They say the art of alchemy was lost to the world a hundred years ago, buried beneath the ashes of forgotten kingdoms and erased from the pages of history. The towers of the old guilds stand hollow now, their libraries gutted, their secrets scattered like dust on the wind.
But legends are stubborn things. Like whispers in the dark, they linger—flickering at the edge of memory, impossible to silence.
I never gave them much thought. Not since the Purge. Not since the day the Verdant Sigil burned, and my father's broken body hung in the city square, branded as a traitor and heretic.
Not since the Order made it clear: alchemy was dead, and anyone who carried its mark would follow.
I was only eight then, small enough to be hidden in the cellar beneath our workshop, clutching a half-burned grimoire as the boots thundered overhead. My mother vanished that same night—fled into the Deadlands, they said, chasing some final secret. She never came back. I learned to forget her face, forget the symbols she traced in the air, the scent of burning silver and crushed violets that lingered in her wake.
For ten years I kept the vow: no circles, no transmutations, no forbidden books. I worked honest trades—mending clocks, repairing old machines—blending into the city's gray life like one more forgotten gear. I told myself the hunger was gone. I told myself the art was dead.
And then the letter came.
It arrived without warning, slipped beneath the door of my workshop in the dead of night. No name on the envelope. No return address. Just crimson wax sealing the flap, stamped with a sigil no living soul should recognize:
A serpent devouring its own tail.
The Ouroboros.
My hands shook as I broke the seal. I had not seen that mark since the Guild Wars ended in fire. Since my father's journals—sealed beneath the floorboards—had last whispered to me in dreams.
Inside lay a single sheet of parchment, yellowed and brittle, yet the words scrawled across it burned with fierce urgency—as though written only moments before.
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"To the one who dares to read this,
I entrust you with my final wish.
Complete the Philosopher's Circuit…
And unlock the secret of the First Alchemist."
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I read it once. Twice. A third time. Hoping the meaning might shift, that the words would soften into something harmless. But they did not. This was no prank. No idle jest from some deranged historian. This was a summons from the grave—an impossible command born of a dead age.
I should have burned the letter.
I should have laughed and fed it to the furnace, called it madness and gone back to the quiet lie of my life.
But curiosity... ah, curiosity. The first and greatest sin of every alchemist.
It crept through my thoughts like slow poison, hooked its claws into the part of my soul that remembered the old dreams—the shimmer of gold spun from lead, water transmuted into wine, life wrested from death's grip.
The part of me that remembered my father's voice, low and secret in the lamplight:
"One day, Corwin. When the Circuit is complete, all things will be made whole again."
I swore I'd forget those words. I swore I'd forget him.
But I did not sleep that night.
By dawn, the letter lay open on my workbench, its crimson seal glinting in the gray light, surrounded by forbidden things I'd kept hidden for years: pages torn from my father's journals, crumbling notes salvaged from the ruin of the Verdant Sigil, fragments of ciphered formulas I told myself I would never read again.
And yet I traced the serpent's curve on the seal with the tip of my finger, and the old hunger stirred.
The Philosopher's Circuit. A name spoken only in myth, only in nightmares.
But what if it was real?
Since that night, the shadows have thickened around me. I glimpse figures watching from alley mouths. Hear whispers in tongues no living man speaks. Symbols I cannot decipher carved into my workshop door, faint and fading before sunrise.
Someone knows I have the letter.
Someone does not intend for me to live long enough to finish what it commands.
And yet I follow the trail, deeper into the labyrinth of forgotten knowledge. Each page of alchemy I reclaim pulls me closer to the truth… and to the price of that truth.
For what the letter did not say—but what every alchemist learns in their bones—is this:
The First Alchemist did not unlock the secret of life without sacrifice.
No great transmutation is wrought without cost.
And the price of this one may be more than I can pay.
Still, I press on. I am my father's son. My mother's shadow. The last flicker of a dead art in a world that has forgotten the fire.
Guided by lost formulas. Hunted by unseen eyes. Haunted by visions of a world that once bent to the impossible laws of alchemy
I stand on the edge of the unknown. The line between life and death, truth and myth, thinner than a gold leaf.
This is my story.
This is the story of the last alchemist wish.
And the price for fulfilling it.