Potion Shop

She made her way carefully through the busy square, further noting, on her right, a neat storefront with many bottles of colored liquid squatting primly on wooden shelves in the display behind the glass. Looking up at the sign that hung, still in the windless city, she read Calway’s Potions on it. Nothing more.

Demons, changers, giants and dragons. These have each their own magic about them. Dragons make fire, fool the eye, and change their own form. This last the changers share, and each has some of the powers of the ancient werebeasts that first took human shape, to walk among the people that had then lately come into the world. Giants can turn themselves into the landscape: to hide or sleep or rest for centuries as hill, boulder, or mountain, growing to truly embody their name. This magic is not as humans know it. Human beings, by blending and capturing the powers embedded by the slow cycle of the universe into plant, stone, and wind, can make charms and potions and wands, and effect thus a mockery of magic, a brief bending of the world: weak, quick to make and quick to exhaust. Only some humans understand the cycle itself, and these are the magicians. These are the ones who know why a potion to cure bad dreams is green, while one to briefly float an inch or two above the ground is a little darker green, and why a warlock’s staff, if spells are to work as intended, must be fatter at the crown than at the foot.

This explains why Margaret Delphine Stapleton, denizen from Astoeb: home of demons, had very little familiarity with the interior of a humble high-street potion shop.