# Chapter 3: A Taste of Power
The first thing Relly Moe registered was the pain. It was a familiar, unwelcome guest, a symphony of agony conducted by a sadistic maestro. A brass section of throbbing temples, a percussion of jackhammers against his skull, and a low, guttural cello of nausea roiling in his stomach. He groaned, the sound scraping its way out of a throat that felt like it had been sandblasted. The air in The Gilded Flask was thick and stale, a toxic cocktail of stale beer, cheap disinfectant, and the ghost of a thousand extinguished cigarettes. Sunlight, thin and gray, slanted through the grimy front windows, illuminating swirling dust motes like a galaxy of tiny, indifferent stars.
He pushed himself up from the sticky surface of the bar, his muscles protesting with every millimeter of movement. His head swam, the room tilting violently before snapping back into place. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, trying to anchor himself in the wreckage of his own bar. And what a wreckage it was. Empty glasses littered the bar, a dozen of them, all the same heavy-bottomed tumblers he used for his best pours. But he hadn't had a best pour in months. He'd been drinking the cheap stuff, the paint-thinner vodka that made his teeth ache. So why were all these glasses out?
His gaze fell upon one of the tumblers. It was pristine, not a single fingerprint marring its crystal-clear surface. Inside, a single, perfect amber droplet clung to the bottom. He remembered last night in fractured, humiliating flashes. The eviction notice pinned to his door like a death warrant. The crushing weight of his father's debts. The desperate, drunken prayer to a grandfather he barely remembered, a man who'd smelled of chemicals and old books. He remembered the grimoire, that heavy, leather-bound tome he'd found tucked away in a lockbox, the one he'd always been told was full of old chemistry notes. He remembered opening it, the pages filled with bizarre diagrams and script that seemed to shift and writhe in his peripheral vision. He remembered laughing, a raw, broken sound, and pointing at a half-empty bottle of the cheap vodka, wishing with every fiber of his being that he had something better, something that could save him.
*Hallucination,* he told himself, the word a flimsy shield against the encroaching madness. *Just a drunk, pathetic fantasy.* He'd probably poured himself a glass of the rotgut and imagined the rest. It was a coping mechanism, a final, pathetic trick of a mind on the verge of breaking. He reached out to clear the glass, his fingers clumsy and trembling. The moment his skin made contact with the cool crystal, a jolt shot up his arm. It wasn't an electric shock, not exactly. It was a hum, a faint, resonant vibration that felt impossibly old, like the memory of a bell struck centuries ago. It was a whisper of energy, a ghost in the machine. He snatched his hand back as if burned, his heart hammering against his ribs.
His eyes darted around the bar, landing on the source of his potential delusion. The grimoire lay open on the bar, its pages turned to a diagram of interlocking circles and a single, stark word in a language he didn't recognize but somehow understood: *Transmutatio*. The leather cover was cool and smooth under his trembling fingers, the metal clasp cold against his palm. This was real. The book was real. The glass was real. The hum was real. A cold dread, far more potent than his hangover, began to seep into his bones. He wasn't going crazy. The world was.
He had to know. He had to be sure. Denial was a warm blanket, but the truth, however terrifying, was a fire. He needed to know if he was losing his mind or if the universe had just cracked open at his feet. Stumbling over to the back shelf, his hand closed around the neck of a dusty, unopened bottle of the same cheap vodka. The plastic label was peeling, the clear liquid inside looking sad and toxic. He slammed it down on the bar, the sound echoing in the silent room. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely twist the cap. It came off with a sharp plastic crack. The acrid smell of pure grain alcohol filled his nostrils, making his stomach lurch.
He didn't bother with a glass. He just stared into the bottle, his reflection a warped, pale ghost in the cheap glass. He thought of the whiskey from last night. He didn't just remember the taste; he remembered the *feeling* of it. The warmth, the smoky sweetness of oak, the vanilla, the caramel. He tried to empty his mind of the panic, of the fear, of the crushing weight of his reality. He focused on that single, impossible desire. *Change.* The word wasn't spoken, it was a command issued from the core of his being. He poured every ounce of his concentration, every shred of his will, into that one word. *Be something else. Be better.*
For a long moment, nothing happened. The liquid remained clear and acrid. A wave of disappointment, so sharp it was almost a physical pain, washed over him. Of course. It was a hallucination. A stress-induced psychotic break. He was just a bartender who was about to lose everything. He let out a shuddering breath, ready to laugh at his own absurdity, to cry, to smash the bottle against the wall in a final, futile act of defiance.
But then he saw it.
It started at the bottom. A single, golden swirl, like a drop of honey falling into water. It spiraled upward, a lazy, elegant vortex of rich, amber light. The clear liquid began to thicken, to darken, the acrid smell vanishing, replaced by the warm, complex aroma of agave and lime, a scent so vivid it was like a memory made real. The transformation was silent, seamless, and utterly beautiful. Within seconds, the bottle of cheap vodka was filled with a liquid that glowed with a pale, golden light. It was the color of desert sunlight. It was, without a doubt, the finest tequila he had ever seen.
He stared, his mind a blank slate of pure shock. He slowly raised the bottle to his lips, his hand trembling so violently the liquid sloshed against the sides. He tipped it back, letting a single drop touch his tongue.
The world exploded.
It wasn't just a taste. It was an experience. The sharp, clean bite of pure agave, the bright, citrusy zest of lime, a hint of peppery spice, and a smooth, earthy finish that seemed to warm him from the inside out. It was perfect. It was alchemy. A wave of pure, unadulterated euphoria crashed over him, so powerful it made him dizzy. He laughed, a wild, unhinged sound that was half joy, half terror. He had done it. He had actually done it. He, Relly Moe, a nobody from the Lower East Side, had just rewritten the fundamental properties of matter.
The euphoria was fleeting, burned away by the rising tide of terror. This wasn't a party trick. This wasn't a way to save his bar. This was something monstrous, something unnatural. He looked at his hands, the same hands that had just wiped glasses and counted out change, and saw them as alien things. Instruments of a power he couldn't comprehend. The grimoire lay open, its arcane script no longer just weird symbols but a manual for a reality he was no longer a part of. He was an anomaly. A glitch in the code of the universe. And what did the universe do to glitches? It deleted them.
He stumbled back from the bar, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The weight of what he had done settled upon him, a physical pressure that made his chest ache. He had power. Real, terrifying, world-breaking power. And he had absolutely no idea how to control it, no idea why he had it, and no idea what to do next. The only thing he knew for certain was that his life, as he had known it, was over. There was no going back. There was only the terrifying, unknown road ahead.
The sudden, sharp chime of the bell above the door cut through the silence like a knife.
Relly's head snapped up, his heart leaping into his throat. The bar was closed. The sign was flipped. No one ever came in this early. He watched, frozen, as the door swung inward, framing a silhouette against the gray morning light. The figure stepped inside, and the entire atmosphere of the room shifted. It was as if someone had suddenly turned up the gravity, the air growing heavy, charged with an energy that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with pure, undiluted presence.
It was a woman. She moved with a liquid grace that was both inhumanly fluid and utterly deliberate. She was dressed in a tailored, charcoal-grey pantsuit that probably cost more than his entire bar, the fabric clinging to a form that was lean and powerful. Her dark hair was cut in a sharp, severe bob, and her face was a masterpiece of sculpted angles and high cheekbones. But it was her eyes that held him captive. They were the color of dark honey, and they held an ancient, predatory intelligence that seemed to see right through him, past the hangover and the fear, down to the raw, terrified core of the man who had just broken the world.
She stopped a few feet from the bar, her gaze sweeping over the messy tables, the empty glasses, and finally landing on him. A faint, unreadable smile touched her lips. The scent that accompanied her was subtle, expensive, and utterly out of place in his grime-caked bar—a hint of night-blooming jasmine and something else, something cool and metallic, like old coins.
"Relly Moe?" she asked. Her voice was low, smooth, and perfectly modulated, the kind of voice that could read the stock market report and make it sound like a declaration of war.
He could only nod, his throat too tight to form words.
"Pres Sanchez," she said, taking another step forward. Her heels clicked softly on the grimy wooden floor, each sound a deliberate punctuation mark in the suffocating silence. "I'm an investor. I've heard whispers about a… unique product coming out of this establishment. I was hoping to sample it for myself." Her eyes flickered from his face to the open grimoire on the bar, then to the bottle of golden tequila in his hand. The smile didn't waver, but her gaze sharpened, becoming a tool of dissection. She wasn't just looking at him; she was analyzing him, categorizing him, assessing him. And in that moment, Relly Moe, the last alchemist, knew with a certainty that chilled him to the bone that his test of power was over. The real one had just begun.