Morning all. I hope your Monday went smashingly. Mine was pretty productive. The paperback for Born of Sugar and Spice is now out and I am hoping that my the end of the day today the hardback should be released. With luck all will go well. For now, I can only get on with my day and resist the urge to check. So let’s jump into the morning prompt as I try not to check on progress I can’t control.
I like this one. Not sure where it is going, but I really like the start.
Tuesday, July 23rd: He stepped carefully.
He stepped carefully. The ground was littered with the remains of broken bottles. Worse, the potions that they contained were now out of those bottles and forming small pools on the floor. He knew most of them would not harm him, after all they created no dark elixirs here, however he knew the mixes would be unstable.
While some potions formed solitary pools, others merged together. In some the colors blended into new and interesting shades. Those he was not concerned with. The shades might have been interesting, but the shine was gone. They wee wet but they lost that inner glow letting him know the magic escaped. Those potions were inert.
Some of the mixes he found most concerning. One pool had formed from the contents of several broken bottles. It was a shimmering silver that seemed to move like a lake under a steady breeze. As beautiful as it appeared, he made certain to avoid it. There was a dark green pool that anyone could see needed to be avoided. It pulsed light from deep within. A third light gray pool simmered with pearlescence and sent up delicate drifts of vapor. He slipped his nose into the crook of his arm and held his breath as he raced past.
Out of the mess created, those were the three he was most concerned with, and why he risked crossing the shattered workroom to begin with. Before he forgot what his eyes told him, he took out a piece of parchment and a stick of charcoal and listed out the broken bottles near each of the concerning pools of mixed up magic. Knowing what went into creating them would be the first step towards figuring out how to clean them up.
Kellan knew better than to simply try sweeping them all away for disposal. He could inadvertently create more new and uncontrolled mixes.
First to see if the neutralizer does anything,’ he thought as he set the page to the side. While there was magic active on the floor none of it was stretching up to the ceiling, at least not yet and he could tell that the safety precaution he rigged was still active. He set loose a drift of his own magic and the pick orbs fixed to the ceiling all burst, showering their contents down at once in a colorless spray. The neutralizer spell eliminated any of the individual glimmering magic left in the singular potions and dimmed two of the combined pools.
It was effective enough that he reached onto the outer shelf and began tossing more neutralizer bubbles on them. Slowly those two were neutralized, the magic in them going inert. It was just the silvery pool that remained. It was unchanged by the neutralizer and would require different means of disposal.
Ten til Midnight 