B1 Chapter 1: Gwendolyn

The village was extremely suspicious of the new shopkeeper.

There were about thirty inhabitants left, if that. The innkeeper and his wife had left the very day Modivar moved in.

The shop Modivar had bought was run down and beaten to shit, but it did come with a few perks. Dead rats. Maybe mold. It gave him something to focus on, something to scrub and tear out, instead of the horrors that sat behind his eyelids.

Modivar spent the first week repairing the shop with quiet diligence. He scrubbed every stone. He ripped out every broken board. He learned how to cut wood by hand, because no one in the village would sell to him. The carpenter would not sell him lumber. When Modivar pressed, the man finally snapped at him.

“You’re new,” he said. “Nothing good ever comes from anything new in this village. Get out of here.”

That was what everyone told him each time he tried to buy anything.

As the weather grew colder, desperation crept in. He had wanted something like this, isolation and quiet, but what he had found was suspicion layered on top of suspicion. Still, he persevered.

When he opened the shop, he had no customers.

It was the nicest place in the village by then. Bright. Clean. Almost sparkling. A glimmer of hope in a bleak, unforgiving place.

Needless to say, the villagers hated it.

He had no customers the second week, either. He continued to make potions. He continued to repair what he could. He took care of his horse, the only companion who listened to him without judgment. He named her Gwendolyn.

Over time, something that felt very much like friendship settled in.

She had an attitude, which he found endlessly amusing. She refused to stay in the stable. She did not like the outside, and he could understand why. Everything out there looked like it was about to fall over. The shop was the only building that seemed like it would survive another winter.

The stables were worse. There were more rats than hay.

Gwendolyn gave him a look when he tried to leave her there.

The stable hand, a farm boy who looked perpetually bored with his own existence. Only agreed to take her in after Modivar convinced him with far more gold than would have ever been considered extortionate. Even then, the boy seemed deeply unenthused about the idea of actual work. There was only one other horse in the entire village, and that horse looked ancient.

So Gwendolyn stayed in the shop instead.

Modivar preferred it that way. At least there, she would not catch whatever sickness seemed to live in the stable walls.

He began to brew tonics and simple concoctions from the supplies he had brought with him. As the days passed, he realized his stock of ingredients was running low. It did not make much sense. No one had bought anything. His shelves were not empty.

And yet, somehow, he was already running out.

Mostly because Gwendolyn kept eating his supplies. He complained at the horse, who looked at him with complete indifference while sticking her head into the golden helidian wheat. He needed that as it was the base ingredient for half of his potions and all of his poultices.

Modivar spent another week indoors, barely leaving the shop, burning through what little supplies he had left. Gwendolyn grew fat on the rest of them. It turned out her favorite food was Algonian pumpkins, the stupidly expensive pumpkins that formed the basis of almost all of his tinctures.

The damn horse ate every single one of them. Except the one he was fighting her over now, trying to pull it free from her mouth while she fought back in a stupid tug-of-war.

That was when the door to his shop opened.

The bell rang for the first time.

Both Modivar and Gwendolyn turned to look.

Modivar’s jaw dropped.

Gwendolyn’s jaw dropped, too, and then she snapped the Algonian pumpkin fully into her mouth. Walking off into the back of the shop, whinnying in triumph as she claimed victory.

A woman stood in the doorway.

She was dressed entirely in black. A corset. A long skirt. And a wide-brimmed hat that Modivar would have called a witch’s hat, if she had looked like any witch he had ever seen.

“Hey,” she said. “You. Behind the counter. You got any Elis potions?”

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She stepped inside without waiting for an answer.

“It says you’re a potion seller,” she continued. “I’ve been looking for something for a while now. You think you could help me?”

Modivar realized belatedly that he was staring.

“Elis potions?” he said at last. “No, I don’t think I have any of those. My damn horse just ate the base for them, I’m pretty sure.”

“That’s too bad,” the woman said. “I really need some for… well, that’s not the point. Shame.”

She turned to leave.

“Wait,” Modivar blurted. “Wait, wait, wait, please don’t go. I can make them. I can.”

She stopped.

“Well,” she said slowly, looking around the shop, “it does look like you actually know what you’re doing. I can tell from the Cantanger drops you’ve got here that you know your craft.”

“Yeah,” Modivar said quickly. “Yeah. I’m classically trained.”

She stared at him.

“What the hell is a classically trained alchemist doing all the way out here?”

Modivar shrugged. “Trying to get away. You know. Life.”

She smiled faintly. “Yeah. Life’s a lich.”

“What?” Modivar asked.

“Life’s a lich, then you die,” she said. “You know the saying?”

“Oh,” he said, a cold flash of memory running through him. “Yeah. Yeah, I know it.”

She had no idea what she had stirred.

“But anyway,” Modivar said, forcing himself back to the present, “I can help you. I just need to gather a few things. Three-eyed mushrooms. I’m pretty sure I passed a patch on my way into the village. I just didn’t think my damn horse would like eating them so much.”