The Last Alchemist

          The magnum opus. It’s the unattainable dream, the neverending quest. For thousands of years, people in my craft have attempted to achieve it like a horde of desert-dwellers trying to catch a mirage on the horizon. Many throughout history ran out of breath a few steps in and gave up, deeming the task impossible.

          I have not.  

          Before me, my flasks and my instruments rest on the table like a miniature city of glass and copper. Everything is in place; all the pieces are ready. A lifetime of study and labor has brought me to this moment. Today, I am going to catch the mirage.

          Gold is one of the most coveted substances in the entire world, the most precious metal known to man. Most ordinary folk think it can only be derived from the enigmatic recesses of the Earth, the hadal shadowlands beneath the jagged flesh of the ground. They don’t realize its yellow beauty can actually be found all around us, at all times, in all places. They don’t realize it can be grown, synthesized, transmuted from mundane matter people encounter every day.  

I know many would scoff at this idea, would consider it a madman’s dream. These people know nothing of the complexities of God’s universe, the true depths and intricacies of nature. Humanity floats only on the surface of reality. Underneath what we perceive, underneath what we touch and see, an entire ocean lies, endless and alive. On its most fundamental level, all of existence is as amorphous as a cloud on the blue canvas of the summer sky. There is no form of matter that cannot be changed to another. The all is one.  

          The only challenge in inciting transformation is finding the keys God has left for us in nature, which is an admittedly elusive task. No alchemist in the present day truly knows another who has actually witnessed the magnum opus first hand. Rumors always abound, of course. There’s always talk of somebody in some faraway land who threw a brick of lead into a cauldron and ended up with a pot of gold. These hearsays come and go like rubble blowing through the wind, though, nothing ever coming from them in the long run.

          Things are going to change, though. The whole world is going to change when I’ve finished my great work.

          A strike of flint gets things into motion. One by one, my instruments begin to heat up, the chemicals start to boil and drip from the tubes of the outer containers into the central flask, the hermetic vase at the heart of the crystalline palace. The experiment is underway, and I’m more exhilarated than I’ve ever been in my long life.

          This is hardly my first attempt. Like everyone who practices the art, I have experienced countless failures before, countless nights wrought with self-doubt and depression. Things will not turn out so, this time. I have learned from my mistakes, accumulated an understanding of nature deeper than my peers and predecessors. I will not fail.

          The objective is to reduce matter to its most primordial form, the quintessential substance from which the whole universe was carved out of. Once that is accomplished, I can build it back up into the glittering form I so desire, emulating the same geothermal forces God used to create gold naturally within the Earth.  

          A solid amalgam of lead and mercury housed in the central flask is the focus of my work, the caterpillar that I will blossom into a shining butterfly. As the purified essences of all the four elements are siphoned into the same container, creating an amniotic broth around the stone, I observe now that the long transformation is almost underway. Behind the glass, completely air-tight save for a steam-release plug at the peak of the flask, the chemical process will occur in stages, each marked by a change in color by the fluid:

          First black, the color of space.

          Then white, the color of heaven.

          And finally, red, the color of tehom, the unformed cosmos. Out from this red, this holy color of creation, shall my gold be born, transmuted from the lead.

          I must keep my attention fixated completely on the flask. With each change, a new piece of the puzzle must be added to incite the next stage, a new chemical key must be turned to bring the process closer to its completion. I have all the materials I need already stored in the cucurbit vessels connected to the hermetic vase, but it’ll be my diligence to see that they’re prepared properly and implanted into the amniotic stew at the right time. Any error on my part could result in a failure of the entire project, and a waste of the precious resources I had struggled so many years to gather.

          It’ll be a challenge in and of itself just to keep my nerves steady. Right now, however, all I can do is watch and wait as the clear fluid slowly begins to boil above the athanor furnace in which it’s situated. The process will take some time to start.

          A chemical-scented draft blows through my tattered clothing as I loom over the round flask like an owl waiting for its chick to hatch, my dreary, wizened face reflected back at me through the luster of the glass. I can’t even count how many years I’ve spent laboring in this dingy work-room, how much of my life I’ve sacrificed to make this ultimate vision come true. There was once a time when the face that looked back at me from my equipment was young, but those days are long gone.

          The air around me in this shed bears the noxious residue of all the experiments I’ve performed here, a sour miasma that still almost makes me choke even after all these years. It would take an army of maids just to purge the scent from the floorboards, provided I could ever convince any to come here. Most people in town avoid this place like a pagan shrine. 

My exuberance sinks a bit as my gaze shifts over the dark walls of my laboratory, the cabinets and shelves that house the arcane tools of my trade. It’s difficult for people to comprehend what I actually do in here. In the absence of understanding, many in town have weaved their own sinister theories.  

          The only friends I’ve ever really had were other alchemists, other students of this esoteric art. As gloomy as this place might seem, I can say with certainty the fondest days of my life were spent here working with my colleagues, our spirits united in a common dream. With all my heart and soul, I wish they could be with me now to share in the joy of this moment, but that is something that cannot be. They’ve all been lost at this point to the somber void of time.

          Without warning, a pang of sickness begins to simmer inside the pit of my torso. Try as I might to maintain my focus on the flask, I suddenly find myself unable to keep my head from sinking to the table, the weight of the room’s emptiness rapidly becoming too much for me to bear. With trembling hands, I reach up to wipe my eyes clear, a veil of mist having rolled over my vision like a fog creeping across an open field.

          It takes several seconds for my sight to finally restore, the quivering frame of my body hunched over beneath the towers of glass. When I finally pick my head off of the oaken table again, my eyes as red as cinnabar, I gaze back at my work and straighten up immediately upon seeing the flask. The chemical reaction has begun.

          Matter must be charred and decomposed before it can be rendered into its purest form. Beating back the haze trying to overtake my spirit, I readjust myself at the table and frantically begin bellowing the hot coals beneath the flask, flecks of ebony lingering through the amniotic fluid like a gallery of black stars adorned on a silver cosmos. As the temperature begins to rise, these tiny patches branch out through the ether, their bodies steadily growing in tandem with the rising thermometer.

          Several minutes pass as the broth proceeds to heat, my heart pounding all the while. Bit by bit, the shards of night continue to stretch their tendrils out through the shimmering waters, searching pensively for any empty space where they can nestle their bodies. Eventually, the fluid becomes so dark that the stone it encompasses in the half-filled flask is completely obscured.

          The first milestone has been reached. Placing aside the bellow, pausing for only the briefest moment to wipe away the smoldering dust that had blown back on my face, I swiftly begin working to ensure the reaction will hold stable long enough to reach the next stage.

With another strike of flint, I shakily start lighting several of the miniature beds of kindle underneath the copper retorts connected to the flask. Sal Caelum is a compound of my own discovery, a substance of potent transformative power. I had derived it from pitchblende harvested out of the Ore Mountains of Bohemia and Saxony, treating the raw mineral in a solution of aqua fortis and lye to render the curious, yellow powder. It’s the most important ingredient in catalyzing the next stage of the process, though trying to sublimate it to add to the amniotic mixture can sometimes yield capricious results.

          My limbs as tense as a rig of mast lines, I wait in silence for the copper appendages of the flask to digest their chemical contents and release them into the black globe. For an undertaking as significant as this, with every juncture planned to the most miniscule detail, even the smallest uncertainty is something that can make a person’s nerves feel as if they’re writhing around inside of him like a horde of living animals. Through the chemical miasma of my shed, the petite wingbeats of a moth flying near the ceiling meet my ear, the static air unbroken by any other disturbance, even my own breath.

          To my great relief, I don’t have to endure this state of anxiety for very long. After only a mere handful of minutes, I see the dark waters around the metal nozzles begin to tremble, the vaporized ingredients exiting their chambers to join the assembly of their partners in the flask. The Sal Caelum has cooperated with my will. The seeds for the next stage are being planted.

With an exhale as heavy as an entire keg being uncorked, every ounce of tension in my body leaves me in a single rush. Stumbling back from the table, I rest my hands on my knees and take several deep breaths to abate the adrenaline still flooding through my veins, my limbs having become numb from the excitement. The despair that had touched my soul only minutes prior almost feels like a distant memory, now, my spirit as light as air.

          So far, everything is proceeding even more perfectly than I had anticipated. Straightening back up, I quickly step back over to the table and resume my position of vigilance. The disorienting excitement that had gripped my body still hasn’t quite left me, but I don’t want to be derelict in my duties even for a moment.

          With some effort, I eventually manage to calm myself down, my heart reverting back to its usual rhythm. Even with the catalysts introduced to the formula, I can’t tell precisely how long this stage will last. As before, it likely needs to boil for some time before the next change will begin. After that, I’ll be another step closer to my gold.   

          Gold. That’s what this is all about, the pebble on the seashore my friends were never able to find. We had many goals, many scientific ambitions, but the magnum opus was always the ultimate pinnacle we were climbing towards. We all sacrificed so much of our lives for this one dream, and yet, the value of the metal itself was never something that held much interest for us.  

          As I learned very quickly during my early days of apprenticeship, this craft is not something one pursues to satisfy his own greed. I wouldn’t have been able to make it this far if I couldn’t find a way to move beyond the trap of pettiness all people are prone to falling into. Those who venture into the art seeking only to get rich usually abort their careers in failure and frustration when they realize how much work is required to yield so little reward, oftentimes nothing more than just a few scraps of insight about the chemical process.

          Your heart has to be able to lust for something more than just material gratification. Money is merely a contrivance to steal autonomy away from people, a tool to subjugate men with greed and wage labor in lieu of chains and whips. It has no innate value to the human experience. Though there’s little wealth to my name, nor much comfort or stability in my life, my ambition for completing the magnum opus is divorced from any desire to line my pockets with cash.

Gold was always just a starting point, the first in a series of even greater miracles. If I can master transmutation, if I can prove it can be done, then I can change the entire world. In the long run, this tiny nugget I’m creating here today could be worth more than every goldmine on the planet put together.

          Though I doubt there are many years left in my life, there’s still a lot I could accomplish after tonight if everything goes according to plan: I could manufacture substances of any kind, not just gold, but anything that exists in nature. Duplicating the chemical process on a mass scale, I could potentially create as much fuel and resources as the people of the world need. Money itself would be unnecessary if humanity didn’t have to compete for the materials that power our civilizations. Without scarcity, the entire landscape of the planet could be transformed, and technology could rapidly advance far beyond its present state.

          Food, likewise, could be created by the same methods. Manna, pure nutrition, could be extracted from the Earth itself, giving people of every race and creed a near limitless supply of sustenance. The abandoned souls who now don’t even have the basic necessities of life would no longer have to tread day in and day out on the razor’s edge of starvation. All people would have a chance to thrive, regardless of whatever circumstances they were born into.

          It would be a world where conflict was only a memory. No wars for resources, no struggles for survival. Peasants and slaves could walk free, their burden of labor no longer required for anybody to perform. People could just live.  

          To many, I know this would sound like a fantasy, even more so than the idea of creating gold in the first place. As inconceivable as this world might seem, though, I know with every fiber of my being that it’s still one worth striving for. I’m not someone who’s arrogant or entitled enough to think I’m guaranteed a space in Heaven. The prospect of a blissful afterlife shouldn’t mean people treat our present home like it doesn’t matter.

          Inside the flask, my future gestates behind the wall of darkness, the last of the chemicals having been fully assimilated into the black mass. Since calming my heart down, I haven’t looked away from the glass once, my focus as singular as a concentrated beam of light.

          Time forges coldly ahead as I proceed with this watch. For how long, I cannot tell. At this point, I can feel my knees starting to ache from the effort of standing, so I deduce that it must’ve at least been a few hours since I started this experiment. This stage certainly seems like it’s taking longer to change than the last.

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The rest of this story is available in Volume 6, Issue 1 of Night Picnic.