Enigmarch 2025, Day 24: SEARCH

[tahnan]

This prompt really stymied me for a while. Oh well.

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No Substitutions

The following excerpt is from my fantasy novel, still in the editing stage.

...would need nine ingredients: the angled harp of a bard, a basilisk's scale, a fin from a shark, a fist-sized topaz set in silver, four dried tulip petals, the eye of a hanged man, the horn of an aged steer, three ibis feathers, and the toe of a swamp newt.

I know this sounds crazy, but please reserve your judtopazent. You must understand that I have seangled high and low through every book of magic I can find, and this ritual is the only cure for my vamptulipm. How I miss the sun! So I set off at night, sneaking through the countryside and terrain more varied than I had ever seen: mountain cliffs, low swamps, distant lakes, isolated taverns.

Ultimately my search took me to the capital. I stood outside an anewttoir, pleading with a butcher whose stone-faced expression and standofshark body language made me despair of ever acquiring the horn I needed. I knelt in front of an irritable jeweler, who ssteerled at being awakened at midnight even as I bscaleed for her help. I even faced down a palace guard, the light of the ceyeelier above him glinting off his armor; he dismissed my description of the ritual as a holibisr from more primitive times. I began to fear there was...

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