only reason he hadn’t aspired to work with Elena of Ruhn instead of Valarick was that he hadn’t known there was even an open position under her. It should have been his opportunity, not Mayda and Bagram’s. Garen should be the one making alchemical history, not those pair of vain idiots. He was by far the superior alchemist to either of them.

Garen realized, that day, that his instructors were just as mediocre and useless as his classmates. Realized that there was a conspiracy of the mediocre, intent on holding the excellent back out of jealous.

Intent on holding him back.

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Garen was a cautious alchemist. Garen was a focused alchemist. Garen was a patient alchemist.

He would find the perfect moment to get his revenge. 

And so he bided his time, and watched, and helped Valarick develop new eutectic.

It was, he had to admit, fascinating enough work. Eutectics were mixtures that melted or solidified at a lower temperature than any of their ingredients, and they were useful for all sorts of alchemical processes. They could be used in metallurgy, to alloy for the smelting of metals at lower temperatures. They could be used to create lubricants that operated in the coldest of winter temperatures. Even saltwater was technically a eutectic— it froze at far lower temperatures than freshwater.

Some of their eutectics were rather more esoteric, even dangerous.

One especially drew Garen’s eye. His master had researched it as a potential weapon, but it was too volatile and sensitive to jostling to transport, so it had been shelved as impractical.

Other than that single failing, it was majestic, to Garen’s mind. It was a keratin eutectic— that is, when it was splashed onto a person, it lowered the melting point of the main ingredient of skin, hair, and nails. Not just a little— it lowered it far below the freezing point of water. It didn’t take much, either— a few droplets would take care of huge amounts of surface area. The resulting solution from the melting was highly toxic, and readily way its way into the blood vessels. It killed quickly, gruesomely, and painfully. 

Better yet, it would be nigh-undetectable to Mayda and Bagram. Its odor and scent were nigh-indistinguishable from a common alchemical catalyst, and it was neither acidic nor alkali, so the couple’s magic shouldn’t detect it. When used in place of said catalyst in most of its common uses, it should, if Garen was correct— and he was almost always correct— gout up in an invisible, odorless cloud.

Best of all, it fell apart rapidly after use, and was next to impossible to detect in a corpse. The wounds it produced, according to Valarick’s notes, looked merely like odd-looking burns.

It was, unfortunately, a mana reactive alchemical compound, so Garen couldn’t manufacture it himself. Mana reactive alchemical substances were the height of their art, and it would be years yet until he was trained in their use.

So he would have to steal some.

It wasn’t difficult at all. Within weeks, Valarick trusted him with the complete run of the lab, and had bequeathed him with copies of all the ward keys. He was, according to his master, the best lab assistant he’d ever had.

Then it was just a matter of waiting for the opportunity.

It came not even six months after the fateful exam.

Elana of Ruhn sent a request for some unusual compounds, including several eutectics, to Valarick, who happily obliged his colleague. 

He didn’t take care of the delivery himself, of course— he sent Garen to take care of that.

And Garen cheerfully switched the labels on two vials of the keratin eutectic, and brought them along with the order. 

He would, perhaps, have enjoyed mocking and gloating Mayda and Bagram— but that would draw to much risk of attracting suspicion, whether before or after the fact.

Besides, they were too focused on one another to even pay attention to him when he entered their master’s lab. They were, even in this professional setting, attached at the hip.

It was trivially easy to slip the vials of keratin eutectic into the storage rack in their shared workspace. He had brief second thoughts, but then remembered how Mayda had spurned his assistance, how the two of them had unjustly overshadowed him again and again.

He carried through his plan, then the delivery. Then he left, no one the wiser.

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The alchemists arrested Garen not even a week later.

To his fury, he hadn’t killed or even injured either Mayda or Bagram. They’d taken one of his vials into a test room, and it had set off a ward that merely detected mana reactive materials. Since their experiment had been one that required no such materials, they’d immediately stopped work to figure out what had happened.

It had been easy to find the material that didn’t belong, just by passing each one individually over said ward. Most of the next week had been required to figure out what material, exactly, was in the vial, but once that had been achieved, it had been easy for them to find Garen— Valarick’s lab was the only one which contained samples of the keratin eutectic.

And Valarick and Garen were the only ones with ward keys to its storage space.

At the end of his tribunal, it was Valarick himself who condemned him. Who told Garen what his failings were. What his sin was.

Garen had been jealous.

Jealousy had made him bold, willing to take risks he never would have done otherwise. And, after all, as they’d told the alchemical students on their very first day, a bold alchemist is a dead alchemist.

Jealousy had distracted him, making him act without learning enough, without knowing of the existence of the sensor wards. And, after all, as they’d told the alchemical students on their very first day, a distracted alchemist is a dead alchemist.

Jealousy had made him impatient, making him act before he’d learned more about mana-reactive materials, their uses, and their risks. And, after all, as they’d told the alchemical students on their very first day, an impatient alchemist is a dead alchemist.

But a jealous alchemist wasn’t necessarily a dead alchemist. Jealousy was normal enough, Valarick told him, in front of the crowd of alchemists. It could be ignored, could be overcome, even be harnessed as motivation.

Garen wasn’t going to be executed for being jealous. 

Because, above all else, the greatest sin of an alchemist wasn’t jealousy. Nor was it boldness, or distraction, or impatience. 

It was betrayal.

Garen was going to be executed for trying to kill fellow alchemists. It really, in Valarick’s professed opinion, wasn’t a difficult moral. Not a difficult lesson at all.

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Alchemists might not have much of a sense of humor, but they do have a keenly sharpened sense of irony. 

Garen was to be executed by the exact same gruesome means he’d planned for Mayda and Bagram. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to, to say the least.

He was given a few days reprieve as he sent an appeal to the Skyhold Council, but not even he seriously expected them to respond, let alone grant him clemency. 

So he was given time to brood on the injustice of it all. The fact that the mediocre had once again conspired to hold down their betters.

The worst part of it all, though? What rankled Garen more than any of it?

Mayda and Bagram had only vaguely recognized him as one of their classmates— a weird, bitter loner. They had no idea why he hated them, no idea why he’d tried to kill them.

They hadn’t even known his name.