The drink the kitchen had started preparing before dawn was darker than it should have been.
That was the first thing Beorn noticed about it. The color was wrong. Memory offered him something richer, a warm deep brown that caught light in a precise way.
What sat in the cup was closer to wet earth from the Badlands, and the smell was wrong too, too mineral and too close to the ground, with some trace of the dried root that the preparation had not fully removed.
He drank it anyway. The bitterness was right. The heat was right. The result, building in the back of his skull ten minutes into the first cup, was exactly what he remembered it should be.
He found interesting the difference between concept and implementation.
He knew what this drink was meant to do, knew the effect, knew that the source material from his previous life had been different in ways he could no longer fully recover. The plant, the preparation, the chemistry that made the result he remembered.
