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A heady maelstrom of scarlet and gold fog hung low over the subterranean classroom, clouding the clammy dungeon walls with unfamiliar warmth. This Scottish castle was so much drearier than Nicolas was used to, but he could see a certain appeal. Outside, fertile hills rolled without care or cessation from the castle’s doorstep, mountains topped with clouds bunched together like spirits congregating to a grave. Above him, corridors teemed with student footsteps, laughter echoing through vaulted ceilings until it rang louder than the bell tower.
Nicolas wouldn’t exactly say that there was more magic here than elsewhere; he had always found claims of magic naturally concentrating in a specific spot rather overexaggerated. No, he believed, it was the act of gathering people – anyone, not just wizards – in the same place that was magical. Invite enough people to love a place they cannot stay, and that memory would grow beyond the individual until it loomed greater than one person could carry alone.
Nicolas had watched it happen over and over again the last five hundred and seventy-two years, and he would likely watch it for another five hundred and seventy-two more.
It remained worth it, he thought as he stood in the dungeon fumes with his arms clasped behind his back, because he could make new memories too.
Here, in this dungeon, where he had only reluctantly acquiesced to attend a few classes on behalf of that handful of students in Great Britain interested in that Moste Secrete and Dang’rous Arte of Alchemy, did Nicolas finally, after five hundred and seventy two years, meet his equal.
Albus Dumbledore was a handsome enough boy, but Nicolas couldn’t decide if that really had anything to do with his tall, thin form and waves of auburn hair, or if he was so striking for the self-possessed confidence so unusual to see rippling in such a young man. The fumes roiling off his cauldron didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest; he stirred with a good cheer and an irrepressible twinkle in his eye that the class’s other students seemed unable to resent.
The young man’s table was consumed by orderly stacks of the precious metals Muggles so desired, here waiting to be fabulously turned or unturned into something else. Ah, why exactly was it that so few wizards were interested in this glorious science? Nicolas would never understand, for alchemy was at the root of all things both mundane and magical.
The most interesting part of the young man lay not in front of him, but inside his cauldron. Nicolas stopped pacing and watched, unaware that minutes were bleeding out the clock as the young man shaved lead, siphoned ring strain from phosphate, and poured argent vive until it pooled thick and silver at the edges of his burbling potion.
Class ended. The other students left, one waving goodbye to the young man as he continued his methodical process. The potion was at a very temperamental juncture. All genius was imitated by the ability of one’s hands to carry out their task.
‘You have undertaken the great work,’ Nicolas said.
Albus Dumbledore glanced up. He’d won so many awards, made such a splash, that even Nicolas had heard of him despite a general lack of attention to worldly affairs, a transcontinental move, and the bicentennial stalemate with Perenelle over their next vacation. There was nothing like reading the newspaper to distract oneself from a frosty breakfast meal.
Despite knowing this, despite all his long years, Dumbledore’s first words surprised Nicolas.
He met the alchemist’s gaze with commanding blue eyes and said, ‘We’ll see.’
Nicolas couldn't help smiling. ‘It’s quite clear that you’re in the third stage.’
It was not the first time Nicolas had had this discussion. There had been plenty of promising students in the last five hundred years of his life, many of whom were likely better alchemists than he was, alchemists who may have only failed because they spent too much time watching Nicolas’s footsteps rather than down at the path they themselves tread. Nicolas had just been lucky enough to figure it out first. There had been no one to analyse, no reason to strive for the Philosopher’s Stone other than unquenchable drive and a deep love for the noble metals that now glinted against the thick green glass set high into the dungeon’s dank walls.
It was not even the first time a student had looked at him and said, ‘Don’t patronise me, Monsieur Flamel, you cannot expect me to believe you achieved immortal life through the ramblings of Zosimus of Panopolis.’
Nicolas laughed. ‘You’d be surprised what enterprising young alchemists have believed over the past five hundred years.’
Dumbledore grinned. ‘They weren’t me.’
He was clearly having a good time. Nicolas had heard that the Dumbledore boy was a quiet, personable young man. There had been no intimation of arrogance – and there certainly would have been if he always treated his elders as equals instead of betters, the greatest hatred of foolish old fools whose only chance at earning respect came from surviving the aging process longer than their peers. Perhaps here, Dumbledore was simply that much in his element; perhaps he enjoyed this process as much as Nicolas did, and sensed a kindred spirit for revelling in it.
Nicolas looked down at the cauldron again and felt a shock as cold as ice water. Where other alchemists would have gone into Zosimus’s recorded fourth stage, or perhaps into Ripley’s twelfth stage of fermentation, the cauldron’s contents were forming into a smooth, scarlet liquid as calm as the Dead Sea, its transparent surface revealing a gleaming aurum underbelly.
‘My god,’ Nicolas breathed. Triumph leapt in Dumbledore’s eyes; just like that, Nicolas had given away the game.
‘You’ll achieve the Red Lion yet,” he admitted, and a roaring monster of freedom and jealousy threatened to burst from his chest.
‘I don’t think I will,’ Dumbledore said.
Nicolas raised his eyebrows. Other students had said this before, but he’d never believed it. It was true that some students did not push themselves, but he chalked that up to fear of trying. Nicolas understood that it all came back to the slivers of metal shivering in the air unseen around them, but no one else had ever looked at the world with the same eyes. Even for those – never as young as this boy before him – who took on the quest understanding that the journey was the goal, Nicolas had never yet met someone who wouldn’t have liked the quest to last a little longer.
‘You don’t need me to tell you that that’s carmot,’ he said. ‘Only once has one of my students formed the mythical element, and it was at the end of her very long life.’
"I don't wish to offend," said Dumbledore, the unassuming young charmer finally making himself known. Steam curled his hair and obscured his face in waves.
‘You can't offend me,’ said Nicolas.
‘That can’t be true,’ said Dumbledore. ‘You are still human, after all. I have always suspected that the human mind can only change so much. That once it has stretched so far beyond its natural lifespan, there is only so much capacity for growth.’
“I must admit that that’s a disconcerting thought,’ Nicolas said mildly.
He had had it for many times before, and had long ago come to terms with it. Perhaps if he discovered the Stone before the age of one hundred and thirty, he would feel differently, but Nicolas and Perenelle had stretched their own minds as far as they could before they brought the Elixir to their lips. To go on with those minds was something they could do with pride. Sometimes Nicolas wondered if the Philosopher’s Stone might not have worked for a man and woman who had done any less.
‘This is why I said I didn’t wish to offend,’ Dumbledore said.
‘You are too young to add ‘always’ to any action,’ said Nicolas.
‘Says every older man to a younger man, whether they be fifty or five hundred. The eternal tension between youth and age,’ Dumbledore said, smiling. ‘But I don’t feel old or young, Monsieur Flamel. I just feel, and I’m ready to do something about it.’
‘And what can you mean by that?’ Nicolas asked.
‘This is truly where I don’t want to offend,’ Dumbledore said, and hesitation flitted across his expression, a stark contrast to the confidence he’d witnessed in every knife-stroke and measurement of the past hour.
‘Come now, stop teasing,’ Nicolas said, breaking into a smile of his own.
‘Five hundred years, and what have you changed?’
‘Many things,’ Nicolas said. ‘Silver to gold and back again as far as the eye can see.’
‘I don’t mean transmutation,’ Dumbledore said, and his twinkling eyes caught sparks into a blaze. ‘I mean the world. What legacy have you left out there?’
‘I have always tried to treat my fellow man with dignity and respect,’ Nicolas said. ‘That’s all I’ve ever needed.’
Dumbledore’s hands gripped the splintered table beneath him. ‘What about your mark on the world? What if the certainty of living forever steals my drive to make a difference?’
How very like and unlike him this boy was.
‘Nothing is certain,’ Nicolas said. ‘Not even my life. What kind of difference do you hope to make, anyway? What cause do you stand for? Who do you hope to help?’
Dumbledore blanched slightly; he recovered quickly, but Nicolas saw it nonetheless. ‘I’ve heard what they say. I know what I can do. I can’t just sit back and do nothing. I have to use my gifts.’
He really was such a young man.
Nicolas could see there would be no use in pressing the point from the way that Dumbledore’s cheeks were flushed for the first time in the conversation. Later, he would wonder if this was a mistake, but it didn’t take immortality to know there was no convincing a young person of the thorns that so plainly lay ahead until they felt their scratches themselves – no matter how dire.
And so Nicolas replied with a different truth. ‘The only thing I ever desired to change was copper into gold.’
‘I’m not like that,’ Dumbledore said, his voice cracking. ‘I want more.’
‘Then seek more,’ Nicolas said, grief seeping into his tone.
Dumbledore mistook him and said, ‘I won’t be leaving alchemy. There is so much magic to explore. I just don’t need this.’
Nicolas could not help but ask himself: How could it be that such a young man was not only on the brink of achieving what had taken him a natural man’s lifespan to do, but would turn his back on it?
Long ago his jealousy might have consumed him, but that stabbing fear subsided quickly, replaced by a thought so cheerful it struck like a revelation: Perhaps before too long, Albus Dumbledore might have something to teach him in return.
Then, Nicolas’s final surprise from Albus Dumbledore before he decided to stop counting: Albus waved his dark wand over his cauldron and vanished the potion.
‘Perhaps the true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words,’ Nicolas said. ‘I may not transmute our society with every choice, young Dumbledore, but I do know this. The words you use to change the world are even more important than the act of doing so.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Dumbledore said, but he was now clearing his ingredients and gathering his bag. As he stopped at the door, he turned and said, ‘I hope we can work together again someday.’
A few splatters of scarlet and gold were all that remained of the cauldron’s contents. As Nicolas peered in, the swirled shape of a phoenix rose into the air and flew away.