...the girl, blue, hid amoung the alchemist's hubris...21apr13

This story relates to an io9 writing prompt, here: http://io9.com/concept-art-writing-prompt-blue-girl-in-the-chemists-476597075, the story prompt relates to the graphic of a little girl hiding under an alchemists work desk.  He stares wildly into a blue rose that appears to glow upon a table.

At last!  I would exclaim it but for fatigue.  This proof before me is evidence that I am, if anything, the epitome of perseverance.  As a lyrical aside to the entire endeavor, I finished it when I thought I would: in the stillest hours of the night, the late spring air quiet, and the grasses around my laboratory resting.  This is done which had been lost decades before.  Blue: life giving hue, how we are pained for having lost the Contrariant!  Would it be known that an alchemist would restore it?

My grin was painful and my face unused to such joyous exertions.  I was much more adept at scowling through glass, my eyes fatigued at watching thousands of reactions.  I verged on weeping, my eyes now moist.  The elation that shivered across the cooling sweat across my robes only affixed the sequence to arrive at this point.  The cat shivered at the sight of it all.

The counter on my log had me at hour 2,789.  I will keep it at that time and move the notes from ‘antecedent’ to a triumphant, ‘subsequent’.  The processes in this last iteration, in a series of some 14 steps, became quicksilver in my memory.  Each built upon the other, the success apparent as it moved from base elements, growing, adapting, and then, definitive perception within the lattices of transformative materials.

Blue had escaped our known world well before I was born.  And with the lack of blue, the world was vastly changed.  Our sky became a white, a clear, or a quality of pitch – the oceans became dark.  The animus of the creatures shifted and many of them are simply no more.  The plants adapted, but the system of dependency erupted into chaos.  People starved, populations shifted to an unhappy sustenance.

My instructor, well over 90-years in age when he left us, had seen the Contrariant, the opposing element of fire disappear in a series of days when he was no more than six.  He infused into me, as one would artemis shade into the bloodstream, all of his studies, the collected works of the entire alchemy endeavor, from libraries that were vacant with death or disinterest.

I thought of him through my eyes as I pored over the flower.  It lived in a sustaining medium, which would only give me a few hours, but I will say, by the vibrancy of the colour, it will carry beyond its death.  If not, I can create more.  The formula is but 14 steps of some 17 materials over the course of little more than five hours.  The petals were firm, healthy.  The leaves reached out towards the artificial light, as best as I could to match the perception of sunlight.  I wanted to grab it, smell it, and move it across my cheeks, for no flower of this size had grown before.  The seeds for it were long dormant, almost ancient.

As a man of letters would say (my own degree from the Falls of Highland), there was even more work to be done.  That was for sure.  I would now approach the High Councilors for assistants, capital.  The process could even be simplified enough to give them each a rose, how such a demonstrative survey would prove my point!

And, then, what then?  From here, could we restore the seas?  The sky?  The very world?  That is the question that will make those three thousand hours turn to triple the amount.  But we will have purpose, we will have aim.

There was aberrational Apocrypha to contend with.  But I pay it little mind.  My instructor was firm in his convictions, but, for my own, I am less inclined to believe the stories.  The return of the Contrariant would bring upon us great consternations, since it’s opposite, red, the fire, the moltem of the world, would become irate.  The worshippers of Fire, apocryphal as they are to most of us, believe that blue had disappeared as a natural consequence of history.  But – here is proof that they are wrong.  How this, if I bandied it about their sulfuric temples, would crash their perceptions.  They’ve called up on my death before.  But, if we are to believe it, then there would be the deaths of what little thousands are left in this world.  My work will need to be wildly published; it must survive me and the whims of the mad.  But I distinctly remember that Hope, a product of the return of the Contrariant, would, by great trials, bring a Mutual Exclusivity.

Now, I said, finally breaking away from the rose, there were two seeds.  What happened to its twin?