Timestamp: 31st Day of Summer, 513 A.V.
Location: Towers Respite Kitchens
Lazy afternoon sunlight lanced in through the high windows of the kitchens of the Towers Respite, setting dust motes to blazing supernovae and limning the bunches of dried herbs on long chains suspended from the vaulted ceilings in gilt fire.
Light also glimmered and pooled in glassware, ranged in neat, clamped rows on the workbenches all around, and shimmered on the pot-bellied expanse of a copper still, positioned in pride of place. Further coppery tanks were stapled to the wall with thick bands of iron, interspersed with battle-scarred cabinets. This, then, was the still-room, and the heart of Alses' interaction with the Respite kitchens.
The place had often been used as a rough-and-ready philterer's laboratory, and it was to that use that Alses tended to put it, making up the various essential oils and philtres the Respite tended to need – attar of roses for perfume and for the baths, for instance, or chilblain salve for the colder months (of which there were many, it had to be said).
Now, though, they were approaching the very zenith of Summer, where Syna waxed ascendant and Her light shone down the brightest. This was a time when the Synaborn of the city gloried and exulted, a time when the Temple of the Sun was thronged with worshippers and Taiyang alike, participating in the great temple-dance to the glory of Syna on high. Summer was also the most congenial of times for many of the plants – they grew and grew under the gentle heat and abundant light showered upon them, drank greedily of the nutrients and water that Semele provided in their scramble for the sun, reaching up to the unreachable fire that sustained them, a vegetative paean of praise that happened all across Mizahar every year, from the ice wastes of Avanthal in the north where Syna's touch was fleeting and precious, to the burning deserts of Eyktol in the south, a glorious place where summer never ended.
People, too, enjoyed the summer warmth and the short, balmy nights, forgoing the thick Kalean mountain robes that protected them through the worst of the winter and the caprice of Spring – but apparently that was a problem. The paler skin of the Kalean natives didn't glory quite as much in Syna's energies as the hides of Her Ethaefal did; the infinite energies pouring down could sometimes cause people to burn, according to Cook.
It sounded unpleasant, but fortunately there was a preventive measure, one that every philterer's shop tended to mix up in great batches for Summer – Alses had spent one very hot and sweaty afternoon at Tian's shop helping to make an apparently endless quantity of the stuff in exchange for the recipe, now safely locked in the vaults of her mind and also in her notebooks, just in case senility should happen to strike.
In the busy hum of her brain, as her body was piloted about the place selecting flasks and retorts – the still-room still had a shortage of beakers, alas – that recipe unfurled in her head, a silver litany directing her motions.
'A measure of almond oil,' she thought as she took down a brass vessel full of the pale yellow liquid from its high shelf and set it carefully near her work area. The oil was both sweet-smelling and useful, providing a highly motile base for the rest of the cream; it would mix well with the other oils and ingredients that provided the active ingredients of the philtre and provide a pleasing scent, too.
'Beeswax, of course...' The thought of it as she placed the open container of very faintly yellow wax near the oil brought a smile to her face – the bees had done very well out of her gardens throughout the summer, so it was only fair she took a little of the fruits of their labours. The particular batch she was using was something of which she was inordinately proud, since she'd been the one to actually clarify the stuff. It had started life as a sticky mess, so dark a yellow as to be almost brown and still glistening with the dregs of honey, bee-bits and a few other things she hadn't put a name to.
Clarifying beeswax wasn't hard, exactly, but it was time-consuming and involved – as she'd been taught it, anyway: lots and lots of boiling water was a staple of the process. Indeed, it took so much time to work with that she'd set aside most of yesterday for its production.
A
Timestamp: 30th Day of Summer, 513 A.V.
Cook had, blessedly, ensured she'd have all the equipment she'd need to turn deep yellow beeswax into fine, fine clarified wax, the perfect base for sunscreen. All of it was ranged about the walls of the still-room, just waiting for her to put them to use.
Pots predominated, beautiful coppery things in an array of different sizes that glowed with burnished light atop the stoves – this sort of work was a simple process, and easy enough to achieve with the Respite's equipment, so she'd not need to go begging to Tian, which was a good thing. Not that it wasn't nice to see the philterer, of course, but Alses was very conscious of imposing, of taking too much for granted – which was all too easy when a city revered your race.
In the quiet of the still-room, the pandemonium of the main kitchens reduced by distance and thick skyglass walls to a murmur, a comforting background hum that couched her thought processes rather than obliterating them under a hail of noise, Alses smiled. There was something about philtering, some echo of magic in the mundane skill – or perhaps it was simply that the method and precision inherent in it appealed to the clinical part of her brain that also delighted in the pedantry of world magic in general.
Regardless, philtering wasn't work – not in the sense of drudgery to be endured, anyway. Someone had said it, hadn't they? 'Find a job you enjoy and never work again.' Now, who had that been? Fenrad, one of her favourite philosopher-mages? No, he concerned himself with the arcane to the exclusion of all else.
No matter, no matter; she was here to make a philtered balm, not to stand around thinking of philosophers and their witty aphorisms.
Making a fire was something simple enough she did it on autopilot, almost, constructing a careful wigwam affair of dry birch twigs interleaved with masses of soft, spongy punkwood, its distinctive musky, not-unpleasantly rotting scent filling her nostrils as she worked in the bowels of the small stove the still-room was equipped with. Method and precision ruled here, too – spacing was everything and there had to be enough air available in the tapering wigwam for the punkwood and birch to catch or else all her effort would be wasted; no fire.
Alses was careful, layering her firestarter pile slowly but surely, making sure she could twine her slender fingers through the latticework with relative ease. That, she'd found, generally ensured sufficient air would get in to not only light the fire but also to allow it to burn without producing vast quantities of acrid smoke – the surefire sign of a novice firestarter, indicating that they'd packed their materials too tightly together and the flames were struggling to gain the supremacy.
Thankfully, the Respite was a civilised place and the main kitchens always had fires of one sort or another on the go – the big ovens at one end of the cavernous chamber reportedly took two days to get up to temperature, from cold, and as a result they were never – well, almost never, they still got a clean every so often, like everything else – allowed to die.
Senses closed as much as possible against the battering insult of the main kitchen, the sous-chefs dashing about the place with reckless abandon, the shouting at cross-purposes and the clang of pots and pans and the sizzle and crackle of foodstuffs partway through the transformation into cuisine, Alses made a dash for the glowing maws of the great ovens, at one end of the kitchens. The whole place always appeared to be on the brink of catastrophe, one step away from pandemonium, and yet three times a day, without fail, food issued forth with clockwork regularity, the maelstrom having somehow, somehow managed to come together in time.
Triumphant, with a blazing log held securely in some long iron tongs, wrest from the grasping, greedy fingers of the ovens, Alses retreated with no small relief to her own, much smaller chamber and the tamer stove there, thrusting the blazing log in amongst the kindling with a satisfied sigh.
Location: Towers Respite Kitchens
Lazy afternoon sunlight lanced in through the high windows of the kitchens of the Towers Respite, setting dust motes to blazing supernovae and limning the bunches of dried herbs on long chains suspended from the vaulted ceilings in gilt fire.
Light also glimmered and pooled in glassware, ranged in neat, clamped rows on the workbenches all around, and shimmered on the pot-bellied expanse of a copper still, positioned in pride of place. Further coppery tanks were stapled to the wall with thick bands of iron, interspersed with battle-scarred cabinets. This, then, was the still-room, and the heart of Alses' interaction with the Respite kitchens.
The place had often been used as a rough-and-ready philterer's laboratory, and it was to that use that Alses tended to put it, making up the various essential oils and philtres the Respite tended to need – attar of roses for perfume and for the baths, for instance, or chilblain salve for the colder months (of which there were many, it had to be said).
Now, though, they were approaching the very zenith of Summer, where Syna waxed ascendant and Her light shone down the brightest. This was a time when the Synaborn of the city gloried and exulted, a time when the Temple of the Sun was thronged with worshippers and Taiyang alike, participating in the great temple-dance to the glory of Syna on high. Summer was also the most congenial of times for many of the plants – they grew and grew under the gentle heat and abundant light showered upon them, drank greedily of the nutrients and water that Semele provided in their scramble for the sun, reaching up to the unreachable fire that sustained them, a vegetative paean of praise that happened all across Mizahar every year, from the ice wastes of Avanthal in the north where Syna's touch was fleeting and precious, to the burning deserts of Eyktol in the south, a glorious place where summer never ended.
People, too, enjoyed the summer warmth and the short, balmy nights, forgoing the thick Kalean mountain robes that protected them through the worst of the winter and the caprice of Spring – but apparently that was a problem. The paler skin of the Kalean natives didn't glory quite as much in Syna's energies as the hides of Her Ethaefal did; the infinite energies pouring down could sometimes cause people to burn, according to Cook.
It sounded unpleasant, but fortunately there was a preventive measure, one that every philterer's shop tended to mix up in great batches for Summer – Alses had spent one very hot and sweaty afternoon at Tian's shop helping to make an apparently endless quantity of the stuff in exchange for the recipe, now safely locked in the vaults of her mind and also in her notebooks, just in case senility should happen to strike.
In the busy hum of her brain, as her body was piloted about the place selecting flasks and retorts – the still-room still had a shortage of beakers, alas – that recipe unfurled in her head, a silver litany directing her motions.
'A measure of almond oil,' she thought as she took down a brass vessel full of the pale yellow liquid from its high shelf and set it carefully near her work area. The oil was both sweet-smelling and useful, providing a highly motile base for the rest of the cream; it would mix well with the other oils and ingredients that provided the active ingredients of the philtre and provide a pleasing scent, too.
'Beeswax, of course...' The thought of it as she placed the open container of very faintly yellow wax near the oil brought a smile to her face – the bees had done very well out of her gardens throughout the summer, so it was only fair she took a little of the fruits of their labours. The particular batch she was using was something of which she was inordinately proud, since she'd been the one to actually clarify the stuff. It had started life as a sticky mess, so dark a yellow as to be almost brown and still glistening with the dregs of honey, bee-bits and a few other things she hadn't put a name to.
Clarifying beeswax wasn't hard, exactly, but it was time-consuming and involved – as she'd been taught it, anyway: lots and lots of boiling water was a staple of the process. Indeed, it took so much time to work with that she'd set aside most of yesterday for its production.
A
Timestamp: 30th Day of Summer, 513 A.V.
Cook had, blessedly, ensured she'd have all the equipment she'd need to turn deep yellow beeswax into fine, fine clarified wax, the perfect base for sunscreen. All of it was ranged about the walls of the still-room, just waiting for her to put them to use.
Pots predominated, beautiful coppery things in an array of different sizes that glowed with burnished light atop the stoves – this sort of work was a simple process, and easy enough to achieve with the Respite's equipment, so she'd not need to go begging to Tian, which was a good thing. Not that it wasn't nice to see the philterer, of course, but Alses was very conscious of imposing, of taking too much for granted – which was all too easy when a city revered your race.
In the quiet of the still-room, the pandemonium of the main kitchens reduced by distance and thick skyglass walls to a murmur, a comforting background hum that couched her thought processes rather than obliterating them under a hail of noise, Alses smiled. There was something about philtering, some echo of magic in the mundane skill – or perhaps it was simply that the method and precision inherent in it appealed to the clinical part of her brain that also delighted in the pedantry of world magic in general.
Regardless, philtering wasn't work – not in the sense of drudgery to be endured, anyway. Someone had said it, hadn't they? 'Find a job you enjoy and never work again.' Now, who had that been? Fenrad, one of her favourite philosopher-mages? No, he concerned himself with the arcane to the exclusion of all else.
No matter, no matter; she was here to make a philtered balm, not to stand around thinking of philosophers and their witty aphorisms.
Making a fire was something simple enough she did it on autopilot, almost, constructing a careful wigwam affair of dry birch twigs interleaved with masses of soft, spongy punkwood, its distinctive musky, not-unpleasantly rotting scent filling her nostrils as she worked in the bowels of the small stove the still-room was equipped with. Method and precision ruled here, too – spacing was everything and there had to be enough air available in the tapering wigwam for the punkwood and birch to catch or else all her effort would be wasted; no fire.
Alses was careful, layering her firestarter pile slowly but surely, making sure she could twine her slender fingers through the latticework with relative ease. That, she'd found, generally ensured sufficient air would get in to not only light the fire but also to allow it to burn without producing vast quantities of acrid smoke – the surefire sign of a novice firestarter, indicating that they'd packed their materials too tightly together and the flames were struggling to gain the supremacy.
Thankfully, the Respite was a civilised place and the main kitchens always had fires of one sort or another on the go – the big ovens at one end of the cavernous chamber reportedly took two days to get up to temperature, from cold, and as a result they were never – well, almost never, they still got a clean every so often, like everything else – allowed to die.
Senses closed as much as possible against the battering insult of the main kitchen, the sous-chefs dashing about the place with reckless abandon, the shouting at cross-purposes and the clang of pots and pans and the sizzle and crackle of foodstuffs partway through the transformation into cuisine, Alses made a dash for the glowing maws of the great ovens, at one end of the kitchens. The whole place always appeared to be on the brink of catastrophe, one step away from pandemonium, and yet three times a day, without fail, food issued forth with clockwork regularity, the maelstrom having somehow, somehow managed to come together in time.
Triumphant, with a blazing log held securely in some long iron tongs, wrest from the grasping, greedy fingers of the ovens, Alses retreated with no small relief to her own, much smaller chamber and the tamer stove there, thrusting the blazing log in amongst the kindling with a satisfied sigh.
