Accidental Alchemy

Note: Image associated is from Ironage.media, specifically their writing prompt 'The Instigator'

Serena was bored.

Not the normal kind of bored for her, though. She was bored of waiting for her friend, Augustin, to return. Normally she was bored of how little anything changes these days, ever since Augustin had begun studying something he called alchemy. When he had first described it to her, it sounded just the right kind of fantastic to be interesting, but it had proved an incredibly dull affair so far. Sure, it involved fire and strange powders, but so far, all it had produced was an incredible range of truly awful smells, the most recent she could still occasionally find in her feathers while she preened. She was most annoyed about that, always priding herself on staying clean. After all, she was blessed with a more impressive range of colours than most of her kind, and she loved to show them off. A brilliant sand-gold across her breast, shoulders, and the top of her wings, alternately fading to a soft cream at her neck, haunches and head, and a teal like the oceans of the tropics in her belly, wings, and tail. She also took special pride in her eyes, a vibrant piercing blue, unlike anything she or anyone she knew had ever seen.

And still, she was bored. It was then that an idea popped into her head. Perhaps she could entertain herself when Augustin returned by moving some of his things. He was inordinately fussy about them staying put, making it infinitely easy to tease him by just moving them around the room, not even very far from where they were. That would alleviate her current malaise and even have her chuckling as Augustin moved everything back. Was it petty? Absolutely, and she knew he’d get his own back for it, but it would still be good fun. As she began moving his things around, a loose feather of hers fell into a jar of powdered lead, and for a while, nothing happened, drawing no notice from Serena. Until she moved the jar that is.

When she did, she saw that the lead that had touched her feather had started to glow and even smoke, a lot like how Augustin’s experiments were supposed to. Not believing her eyes, she shook the jar, and more of the lead was glowing now, the smoke changing from that of a snuffed candle to a wet log in a fire. Mesmerized, she kept shaking the jar to see the reaction, so focused on it that she didn’t even hear Augustin’s feet coming up the stairs.

“Moving my things again Serena? I swear,- Why is that jar smoking?”

“I don’t know, one of my feathers fell in, and it just started.”