Though he’d taken the challenge to cover up for his own goals, Lucas thought that it would be an easy win to shove in Heisenburgle’s smug face. He was sorely mistaken. Though he made a few batches of Blue that night, that was just because he’d already started preparing reagents. Once that was done, he tore into the texts that the gnome recommended on the subject, and though he would never admit it to Heisenburgle, he had a hard time making heads or tales of them.

  Hobskin’s Treatise on The Distillation of Celestial Solvents was supposed to be the easiest of all of Hessienburgle’s texts on the subject, but it was denser than any instruction manual he’d ever read. The tome was two inches thick and characterized by passages like “Some works of alchemical excellence are too dense and reinforced to ever be separated and enhanced without energies from the heaves themselves” and “Our goal is not to use liquid sunlight to purge the poisons of this mixture, but to annihilate them as if they’d never existed at all. ”

  That flowery language toned down a bit as he got to the particulars of the recipe, but as Lucas started to skip ahead, Heisenburgle called out, “Careful, if you skip to the recipe itself, you’ll find it is quite impossible to make without the requisite grounding in philosophy…”

  Lucas ignored him, though he did worry for a moment that the gnome might be right.

  If this is like the elemental shit he was on about before, I might be fucked, he realized.

  Still, he pushed those doubts down and reviewed the potion recipe, which didn’t seem to be that hard at all. Besides condensed moonlight, it required the purest of water, the essence of firefly, refined phosphorus, and ground teeth of a nocturnal prowling carnivore. Lucas hadn’t checked, but if the book considered them to be reagents, then alchemists almost certainly felt the same way, which means Heisenburgle considered them to be worth stocking.

  Harvesting the moonlight, though, was another matter. There was no diagram of what the machine to do that should look like, only that, “Even on the night of a full moon, mirrors should be about the size of three average drawing-room windows. Too much more than that will boil the mixture into uselessness, and too little will fail to catalyze properly, resulting in a failed batch.”

  To Lucas, it seemed like they could have just said that you wanted so many square feet of exposure per dose per hour, but the author was as immune to sense as Heisenburgle was. “It's fine,” Lucas said finally. “It all looks pretty straightforward to me. I’ll talk to the craftsmen tomorrow, and they can get started. We should have some moon goo in a week or two, no problem.”

  The gnome answered, rubbing his hands together. “Oh, will we now? I can hardly wait,” he cackled. “I think this is a show I shall savor!”

  Lucas let those words roll off his back as he started sketching ideas for how he was going to make his mirror. The size, he decided, wasn’t the issue. It was how the ability to throttle the amount of moonlight that he needed. He cast a look at Heisenburgle’s harebrained contraption and quickly decided. There’s no way I'm making any Rube Goldberg device like that.

  The man had almost two dozen mirrors, many of which were on poles, so he could independently adjust them, one at a time. Lucas had an entirely different plan, and in the morning, he went to talk to the blacksmith about making an oculus and the glassblower about making a couple of lenses.

  Both of the workshops were staffed much better than he’d expected. The blacksmith, in particular, was a world away from the others he'd seen in Meadowin and Lordanin. It was practically a machine shop, with different people working on different things at the same time. Looking around, Lucas saw a peddle-powered drill press, a lathe, along with several forges and drop hammers. It was pretty fancy, and he could see why the gnome kept it secret. One of the smiths near the back of the shop even seemed to be working on making a horse leg.

  “Hey, don’t you guys usually make just the horseshoes?” Lucas laughed as he pointed it out to the head smith.

  The man crossed his arms in annoyance and said, “And ain’t you supposed to mind your own business?”

  “Yeah, man, sure, whatever,” Lucas agreed. He quickly changed the topic, brought out his sketch of the aperture he wanted, and showed the man how it worked. It looked just like a camera shutter with five leaves that opened and closed smoothly, but of course, he couldn’t use those words.

  Things went back and forth for a while, but it wasn’t until he laid several pieces of paper atop one another and then showed the way they would fan out and create an opening that the man finally got it. Then, after a few questions, the guy seemed to get what he wanted, and as he scratched his neck he said, “Yeah, I could see it. This will actually work pretty well on something else I’m working on, too. I should be able to get it to you in a week or so, alright?”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Lucas shook on it and went off to the glassblowers. He’d expected this to be much easier than explaining a complicated moving part. He just wanted a couple of bent mirrors and a couple of focusing lenses to go with them. The lens, at least, they had no problem with. Heisenburgle already had a whole setup for that, and Lucas didn’t even want to know how much it cost. The curved mirrors, though, threw the old man running the place for a loop.

  “You want any old mirror, but you want it bent?” the man asked, not quite believing what Lucas was requesting.

  “I mean, ideally, I’d want something parabolic,” Lucas said, “But that’s probably asking a bit much.”

  “Para-what now?” the chief glassblower asked.

  “I want a mirror that’s curved, like a kite shield, you know?” Lucas said, pointing at his drawing. “The angle lets you create sort of a focal point.”

  Focal points at least, they understood, even if Lucas probably didn’t. Curving glass to create what he was asking for was an entirely different story. He tried to explain to them that they could just beat it out of metal and polish that, but the man was pretty skeptical of that, too, and Lucas wasn’t about to explain to him how a solar thermal power plant worked.

  So, in the end, they met halfway. They used steam to bend wood and make a frame, and then a few days later, they attached three-inch strips of mirror to it, creating a curved-ish mirror with flat spots. It wasn’t ideal, but after some thought, he decided that it would probably do.

  After a little over a week, Lucas was setting up the whole thing on the roof of the main building, and after a week and a half, when his oculus was ready, he was finally cunning some tests. Heisenbugle watched all of this proceed, of course, tut-tutting away as he went. Still, he held off on the criticism until things were starting to take shape, and he could see well enough what Lucas was doing to mock it.

  “What in the name of the stars above do you think you’re making here exactly?” the gnome said, openly mocking him. “These lenses in front of these mirrors will only block what little light you’re gathering!”

  Lucas only smiled. The gnome might know a lot about alchemy, but it was clear he didn’t know shit about science or how light worked, and Lucas was happy to teach him a thing or two.

  At least, that’s what he thought at first. Every time Lucas tried to explain to him how something worked, the gnome would respond reasonably enough before giving a ridiculous explanation for why he shouldn’t do it that way.

  For starters, your mirrors are much too small and crooked. It’s like you didn’t read a single word of Hobskin’s wisdom! Separated mirrors will lead to uneven heating and an iron window?!” Heisenburgle threw up his hands in frustration. Don’t you understand how much you’ll taint the light with such heavy things?”

  Lucas had expected objections, but these were entirely based on strange Alchemical philosophies that he’d need to study for a decade to understand. The gnome stayed up there for a while with him, drawing what he was supposed to get out of his reading, which was apparently three large rectangular mirrors to surround his vial with, but Lucas saw way too many problems with that. Those were mostly related to how inefficient and non-adjustable it was.

  “If I set my apparatus up like that,” he explained, “Then all I can do is start it and pray the reaction works. This way, I can adjust—”

  “Exactly!” the gnome interrupted. “Celestial solvents are a way to beseech the Gods and grant you favor. If your mind is right and your philosophy is sound, then the Lord of Potions himself, the might Thrzaelwick, blessed be his name, will make up for any of your shortcomings.”

  “So that’s why your starlight potions still aren’t working quite right?” Lucas thought. He considered saying that out loud but decided against it.

  Instead, he said, “Well, we will see. I plan to try in two more days, so we’ll see what we see.”

  “But that’s not even the night of the full moon!” the gnome declared. “Did you really learn nothing?”

  “I learned that the moon is up for a good chunk of the day when it’s full, and I’d rather have all night to work on something finicky like this.” Lucas shot back defensively.

  “Multiple attempts?!” Heisenbergle shouted in a way that made his squeaky voice that much more ridiculous. “With mirrors like this, you’ll be lucky to gather enough light throughout the entire night!”

  Lucas shrugged that off, and eventually, the gnome left. He might not know what he was doing, but he was fairly certain none of the other alchemists did either. They were all just copying recipes off of each other and claiming divine insight for various changes and techniques. Given what he’d seen with the elemental alignment bullshit, he couldn’t dismiss all of that out of hand, of course.

  “But I can sure as hell test it,” he growled to himself as he stood up there alone in the cold.

  Two nights later, everything was in readiness. Lucas spent a few hours before moon rise creating half a dozen of the substrate potions he’d need for the experiment. He’d used water from distilled steam with Heisenburgle had also balked at, but otherwise, he’d stuck to the recipe for Concentrated Moonlight.

  He’d arranged his work area like a triangle. In the center, there was the clamp to hold the potion. In front of it, between the moon and the vial, there was an armature to hold the front focusing lens so that he could adjust it throughout the night., and behind it were the two curved mirrors, which aimed at their own focusing lenses before those beams of light went through his adjustable aperture.

  It was the maximum exposure he could give without using yards and yards of glass. “Alright bitch,” he told himself, “Let’s do this.”