He was fully aware of the childishness of his visceral discomfort with the implication of a sapphic relationship between one of his comrades and the person who got them across the border. But that was Makhus the man, Makhus the Alchemist. The source of such insecurity was far deeper than his conscious self, it was an insufferable little boy that couldn’t get over his inability to woo a woman into bed, it was a mental vestige of his past self that he had done all he could to exterminate.

Makhus had killed a dozen Grekurian soldiers in a single evening using nothing but his sword, he had bedded women that wouldn’t give most men even a passing glance, he had achieved feats of alchemical engineering few ever would, all for the sake of building his own sense of self-worth… But it remained shaky, for it had rotten foundations. 

So it was that he retreated to a lab that rightfully belonged to a dead man, surrendering himself to childlike wonder at the sight of a life’s fortune that also rightfully belonged to a dead man. His trail betwixt the lab’s equipment led him towards a writing desk situated amidst two large closets, each containing many flasks and jars full of reagents, from colorless chemicals to preserved organs. There was even…

“A homunculus! A real fuckin’ homunculus!” he exclaimed, staring at a malformed blob of flesh that floated in off-green, Viriditas-based preservation solution. It was a tiny, vaguely humanoid thing, barely bigger than someone’s head in its entirety, its pallid skin clung to its bones so tightly one could see each individual rib even through the cloudy liquid. Its right arm and left leg were little more than nubs, but its other two limbs were fully-formed, if miniature and distended, while its head was so fully proportional and recognizable it could be mistaken for a wax miniature of a real person’s head.

Its vacant stare followed his every movement, just like the textbooks described a correctly-grown homunculus would. Unlike the textbooks described, however, it slowly raised a hand, and pointed towards the writing table. Its expression was dead-serious as it went on to write out a few words on the inside of its jar using the sediment that had collected on the glass.

BURN IT

OR

USE IT

It rubbed them away and did a breathing motion, causing the layer of sediment to reform before it wrote something again.

ALBEDO

SHOWS

THE

WAY

Another breathing motion. It raised its stubby little hand to its mouth and did a zipper-closing motion, gave a knowing nod, and just like that, the spark of sentience vanished, its eyes once more absently following Makhus’ every movement.

The Swordsman turned his gaze to the desk, to the many notes and notebooks strewn about it. He took a seat and began reading. The word length and sentence structure made sense, as did the alchemic diagrams, but… It was all letter soup. It was…

A substitution cipher. Just like he’d been taught back in training. It only took a moment of looking to find a clean piece of paper and a sharp-enough pencil, both buried under the topmost layer of clutter. Now all he needed to do was figure out what the cipher’s key was and follow his training, and if he did everything right, he should be able to decode the dead man’s notes.

No particular word came to mind, until he looked to the homunculus again, its eyes still vacantly staring at him. “Albedo shows the way, huh…” he ruminated, and just like that, he realized his mistake. The homunculus had outright told him the key to the cipher.

Makhus took hold of the journal that most grabbed his attention, a leather-bound thing whose outer binding was clearly worn down and whose clasp had clearly been ripped off and replaced at least once. The very first page was filled to the brim with neat and practiced handwriting, and he tried it on the first sentence of that very page.

What came out of the decoding process wasn’t modern Ikesian. It was an old dialect that was almost exclusively understood by the many old families that lived in southern Ikesia before the unification, whose cultural legacy made up the backbone of the union as it became under the Sage of Fog. In other words, it was an antiquated tongue almost exclusively spoken by people very likely to be patriotic for Ikesia.

Makhus was not from one of these families, but he felt himself fortunate, for the very man who he had named himself after was also the man thanks to whom he understood this dialect. This man he so deeply respected was a nobody, just a lower middle-class librarian that liked his home city-state very much, as people of his generation did. 

But he had taught him to read and write Old Ikesian, so that little Makhus could read the old alchemy textbooks that were still written in this dialect.

And so it was that he could now read this encoded journal, which spoke of such things that he risked execution just by reading it.

Whosoever reads this journal, know that I hold no regrets for my actions, that I was of sound mind throughout all my life, and that I have never so much as considered suicide. If you are reading this, I have either been slain in defense of my homeland or by the treacherous hands of anti-Ikesian operatives.

Three years before the unification, I took part in an alchemist’s convention at which I met a man who I believe later became known as the Sage of Fog. He revealed to me no secrets of the Fog, no grand design of alchemy, but he planted in my mind a seed which has sprouted into a grand design of its own.

Within these pages, I intend to detail the process of creating a homunculus capable of surpassing the greatest heroic bloodlines of the old powers.

For hours that, to him, felt like mere minutes, Makhus continued to feverishly decode page after page of the journal.