The Elixir

	The bell tolls. It is midnight.

	The fires roar on the horizon, white as the stars they drown in a rising monolith of smoke.

	The rattle and march of soulless metal lurches towards your sacred ground. Vacant of a guard to defend it or a townsfolk to be terrified, you take both roles on.

	You rush, into the city center, into a dim and familiar glow as the honeyglow washes down the river, a glow soon to be choked by blood and ash pouring from the howling depths of the wildfire east of you.

	The bell tolls again, its shadow sinister against the backdrop of the glowing treeline. The nameless stone wisp of flame hovers there, atop its pile of dusty riches, a shrine whose patron is long forgotten and surely long dead, and yet a shrine around which your town was built.

	You are without any other option, and so you just kneel. The divine flame, the rage, it marches ever toward you. The smell of ash is now in your nose, and you can barely breathe as the summer breeze drags a pall over your beloved town.

	You don't know what to do! You look back at the cascade of vacant homes rolling down the hills; they lean in the night, no lanterns to hold the night at bay and no souls to hold the rot at bay. Is this worth it? Is this all worth it?

	You sob, and clutch the shrine, threatening to tear it from its thousand-year pedestal. It is your only hope, the only thing that might save this place, and it rests silent and inert in your arms. No spark, no sound, nothing. You give it everything you have, you splay the contents of your only coinpurse into its basin, you stare into the sky and beg it to break open and bring reckoning to the crusaders.

	You hear them. They march over the hill just behind the city center, the fire close behind them. The rising tide of flame reaches out to your soul, and you can feel it beginning to singe in the building heat. Glimmers of that hellish white flame seep through the cracks of the black treeline, like a dam prime to break.

	Your throat raw and your face burning, you prostrate yourself at the foot of this altar. Pray! You pray to a forgotten god, to save a forgotten place, a forgotten person, with no way of knowing whether there's anything at the other end of the line.

	You hear something behind you. From behind one of those empty, overgrown homes emerges a figure. Hobbling with a worn cane, staring at you with bright white eyes behind spectacles, a long, grim coat wrapping his wiry and senile frame. His wrinkled face curls into a knowing smile. He descends the steps towards his rapt and terrified audience, as the fires begin to breach the shade of the trees and threaten to consume your town.

	In the light of your apocalypse, as the bell tolls its final time, he stands before you, clasped in his hand a plain little bottle. In that elixir swirls a power whose stench overwhelms the ash, even through the cork; it burns your nostrils and eyes, shimmering with a thousand dizzy colors and un-colors. Wordlessly, his decrepit and trembling hand extends it to you, and as you turn to look at the shrine, you realize your riches have vanished.

	Desperate and lost, you reach up to him and clutch that bottled salvation. Without tarry, you tear the cork from the bottle and upend the contents into your maw, gagging and retching on the burning, nightmarish taste. It slinks down your throat like molten metal, and you feel it pool in your guts, heavy as an anchor. The bottle clatters to the ground as you wheeze and cough, kneeling there in the night, your hands clutch your pounding head. The man simply turns his back to you, promptly disappearing into the shifting scenery.

	Your eyes begin to bubble from their sockets and you feel your body start to come apart, howling as the energy floods back up your throat like bile.

	Your mortal form unwinds; in its place, ragnarok.

	…

	The morning comes. You awaken, in the town center, under that familiar summer dawn. Your eyes open, but you can barely feel the rest of your body; it feels as if, slowly, more and more of it begins to realize. There, hovering ominously and casting a shadow over your arcane half-form is the shrine.

	As you look about, you can still see the buildings looming over the hill, untouched by flame. Indeed, the trees that burned so brightly in your most recent memory stand as whole and as green as they were the morning before.

	Relief seeps into you, but so too does worry. You drag your arm out of unreality, and in time the rest of you follows. You look down, finally, as you regain the use of your neck, and see your body… or what remains of it, sunken into a shimmering mirage that is weaving itself back together.

	And no sooner than you regain your stomach do you feel that weight, still heavy inside of it. Not just that… but you can feel a similar and deeply unsettling weight to your veins, pumping as though filled with thick sludge. Your heart beats as slow as sand, each thump sending a sharp, stabbing pain through your chest as it struggles to move that slurry through your veins.

	What… have you become?