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Rose stared at the growing flower, her lips parted in awe. It was perfect. A Starlight bloom so beautiful it radiated a silver golden glow. Bells like lily of the valley simmered down a silver stalk, tinkling lightly in a wind that was nonexistent to her.
How
How How
They only grew in starlight, to be this pure..
She was quite frankly, gobsmacked. The skies had been clouded over for 3 months...the water smiths had messed with the atmosphere overnight on purpose. No night blooming flower that relied upon the moon nor stars could grow.
Darkness and shadow ones had thrived, especially those linking to the water element saturating the atmosphere.
Yet here it was.
Shimmering bells just glimmering and tinkling happily at her. Blinking like an ol, she sat down heavily
Staring into the cloud speckled sky, of course they never totally went away even during the day, but the sun was good at burning off the water vapour in what ones did congregate...
Tipping her face up to the warmth of the lifesaving blessing... Rose contemplated how her life had been saved. Would she ever manage to work out how this had happened? With all her experience at growing things for alchemy. With teh books lining the walls of her home, ould she find a solution in their old pages? Amoung the notes of alchemists gone buy? Journals passed on to favoured students over generations. Would one have discovered something so profound, and not have told their apprentices and journeyman? Their favoured ones?
Rose sighed, blinking in the bright sunlight as she listened to the Starlight Bell.
Was there something she knew that her predecessors could not have fathomed? Sure the sciences had advanced somewhat, but growing and alchemy .. were essentially the same. Except for the addition of complex information on chemistry, biology and other sciences that had helped cultivate plants to a higher and better standard. Selective breeding had done a lot, splicing, so many other techniques...
But a Starlight bloom grew in Starlight.
The stars that speckled rhe night sky, their faint radiance, she knew were from so many miles away in distance she couldnt fathomnit with her mortal mind. Each starout there had its own planets, maybe even its own form of botanists of alchemists. All pondering similar puzzles like her. Under the radiance of their own stars.
Wait.
It couldnt be that simple could it.
Noone had ever tried to grow a star bloom except under Starlight. Traditionally, of old, planting them in complex black covered greenhouses, to open the roofs when the night sky was sat its most clear ... Even now they only grew them when their were predicted days and days of dry weather.
Yet they still discovered some species of blooms, in the wilderness, on night hunts. Ones with better more radiant gleams than any ever grown by a master botanist.
Was it that simple? Certain star blooms grew under all types of Starlight? Not all did surely, some definitely needed only dark, because they had aspects of the moon, shadows and night ...but this particular species... didn't.
The Starlight Bell grew under the auspices of ANY type of starlight, including that of their own star, the sun.
Rose was stunned, the avenue of research that reached out to grab her from this revelation! Which blooms needed both kinds of starlight, which only needed the night sky, which needed either....
Not only did she have a project for decades in front of her, inspiring her senses, smacking out of her way that awful rut she had felt stuck in..but she had also grown the impossible.
And saved her nephew. Only Starlight Bell could cure the sickness, saving their family from the hostile takeover of the water families that were doing their best to thwart her nephews healing.
Rose laughed, stunned and delighted. Then with a no nonsense attitude she shook everything off, standing ti grab her tools and gather the life saving blooms. Time to craft a healing medicine. Save her Family and reach for the future and all its sudden promise! And it all involved her favourite things. Botany and Alchemy.