Twenty miles outside the city, there is a place they once called Candle Hill. A young man like you wouldn't recall, but long ago it was acre after acre of lush flower meadows, and the master chandlers of the city would keep their bees on its gentle slopes. Wax from the hives was fashioned into stout candles of pale yellow and cream, which City housewives swore could burn for a month or more.

Those were the days before lamplight gas; before they found... it. That curious mineral, which seemed to defy all explanation. A sample found its way back to the Imperial University, and soon every son of Midas was clamouring after the stuff. They bit a thousand tonnes of earth off the top of the hill, and sent men into the depths in search of what some were calling "white gold". Heh. We alchemists are such unimaginative creatures. It always comes back to gold, in the end.

The great Houses grew richer, and their alchemists richer still, while the country villages and hamlets became mining towns. There were some who objected, in the earliest days: the chandlers and farming folk exerted what pressure they could. But the housewives of the City soon forgot their candles. When the first prototypes of ultra durable cookware and flame-repellant fabrics came streaming out of the House workshops, the resistance collapsed overnight.

Years later, when the sickness had taken hundreds of lives, the mining families went on strike. Men, women and children: they barricaded themselves into the barren upper levels of the mine, and barred the entrance to any who would quarry it further. Those poor fools.

They say that nobody knows how the fire started. It's a lie. Every alchemist in the City knows. It is a dangerous thing to oppose any of the great Houses, and *that* House most of all. They burned Candle Hill, the encampments and barricades, with everyone still inside. There was risk to the white gold itself, of course. But people need to breathe, and there was no way out.

The light of the fire could be seen for miles around, even here, in the very heart of the City. Candle Hill didn't burn for a month, not even a day. But I've lived with the memory of that terrible glow ever since.

It's funny. Lay people believe that we alchemists are more than human, with the ability to change something into anything and back again. But when I stood on the riverbank that night, and saw the smoke rising like a wraith from beyond the horizon, I felt in that moment we had changed the very nature of *ourselves*; we had become something terrible. And I feared that there would be no changing back again.

No, no, I'm fine. It's just a cough, is all. It happens at my age. Now, run along young man. Haven't you got better things to do than to keep an old woman like me company?