Redemption Arc

Lucian had left the first Student Ambassador meeting on somewhat frigid terms. He walked alongside Miriam as they left the Concord. Stairs were very troublesome for her. She clung to the railing as she hauled that metal prosthesis of hers up each step. He would have offered to help, but he knew Miriam well enough to know that she’d hate being shown pity. She liked to do everything herself, and resented special treatment.

“What exactly did you want to talk about?” Lucian asked her.

“Your grandfather,” she said, then paused to move another step.

“I think he’s dead. I’m afraid I don’t have much influence there,” Lucian answered.

“I didn’t finish my sentence,” she said, then sighed exasperatedly. “I’ll hold my tongue ‘til I get to the top.”

Miriam reached down to her prosthetic and fiddled with it for a moment until it came off. She picked it up and hauled it over her shoulder, then started hopping her way to the top. Lucian followed nearby, ready to catch her if she stumbled while trying not to stare. Miriam was quite adroit. Lucian found himself taking the stairs quickly to keep up. Once at the top, she set her leg down, panting a little as she refitted it.

“Could have asked me for help,” Lucian said.

“Yet I didn’t,” she returned, testing to be sure the leg was attached. “Because I didn’t need it.”

Lucian thought of a joke Miriam might appreciate, and after a moment of hesitation, decided to go through with it. “Just saying… real inconsiderate of you.” She looked at him with a raised brow. “You saw how much people hate me in there, and now you’re having me stand idle while you hop up the stairs. Think about me for a minute.”

Miriam laughed hard, and he was glad he judged her sense of humor right. “Sorry. Sometimes I just don’t understand how good I have it.” She stood tall, and then resumed walking. “Anyway… as I was saying, I wanted to get some information from you regarding your grandfather.”

“Alright. I’ll answer what I can,” Lucian said, then the two of them started walking toward the alchemy class. He still wasn’t entirely sure what this was about.

“Your grandfather was one of the principal people involved in dismantling the Black Bloom Initiative. Is that something you have any knowledge about?” Miriam asked, her tone neutral.

Lucian didn’t answer immediately. The Black Bloom Initiative was the name for the project that saw the development of the plague which had deprived Miriam of her leg as a baby and still persisted in the Republic of New Riverra to this day. Advances had been made to stall the disease, but Miriam was of the opinion that it could be cured entirely. As it turns out, she wasn’t wrong.

“I’m vaguely aware that he had some part. I’m afraid that I wasn’t born when it was ongoing,” Lucian said.

“Well, neither was I,” Miriam said with a shrug. “Maybe I should explain why it is I’m asking so you don’t get the wrong idea. My primary interest is in further dismantling the Black Bloom. It’s a disease that affects elves, solely. Advances in alchemy have allowed us to render it dormant, which has been a great boon to my people. One area in which it’s lacking is in protection of newborns. My mother rendered the Black Bloom dormant with the drug, just like countless other elves—you call us quasi-humans.”

“I call you elves,” Lucian corrected.

“You’re a race traitor, huh? It’s just a name, though. I don’t care what people call us.” She glanced over at him. “Like I was saying, even though the drug rendered it dormant in my mother, the Black Bloom still spread to me in the womb. Can you guess the result?”

“You lost your leg,” Lucian said.

“Wrong,” Miriam said. “Didn’t lose it. I keep it in a bag at my home. It’s a little black shriveled thing.”

“Oh yeah? Maybe you can show it to me sometimes,” Lucian said, knowing she was making that up.

Miriam tsked. “First real conversation, you’re already asking to see my bare legs. Shameful. I see they were right about you.”

Lucian chuckled. “If they called me a lie detector, yeah.”

“Alright, fine, I don’t have my old leg. I wish my mother did keep it, but she was too busy crying about it.” Miriam shook her head with a wide smile. “Anyway, point is, I’m looking into the Black Bloom Initiative. If there’s anything you can tell me about the project, I’d be very glad to hear it. Considering your grandfather was one of the people responsible for ending it, I figured you might at least have some information. Some tall tales he told at the dinner table, maybe?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelFire; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“You must be scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Lucian observed.

Miriam nodded in solemn agreement. “As you might expect, it’s not particularly easy to get information about. The only reason I accepted the position of Student Ambassador was in some hope that I could leverage the influence to force some people to declassify information. Whether that’ll happen, we’ll see.”

Lucian couldn’t exactly justify keeping information from Miriam. At the same time, he could get the both of them killed if he was too loose with his words. The Black Bloom Initiative was a closely guarded secret that multiple governments would kill to cover up. He liked Miriam—more importantly, he liked living.

Still, he could give her something.

“The only information I could give you that might help is the fact that some members of the Black Bloom Initiative are still alive,” Lucian told her.

Miriam scoffed. “But the project ended… seventy years ago. I doubt there were any twenty-year-olds working on the project—and even if they were, they’d be ninety years old, at best. Realistically, these were professionals in their thirties, forties, and fifties—meaning they’d be in their hundreds.”

Lucian shrugged. “That narrows down your search significantly, then. I know for a fact they’re alive.”

“How?” Miriam asked.

“I overheard my father talking about it one time,” he said.

“And that’s given you enough conviction to say that you know for a fact that they’re alive?”

“They say that alchemy promotes longevity.” Lucian walked ahead and stopped. “These were some of the brightest minds of their generation. Do you think that the governments would be so eager to get rid of them? It was a settlement reached right here in this city that put an end to the Black Bloom Initiative, not an armed invasion. I’ve no doubt they gave considerable concessions.”

“…that does give me something to consider.” Miriam ran a hand through her hair.

Lucian felt a little guilty he couldn’t give more, but if Metterand found out he’d given her even this much, he might break his shins. He couldn’t simply tell her the answer, either, because he didn’t know it. The alchemical solution for the Black Bloom had yet to be discovered—its production process wasn’t elaborated on in the War of Four, either, so he couldn’t even guide her in the right direction. Still…

“Maybe I could help you out,” Lucian proposed. “Let you throw my weight around as the heir to Duke Cyril Villamar.”

Miriam tilted her head. “I wouldn’t let you help me up the stairs, now you’ll expect I’ll respond positively to this?”

“Here’s a thought—maybe I just don’t like babies being born without legs,” Lucian said, meeting her gaze. “And unless you do, I think you should take my help.”

Her haunting eyes looked upon him. “So… this is out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Not fully. You immediately became silver-ranked in alchemy,” Lucian said. “I think I need quite a bit of help in that field, and I wouldn’t mind having a study partner whose considerable talent I could leech off.”

“There’s half a million instructors in the Collegium,” Miriam exaggerated. “You want one-on-one guidance, you’ll find it there.”

Lucian shrugged. “Wouldn’t hurt to start turning people’s opinions around by working on a noble cause.”

Miriam crossed her arms. “Most people don’t like that my kind are even at the Collegium. They don’t care about the Black Bloom Initiative, and they won’t care that you helped us.”

“You want help, or not?” Lucian said.

Miriam stared at him for a few moments before she walked up to him and patted his arm. “I understand. You want to stop another ugly thing like me from being born into the world.”

Lucian snorted. “Believe you me, I’ll be taking full advantage of your talents. I have a lot of need for alchemy.”

“As I remember right, you still need to learn the basics,” Miriam said. “But sure. I can help you out. I think you’ll find my help lacking in comparison to the instructors.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” Lucian said, then took off walking with her.

***

Lucian attended his first alchemy class. It was very grinding and dull to get started. He had to learn a great many things about the instruments that they used in the process alongside the tools necessary to handle and process the ingredients. The foundational stuff was always the most boring.

His instructor spent hours teaching the names and purposes of beakers, retorts, alembics, and crucibles. He had to practice weighing powders to the grain, stirring solutions at a precise pace, and writing down endless safety procedures about fumes, burns, and contamination. It felt like the lectures were designed to test patience more than skill. Miriam, meanwhile, seemed to be practicing making an incredibly complex potion with her instructor—it was more engaging just watching her work than listening to his instructor.

He intended on pursuing alchemy independently, but having a connection to Miriam would be a great boon. She was capable of becoming one of the most skilled alchemists in the game if the player paid proper attention to her growth. Completion of her quest to deal with the Black Bloom Initiative was a key component of that. She was also quite a skilled spellcaster even despite her disability. He’d call them ‘friendly acquaintances,’ for now.

It'd take a while for alchemy to get started. On the other areas, though, he needed to get busy right away. If he wanted to have any hope of surviving, there were a few things he needed to learn without question.

Lucian sat at a bench in one of the Collegium’s parks, looking into his Evercodex. One page in particular dominated his attention.

Mission 1: Bandits on the Confluence

He’d made it through the prologue, but this was where the War of Four truly began.