The Princess and the Alchemist - Part 21

The Princess and the Alchemist - Part 21
Dawn settled like a thin silver film over the laboratory windows. Agon remained motionless before the workbenches, one hand resting on the wooden surface, the other holding a quill he could no longer move. The flasks before him looked like tired sentinels, each one carrying a cataloged failure, each label holding dates and attempts that were already blurring in his memory. The lines of notes piled up like palimpsests of despair: extracts, solutions, combinations, proportions… nothing responded.
The candle beside him had already burned halfway down, wax dripping like indecisive tears. The silence was so thick it almost muffled the sound of his own breathing.

Agon closed his eyes. He tried to visualize the mental map of everything he had already tested. Roots of different types, leaves once used to combat seasonal fevers, and flowers formerly used in potions to strengthen the blood. Rare fungi that Lissandra cultivated in dark jars. He reviewed each of these attempts like someone examining ruins: he knew exactly where each brick had fallen.
No substance had suppressed the progression of the plague. Some even seemed promising for a few hours, but soon the disease advanced, disintegrating any hope.
Logic armed and disarmed itself in his head, like a board rearranging its pieces on its own.

His fingers touched the pages of his notes, and he felt a slight tremor. Physical exhaustion didn’t take him the same way it took Lissandra — he didn’t have Cathedral training, or vigils, or endless rituals — but the mind had its own ways of failing. His fatigue was different: an internal wear, a constant friction between “thinking” and “doubting.”
He massaged his brow, trying to recover some loose thread, some neglected detail. A hidden pattern. Something that had always been there, but that the mind, that stubborn creature, refused to see.
It was in that in-between place, that nebulous space between lucidity and despair, that a memory appeared — so faint it almost slipped by. An old scene: Lissandra talking to him about folhes, and he, long before that, on the day he arrived in Norden, noticing the presence of one plant in particular.
The tree in front of the palace.

It had been weeks since he last thought of it. Maybe because looking at it now hurts; it was dying too.
He opened his eyes slowly.
Why had he never returned there since all this started?
Intuition presented itself like a thin line, fragile, almost ridiculous — but insistent, like a mental whisper finding a crack to slip through.
He pushed his chair back and grabbed his cloak. The decision didn’t need words. There was nothing else inside this room he could wrest from rationality. The answer, if it existed, would be out there.
The laboratory door creaked when he opened it, as if the world were tired too. The corridor was silent, lit only by the diffuse glow of the moon. The palace slept.

Agon descended the stairs, careful not to make noise. He wasn’t fleeing, but he also wasn’t willing to explain this idea to anyone. Some discoveries demanded silence.
When he stepped into the garden, the cold air struck him with almost aggressive vigor. The wind carried the smell of damp earth and dead leaves. The tree stood not far away, a crooked shadow against the pale sky. He approached slowly, his heart quickening as if recognizing sacred — or profane — ground.
That trunk that had once been robust even in winter was now rough, cracked. The branches, dark as charcoal, pointed in irregular directions like arms begging for help. The ground around it was covered in dry leaves, a brown carpet that answered with a soft rustle at each of his steps.

Agon felt a tightness, a strange sadness.
He knelt. Ran his hand along the base of the trunk. Nothing there looked useful. Nothing looked alive. But his gaze, trained by insistence, found something tiny between the roots: a petal.
It was so small it could have been mistaken for a piece of bark, but when he touched it, he noticed the different texture. It was a dry petal, almost transparent. It was fragmented, but still held a trace of color, fighting not to disappear.
He held it carefully, as if afraid it would crumble in the air.
There was no guarantee it meant anything. It could be nothing more than leftover memory from the tree. The last breath of something that had tried to live.
But Agon knew — not with logic, but with the instinct of someone who had observed nature for years — that there was a reason that petal was there. A reason it had survived the general collapse, a reason it had appeared at that moment, even when people said it had bloomed only once and then never again.

He lifted the petal to his face. The moon passed through it, illuminating its delicate veins like a map. Something inside him rearranged, as if the world were finally opening a clearing in the shadows of doubt.
All the other samples he had taken from that tree had yielded no satisfactory results, but in that moment, the air changed behind him.
He didn’t turn right away. He merely recognized the sensation: the slight shift of someone holding their breath, the almost inaudible sound of fabric rubbing after a short run.

“So this is where you went.”
Lissandra’s voice arrived carrying exhaustion and irritation, but also relief.
Agon closed his eyes for a moment, defeated at having been followed. When he turned, she was there, still breathless. Her ceremonial cloak incomplete, hair undone, hands trembling. Her face was lit only by the moon and frustration.

“You’re going to scare yourself to death one of these days,” she muttered, crossing her arms. “Going out alone in the middle of the night without telling anyone… you’ve lost your mind.”
“I had already lost it before I left,” he replied, storing the petal carefully between his fingers. “This is… a desperate attempt.”
She stepped closer. Her gaze fell on his hand.
“A petal…” Her voice wavered. “But how… When?”
“I don’t know, but I followed a voice in my head telling me to look for a solution here one more time, and this is what I found. And since I can’t touch the samples at the Cathedral…” He smiled with irony, a fragile smile. “I tried everything, Lis. Everything. Following that voice and coming here again was all I had left.”

She shook her head, but her expression softened. “Agon… what if this is just a dry leaf altered by the plague’s effects?”
“It costs nothing to try. And if I can’t do anything, I’ll have to admit to your father that I can’t save the kingdom.” He sighed. “But let’s look on the bright side. At least one of us is making progress.”

His comment cut through the air like a blade. Her expression tightened; a shadow of pain crossed her eyes. She drew closer, brows furrowed.
“Don’t talk like I have a choice,” she whispered. “Half my day is ritual, the other half is study. Hestira watches me even when I breathe. I can’t just… disappear.”
“I know,” he said softly. “And seeing you being swallowed by all that makes me…”
The sentence died in his throat. He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid you’ll stop being you.”

She stared at him. For a moment, they seemed suspended in their own conflict. He feared losing her to fate. She feared losing him to obsession. Neither knew how to act in the face of that paradox.
Lissandra sighed, tired, but gently took his hand, opening his fingers to look at what she now also hoped was truly a petal.
“Whatever happens,” she said, studying the tiny fragment, “I’m here. Even if I arrive late, even if I’m exhausted, I come.”

Agon looked away, unable to face the raw truth of her sacrifice.
She touched the petal with her fingertip. “Let’s analyze this together.”
“Even if it’s useless?”
“Even if it’s the most useless thing you’ve ever brought into the lab.”

They laughed, as if they had forgotten for a few seconds the enormous weight they carried, then walked back, side by side, toward the palace. The petal, protected between their hands, shimmered under the moonlight as if guarding a stubborn secret.
A secret that, soon, would drag them into choices greater than either of them could imagine.