Insignia: Scars of Lumierna

Eleven

The night's chilling tendrils creep through the cracks of Faerydae's cottage. She doesn't seem to notice anymore with her skirt of color, scraps of fabric spread out like petals of a flowering meadow. Her skin flushing, she leans over the hot coals of her alchemy set. She finishes grinding the last of the beetle wings in her mortar. Setting down her pestle, she adds the dry ingredient to a bowl already containing dried rosemary and honey.

Taking a freshly sharpened knife, she folds the end of her hair over the edge, and with a fluid movement, she cuts a small lock off. She whispers words as she sprinkles them into the bowl. She sets the bowl over the glowing coals and pumps the bellow, breathing a fresh breath of air across them. They ripple and flicker with life, melting the honey into a softened liquid.

Reaching over to a box of clay bottles, she runs her hands across the corks until she sees one with a pink painted dot. She plucks it from the rest and pours the rosewater into her mixture while simultaneously stirring. Removing her concoction before the rosewater heats up to a boil, she pours it over a fresh pigeon heart.

Her eyes shoot up from her alchemy set at the sound of boots treading heavily on the gravel path of her garden. With the skip of her heart beating in her eardrums, she grabs the third bowl with her almost completed love potion and throws it to a corner of her room behind her storage crates. The contents saturate the dirt giving up the properties they once held.

Still sitting on the ground, she spins around to face two guards pushing through her curtain door. "Faerydae Rhoslyn, you are under arrest for the practice of alchemy."

She can't run. She can't scream. Her body is rooted to the ground in fear as the two guards trample through her home over to her. Eyes wide with terror, she stares up at their hands reaching down, ripping her from the earth.