A Novel
The Alchemist of Goreau — Chapter 1
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The Alchemist of Goreau is a fantasy novel set in late 1800’s in a mountainous Central European country with magic, incredible and unbelievable situations, and a healthy dose of humor. The story follows Donwillo, a mid-twenties alchemist struggling to make a name for himself in the world. When the world starts to crumble, he’s the most likely suspect. Follow his journey as he seeks to clear his name.
Are you ready to join Donwillo on a fantastical journey?
Chapter 1 — Donwillo Cooks
Donwillo calibrated the Conjunctugator, a machine he designed and built that combined rare earth minerals into new compounds. For most who studied alchemy, the Conjunctugator was more myth than anything. And yet here it was, being operated by the man the Alchemist Guild cast out for pursuing profit seeking ventures.
Donwillo lived and worked on a low hillside overlooking the small town of Goreau, in a portion of the Schlussen Alps rarely visited or seen by outsiders. The natural beauty was unsurpassed, but the people were Luddites, anti-tech, anti-pretty much everything that could possibly bring change to their culture that somehow remained untouched by modernity.
The locals had enjoyed peace, cowbells, tales by the hearth, and seclusion like none other, and this way of living suited them all just fine.
They were cradled in tradition and self- imposed isolation.
The number of citizens in the spread out village was unknown, since country census takers often walked past it by accident, the way one might walk past a black cat at night with its eyes closed.
It was so irrelevant to the Schlussen government that the leader, called the Absolutum, had never bothered to send tax collectors to the city.
Tax collectors were more than content to never visit Goreau as they feared it like some quicksand that would drag them under never to be heard from again.
Just because the citizens of Goreau were Luddites didn’t mean they weren’t interested in education or history. Goreau was a book place. A town so full of fact, fiction, myth and tall tales that the people believed in a sort of magic. Or rather, they couldn’t quite cling to reality the way most people do. It was a collective delusion, in a way.
It came to their collective consciousness that nearly everything recorded in the history books was bad, and that the only way to avoid ending up in them was to do nothing of interest. And this seemed like the best way forward.
Over generations, the people of Goreau perfected the art of doing nothing important, minding their own business, and minimizing trade so as to remain unseen by the greater society.
When Donwillo came to Goreau he found it to be the ideal place to setup his experiments. Everyone left him alone and nobody inquired about his business.
While this put him far outside the intellectual epicenter of alchemist learning and education, he didn’t mind. His ideas has been widely rejected by his colleagues anyway.
Goreau offered him freedom to operate without oversight or Guild regulations, which had grown increasingly strict to the point where nothing significant had been discovered by alchemists in three hundred years.
The one downside of Goreau’s isolated nature was that Donwillo often struggled to acquire materials and rare elements he needed for his experiments.
The residents of Goreau shunned the new-fangled trains that dotted the countryside, instead insisting that horse and carriage were the perfect meld between God’s creation and the pinnacle of what man could create.
Electricity was also seen as a fad at best and at the worst a sign of the decline of human culture. Their reasoning went something like this: electricity would mean the death of stumbling around at night by moonlight hoping not to get eaten by a bear and that without this quintessential human experience we were halfway to being automatons.
The oral tradition was strong amongst the people of Goreau. They told stories that passed through generations unencumbered by unnecessary additions. Their myths were poured straight from the fountain of the Gods, or so they believed. Who were Gods? Just their very important ancestors. The stories honored their past and the storytellers secretly hoped they too would be remembered as figures larger than life.
The hearth was essential to their oral tradition, just another reason they feared electricity coming into their lives and obliterating their history.
Donwillo’s cabin was part home and part laboratory, though the part that was home had shrunk considerably to accommodate his Conjunctugator and its various appendages and accessories.
Currently, both he and the Conjunctugator were hard at work on what could be the greatest invention in human history — the creation of a brand new element.
At present, various elements were colliding, orbiting, melding, fusing and infusing, and finally remaking themselves into the beginning of the pieces that would make up a new element lighter than aluminum, stronger than titanium, and ten times more brilliant and rare as gold.
Donwillo’s part in this was monitoring the finicky lumbering behemoth taking up most of his cabin. He feathered knobs, tightened pieces grown lose from vibrations, and watching and responding to the movement of numerous gauges.
The cabin grew hot from the reaction taking place within the soldered steel sphere where the chemical reactions were taking place.
Should he succeed, the new element would be the most sought after metal in the world. And he would be the sole supplier. Kings, wealthy bankers, rulers from all the lands would desire it for its unique properties.
He would instantly become one of the most wealthy humans on earth.
Ships would sail across the seas to acquire his precious material.
Woman would find him immensely desirable.
And the Alchemist Guild would come crawling back with palms outstretched, begging him to teach them his ways.
And he would buy perhaps a farm and hire people to tend pigs, cows, and chickens, and his garden would stretch as far as the eye can see. And his team of personal chefs would never fail to prepare decedent feast after feast for him and whoever he blessed with an invitation. And his stomach would never, ever, ever feel that gnawing sensation that is the reminder of lack — that is the reminder that the most basic human requirement is not being met, and that hunger would be a word he soon forgot the meaning of.
Beverly, an ermine who lived with him, sat in the corner with a fresh quail she had killed earlier in the day. As was her tradition, she would set the quail out for Donwillo to eat, as she had quickly deduced that he did not carry the capabilities to take care of himself. If he hadn’t eaten it by midday, she would.
Donwillo didn’t remember much of what happened before his accident at the Alchemist Guild. In fact, he had no recollection of his parents, who supposedly left him one day at the courthouse and disappeared forever.
The court was unable to find a home for him and so placed him in the charge of the Alchemist Guilds Apprentice program. Accidents were common at the Guild. This was seen by teachers as a necessary evil in the search for answers. The day his memory was lost was when his alchemy partner combined, by accident, two elements and a not-so-noble gas that should never be combined. It was like a memory bomb went off. He had fainted, been dragged out by a stout boy named Randolph, and thankfully came-to hours later right when doctors were about to declare him medically deceased.
Donwillo found he had a natural inclination towards alchemy without even caring too much about it.
The core tenets of alchemy were mathematics, theory, and the ability to hypothesize reactions before they occurred. For those who were bad at this last item, they were the ones who most often suffered bodily harm.
Donwillo could pick up an element he’d never seen before, palm it, feel it’s texture, feel it’s density, and come up with a list of possible reactions that may be useful. And he was, crazily enough, almost always right. This made him unpopular. Excelling at a skill is even more obnoxious to peers when the person excelling doesn’t even know why or how they are succeeding. It just seems pompous.
Donwillo once witnessed a chemical reaction that decripified a student’s skin.
Another time a student stood too close to a beaker, a lose hair dropped in the concoction, and it burned a hole through the desk, then the floor, then the earth, and as far as anyone could tell it went all the way through to the center of the earth, and possibly further.
With how common accidents were at the training facility, the Guild leaders had been careful to select individuals for their program who had few familial connections. Orphans were a popular pick, as were beggars (their parents may be relieved they didn’t have another mouth to feed when their child went missing), and straight up the unlikeable children — the snot nosed bratty types whose mother’s could only love them on a good day.
He heard a knock at his door. This was unusual. Macob was a good deterrent, the roaming animated corpse Donwillo had brought to life by mistake and now prowled his grounds acting as a security guard.
The timing of this knock could not have been worse.
He needed his full concentration. Running the Conjunctugator was like trying to to keep the lid on a bucket of rattlesnacks using chopsticks.
On a chalkboard behind him were the number of tallies, marking each prior attempt, it looked like an aerial view of a cornfield.
Still, he felt like this really would be the attempt to succeed.
The knocking persisted. Each sound wriggled its way into his ear, trounced through this neurons, and batted about his focus like a cat with a ball of yarn. He couldn’t take it much longer.
Still, he kept his eyes on the controls, babying the Conjunctugator, softly coaxing it to greatness.
He’d experienced distractions in the past. Beverly had a habit of tossing wood chips at him when bored, tired, or hungry, which made up about 95 percent of her day. One time a wood chip got sucked into the intake valve and he’d spent three days rebuilding the fuel system.
Alongside the various tallies on the chalkboard were reminders like, “Take your time,” “Patience is a virtue,” and “Feed Beverley,” which was underlined multiple times.
Sometimes however he had nothing left in this cupboard to feed her and had to power through the storm of wood chips anyway.
His focus had been tested before.
What made this situation different was he couldn’t get past the idea that the person or thing on the other side of the door had slipped his defenses, and was not deterred by an undying monster. It must be made of something resilient.
Donwillo, using his utmost powers of concentration, was able to tune out the knocks by filing them away into the symphony of sounds the Conjunctugator made. His mind categorized it as just an extra percussion section, and while it played off-beat and off-rhythm, it was still a part of the program.
This worked temporarily. And then the knock changed. It found the part of the door that resonated perfectly. It was a perfect transfer of fist, to wood, to interior of his cabin, to the emotional center of his brain.
He was mad now.
For the first time he took his eyes off the Conjunctugator to hazard a glance out the window. There was Macob, going back and forth along the fence line, as if nothing was happening.
Donwillo considered his options. He could take his hands off the wheel, run to the door, shoo the interloper away, or he could hope and pray that every knock would be the last.
He choose, inspite of himself, the first option. He flung open the door, as angrily as he could so as to send a clear message, and then hollared into the space, “I’m busy, leave me alone.”
Then he tried to slam it shut but he found he could not, as there was a little girl holding a few boxes of cookies that she placed between the door and the door jam. The door smushed the boxes nearly flat.
“That’ll be 8 Absolutumens,” she said, with gusto, innocence, and, thought Donwillo, and hint of deviousness that small children display on occasion.
The Conjunctugator, hating to be left alone, retaliated by launching a loose bolt at their heads. It missed, zoomed through the front walkway, and zinged past Macob, who’s dumb expression did not change.
He rushed back to the Conjunctugator to try and wrestle it back into shape before it popped off.
The Girl Scout followed him inside, babbling all the way.
“My mom says you are a stingy guy but I don’t think so. She told me not to bother trying to sell you cookies, but I decided to come up here anyway. I think I can tell just by looking at you, you have a whole lot to offer the Girl Scouts and frankly I think this could be a very lucertive partnership for both of us.”
The Conjunctugator was wobbly, thrown off axis. He was worried about the reaction maintaining its stability inside the sphere. If the reaction failed, it would be months before he could collect enough source material to run the experiment again.
“I have lemon glazed, chocolate fudge brownies, hazelnut pistachio…”
“…Every box you buy goes to support the Girl Scout foundation of Schlussen. You’d be doing a great service…”
Donwillo tuned her out. He was locked in mortal combat with the Conjunctugator. It was trying to explode and he was trying to stop it from exploding.
“Please, not now,” he said with the one percent of his brain not focused on the Conjunctugator.
“If you do not support our causes there’s a good chance our organization will no longer exist.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” he said gruffly while clamping a hose that had come lose and was releasing steam.
“You don’t mean that, sir,” said the little girl.
“I do mean it! Now get out before something terrible happens!”
“Are you threatening me?” said the girl indignantly.
“No,” he shouted. “Well, yes actually. Leave now, or else!”
And at that moment Donwillo lost control over the Conjunctugator and all hell broke loose.
The order with which things happened was this:
- The safety bolts shore clean off.
- The metal dome containing the reaction shot straight through the ceiling.
- The half-formed new metal reacted with the air and super heated.
- The Conjunctugator began spewing molten liquid like confetti.
- Donwillo grabbed the girl and ran.
- His cabin went up in flames.
Once outside and a safe distance away he was able to watch his home and workspace burn to the ground, helpless to stop it.
The Girl Scout started babbling again.
“That’s three boxes at eight Absolutumens each, plus a trauma fee, your total is 45 Absolutumens,” she said brightly.
He looked at her.
She twirled a pigtail.
He glared.
“Where’s your mother?” he asked.
“If I have to stick around I’m going to have to start collecting interest,” she said confidently.
“I’ve never hurt a child before,” he mumbled.
“Would you be interested in signing up for our special subscriber service?” she asked, and before he could stop her she continued,
“For a modest fee of 25 Absolutumens per month you will receive fresh cookies delivered to your door twice a month.”
Donwillo zoned out.
When he zoned back in she was still talking.
“I need you to leave,” he finally said.
The girl sensed that her sale was a lost cause and that she wasn’t going to get paid for her work today.
“I just need some time alone,” he muttered.
With that she left the property.
Macob shuffled over and placed a dead hand on his shoulder.
On the corner of his lip was a cookie crumb.