Excerpt: At the End of the Beginning

You know, I once spoke to a travelling alchemist, long, long ago. I spent a night around a fire with him and a few other travellers who were heading in the same direction, back when the world seemed a little gentler. It seemed that the fellow had gained some notoriety by converting a large proportion of a kingdom’s gold into lead, while trying to actually perform the more traditional inverse operation. Of course, the king and queen of said kingdom were not best pleased by this development, and so the alchemist was on the run.

Now, I admit, I never found out what happened to the poor gentleman, who claimed he had been caught out by some low quality ingredients from a shady market trader, but it was clear from the conversations he shared with us that night that he was, in fact, quite, quite mad. Or, at least, not all fully there, if you see what I mean. But, I do remember one part of our conversation quite clearly, just one thing that he said, although I’m not entirely sure why. He claimed that if a butterfly flapped its tiny, delicate wings on the west coast of the continent, that that one infinitesimal, insignificant event could eventually cause a storm on the east coast of the continent.

I never quite understood what he really meant by that, although it did stick in my head as I have just shown you. I remember chuckling at the time and advising him that he shouldn’t go telling any kings that story, as I quite enjoyed the sight of butterflies and didn’t want him to cause one slightly unhinged king to go on a genocidal rampage against the tiny creatures in the hopes of somehow preventing bad weather.