"A bit of lake water…a touch of fairy dust…a couple of lizard tails..." Clara kept going on as she put more ingredients into the cauldron. Like most sanctioned witches she practiced potion brewing and runology.

They were on the 1st floor of the Midnight Hour. A witchy name for a clinic run by a witch. A normal business if Asher ignored whatever Stephan was doing in the basement. On that note, it's been weeks since he'd seen him.

She was teaching the boy how to make some potions to help around. He was staying here now after healing most of his injuries. It was his way of repaying her.

Aside from the daily cleaning and taking care of patients…She'd teach him brewing, history, and math. Math was important for some godforsaken reason. He hated math with passion.

"Focus…this is the most important part." Clara snapped with her metal fingers, so he'd pay attention. She grabbed a couple of thin plates from one of the cabinets and threw it to the fire below the cauldron. Clara followed with a murmur like chant that resonated with the runes on the plates. Soon after the flames turned green and the runes on the cauldron followed with the same hue.

"It should take a few minutes…now did you finish the book I gave you last week?"

The book in question was titled…Alchemy Redefined by Theodore the Mad. It was surprisingly by an alchemist instead of a fellow witch. With a broken mask, anybody could tell that she was banished from her coven, but Asher didn't ask. She didn't ask about his past so he would return the favor.

"Yes!" The once malnourished boy replied with a tinge of enthusiasm. He was healthier now, at least of body. The nightmares were getting worse but thus far the companions in his mind have been less talkative.

His pale complexion became a bit rosier leaning towards a healthy tint. As for Asher's body, it was free of bandages and gained some muscle. It would take more time for it to return to a decent state.

"Then recite the three laws!"

"Equivalency, Causality, and Order."

"Now don't go getting a big head just yet...Theory and practice are worlds apart even conceptually." She waves Asher to the side and grabs a long eel from a nearby tank. It was more a centipede than an eel with all the appendages but it lacked the chitin and instead carried a black sheen for flesh.

The creature slithered around as Clara placed the disgusting thing on a nearby table. She followed with a cleaver and without hesitation gutted one of the limbs as the creature screeched horrifically.

Asher winced at the display. "Now don't go disappointing me now...Cruelity is how you get things done. Hesitating only prolongs the poor sod's pain." She muttered as she grabbed a deep red vial and poured some of the contents on the creature's wound.

The flesh coated with green blood began to slowly knit back together albeit not completely. 

"This was a weak one...some butterfly wings, a newly laid egg...weak life force for weak healing...that's equivalency." She nodded as the creature stopped screaming but to its dismay Clara didn't stop there but instead grabbed another vial and poured its contents on the wound again.

The creature turned motionless...its pupils dilating only to suddenly start jerking and shaking violently. The maw of serrated teeth became longer and bone pierced flesh as the creature became larger. Only the weight of Clara's metal hand kept it in place.

"Now this is a very strong one at least for this little fella...the average man would at worst vomit, but he'd be healthier than ever...that is to say that causality of essence is determined by the ingredients, the purpose, and the consumer." 

After finishing her explanation, she grabbed a purple crystal and lunged her hand inside the eel's mouth, force feeding it the material. 

"That was crystalized malaize...now watch and see the effects of arcane intervention." And true to her words the creature convulsed and began to grow large and fiercer as flairs of electricity danced on its body but it the cries only grew more pitiful as the electricity intensified to the point where it fried the own creature's flesh seared it away into an amalgam of crystal and blood the size of a fist.

"Order is the simplest and most important of the three. The arcane is unpredictable...prone to mutations. Even the smallest touch could lead to catastrophic ends." She cleaned the remains off the table as Asher mustered a question.

"But-but you used your witch...witch magic!"

"haha...but they are different...vastly so. What I used was a predetermined arcane formula imbued with an intent. The chant was a trigger for a specific phenomenon to take place. Chaos manipulation on the other hand is like pillaging from the world. You take but at the price of scarring our reality."

She dipped her hands in boiling water to clean the muck and goo off. Clara cooled them and padded the boy who was digesting all the new information.

"Its a bit much I know but you'll get the hang of it...Stephan could probably explain it better...on second thought scratch that..." Suddenly a pop like sound echoed at Midnight Hour's backside lab.

"Aaand it's done." Clara chimed, scooping a dark red liquid into multiple glass vials and soon after the bell at the storefront rang as a customer walked in. Asher followed behind the Clara who was twice his height if not more to the counter. 

The customer today was a Dremin. He was slender, pure black, and had the shape of a python with splashes of green. His black shape despite the lack of legs was humanoid from the waist up meaning that his owners were feeding him well.

The Dremin slithered with his tail towards the counter, the mask on his head covering only the upper part of his face, leaving the large serpentine mouth on display.

"Tommy…what brings you hear today." Clara said dryly. Tommy was an old customer. A servant of house Trene. He'd come pick up medicine from here from time to time and…

"To visit you of course…Here a flower for my fffflower." His serpentine tongue emphasized the 'f' with a large smile. He kneeled slightly presenting a rose from his butler's garments towards Clara who took it and placed it in a nearby vase filled with identical flowers. The lack of tact throughout this display almost made Asher gag.

"Is that potion the one I requesssted?" Tommy slithered closer to the counter, eyeing the newly made potion.

"No of course not…Yours I made specially…it's in the back, give me a minute." Clara quickly left to get the potion, leaving Asher alone with Tommy. Asher at this point was not comfortable enough to hold a conversation with a new person but he held his ground. He had to face the discomfort at some point.

"How delightful…what do I taste…Ffffear, uneasiness, and a tinge of…how weird. I don't what the last thing is." Tommy closed the gap between him and Asher and began to circle him while his long tongue licked the boy slightly.

"Hey kid…want some help calming those emmmotions. I'd even do it for free to since you made Cllllara happy."

"Happy?" Ash mustered the words while closing his eyes, enduring Tommy's breach of private space.

"You're new…she was sad oh so very sssad…now she's happy…I can taste it." Tommy slithered to the back of the counter just before the woman in question appeared in the room.

"Here it is…packaged and ready to go. That would be 2 silver Talins."

"How cruel…not even a little disssscount." Tommy tried his hand at negotiating, but Clara didn't budge. "Ffffine...It's a bouquet of roses next time." The Serpentine Dremin said these words while laughing. He winked at Asher and slithered out of the glass door of the Midnight hour.

"What was that about?" Clara asked with a bit of concern.

"He just wanted a taste of my emotions." Asher preferred saying that over confronting her happiness. He wasn't sure if he deserved to make her happy. He needed more time to understand.

"How unpleasant…You have to promise me Asher." The masked woman was adept at displaying her emotions. She was angry and dissatisfied. Asher didn't know why but he recoiled a bit at her tone and looked at the ground. She kneeled beside him, placing her metal hand on his shoulder. He didn't recoil at her touch like he used to.

"Emotions are cruel…yes but they also are important…Never give them up…Promise me." Her tone mellowed to a gentler one as she looked Asher straight in honey-yellow eyes.

"I promise." Asher gave his word even if it amounted to little. He understood what she meant but sometimes it was hard not to try to ignore them.

She stared at him in silence for a minute before getting up and grabbing one of the vials they made before Tommy barged in.

"Another promise...you keep taking on more...have you fullfilled even one...? Regret spoke up from her dormancy leaving Asher in a daze. The word promise that echoed in his head made him gulp. He tried to take deep breaths, but his emotions were in a disarray. It was hard to resist the urge to run...to hide...to huddle up where no one could find him.

"We can't keep your friend waiting…lets go." Clara mused, breaking Asher's daze. He followed behind her in silence. The mood which was settling back to a comfortable one turned uneasy as they entered one of the patient rooms inside the Midnight hour.

Inside was another Dremin. A Dremin he was growing familiar with after all it was the one that he got beaten up defending. He was staying with them for a while now with Clara feeding him some of her emotions till he got back on his feet. Through brief moments of lucidity, the avian Dremin managed to tell its name. He was Balar. 

However, the poor thing was beaten so badly that his avian form deteriorated leaving nothing but the black malleable sludge that made up all Dremin. It lost its form after the beating, and it needed a lot of emotions to get back to its conscious self.

Dremin were fascinating creatures. Most are born like this sludge in populated areas after condensing the ambient human consciousness. In contrast, others could be born from two Dremin who have gathered enough emotions to gain a more physical form. They would adopt human names or be named by their owners. Tommy was clearly named by his owners but Balar probably picked his own.

Their forms depended on the type of emotions they fed on or were fed because most were slaves. For each thousand humans, there was one Dremin and even though they displayed no immediate hostility towards the major species, most of the populace viewed them as monsters.

Nobody really knew where they come from not even the Dremin themselves, but they've become a large part of society since the Pyre wars a few hundred years back.

"How long do you think till he wakes up." Clara broke his reverie of the history lesson she gave a while ago. It wasn't new information to him, but she sounded happy teaching him, so he pretended otherwise.

"A week at most." Asher summarized as the sludge was slowly coalescing back together and forming proper limbs. He grew closer to the bed in order to check the rest of the body but just as he got close, the sludge making up Balar moved.

The sludge was normally docile however Asher noticed that it began to bubble all over as if agitated. It slowly convulsed and began to grow out of Balar's mask and mouth till it...

"ASHER...GET BACK!" Clara grabbed him by the scruff and shoved him aside, narrowly dodging the tentacles which sprung everywhere from the now blob like mass. 

The sludge turned into sharp needles and stabbed into the walls and furniture. Clara barely defended herself with her metal arms.

"Blights…I hoped to avoid this…Get the Crystal Asher." Clara Shouted at the boy who was getting further from the bed.

This was the reason why Dremin were viewed as monsters. If they consumed too many negative emotions, they would turn feral and lose the ability to think.