Episode 11: "Ash to Gold"

In which Ash gets his chance to make a play for power in the Black Pyramid—and confronts his father.

Story by Mabel Harper and Weaver Webb
Written by Weaver Webb

For content warnings, see Episode One.

It was almost four a.m., and Ash wasn’t even close to being able to sleep—which normally would have bothered him. He liked to make sure he got his three-and-one-quarter hours of sleep every night (three-and-a-quarter being the optimal duration he’d settled on after nearly a decade of manipulating his consumption of nutrients, minerals, and alchemical substances to maximize his body’s energy efficiency).

But right now, he couldn’t care less about sleep.

Instead, he kept watching Valentine’s new video, which he’d downloaded to his phone, over and over.

It still seemed kind of unreal. But there was no mistaking. Valentine was cosplaying Ash in this video.

It was a good cosplay, too. Ash had really thought for a half-second that he was looking at himself when he’d first opened the video on his phone’s small screen. But on closer inspection, the version of him in the video was gorgeous, in an impossible, otherworldly way—because it was Valentine’s elegant bone structure between those curtains of hair, Valentine’s long neck and limbs in the black sweater and pea coat, Valentine’s eyes hypnotizing Ash even through solid black contacts.

The influencer started out in front of a moody background almost as black as their turtleneck. Instead of bedroom pop this time, something like an old German hymn played on pipe organ lent a sacred vibe to the soundtrack. Valentine-Ash tilted their head to one side, blinked big black eyes at the camera. Hooked a long white finger in their black turtleneck and gave it a slight, suggestive tug.

The music swelled. A swirl of multicolored light bloomed across the background as Valentine-Ash shrugged off their coat, removed their glasses, pulled their sweater over their head and discarded it—baring a perfectly androgynous torso, an immaculate marriage of angles and curves. Closed their eyes, ran their hands lightly over their porcelain arms and chest.

The background flushed suddenly from color to dazzling white.

Valentine-Ash opened their eyes, revealing irises that were now starbursts of shimmering gold.

A rapturous D major chord progression underscored the final tableau: the transformed Valentine-Ash framed from the waist up, naked against the white backdrop, which was spangled, along with their pale skin, with light of every color in the rainbow. Their black hair streamed in slow motion as if caught in a gust of breeze. A halo of twinkling crimson and gold rays radiated from their crown.

“Nigredo, albedo, rubedo,” Ash whispered to himself, fingertips softly brushing the screen. “Ash to gold.”

Who was this beautiful stranger who seemed to see him—who knew the deepest wish he’d never shared with anyone?

In little moments of spare time since he’d first found Valentine’s Blabel, Ash had continued analyzing metadata from the videos, and had—as he’d somehow known he would—discovered a code. So far, translating it had yielded only vague references to the philosopher’s stone and the Magnum Opus, the mysterious process by which it was said one could create the stone—all things with which Ash was already deeply familiar.

But with this new video, once Ash finally tore his eyes from this mesmerizing vision of himself and dug into the metadata, what he came up with—using the exact same code from the other videos—was something he didn’t expect, or understand:

TRISTAN LEES PIPE ORGAN

“Tristan Lee?” Ash muttered to himself. “…The Babel-dot-biz guy?”

Ash had been wondering why Valentine had encoded so many terms in their videos that any alchemist worth their salt would already know. Whether taken separately or all together, none of it had seemed to point to anything new. He’d concluded maybe the videos themselves were just some creative form of sigilwork—artistic vehicles for the manifestation of Valentine’s own desires.

Now, Ash considered that they might also be intended as a kind of Rosetta Stone—a key enabling someone with the right skills and knowledge to decipher Valentine’s code…and then follow their breadcrumbs.

The first of which, Ash supposed, had just dropped.

What a richer-than-God mundane tech tycoon’s pipe organ could possibly have to do with the alchemical Magnum Opus, Ash had no idea. But he was chomping at the bit to get to Philly, find someplace with good herbal tea and Wi-Fi, google it, and find out.