My dear apprentice,
There is a moment I did not linger on when I told you of the tavern. I moved past it quickly, the way one moves past a doorway one is afraid to look back through. But I have thought of little else since, and so I offer it to you now, not as instruction, but as confession.
It was not the vow itself that frightened me. The vow, once spoken, was almost a relief, the way a held breath becomes relief the instant it leaves the chest. No, what frightened me was the moment before. The half second where the words were already forming and I still, technically, could have swallowed them. Could have ordered another drink instead. Could have laughed it off as the wine talking and gone home unchanged, unwitnessed, unaccountable.
I have come to believe that moment, the one just before the speaking, is where most of us actually live. Not in our failures. Not even in our successes. In that suspended half second where a private wanting has not yet become a public promise, and so still costs nothing to abandon.
I wonder how long I would have stayed there, at that table, circling the shape of a commitment I was too frightened to name aloud, had Osric not been sitting across from me. Had there been no witness at all. I confess I am not certain I would have spoken that night. Perhaps not for years. Perhaps not ever, and I would have simply grown old telling myself I still meant to.
This troubles me more than any failed batch ever did. A failed elixir is a private grief. You can grieve it alone, study it alone, try again with no one the wiser but yourself. But an unspoken vow does not even offer you that dignity. It does not fail. It simply never begins. And a thing that never begins cannot be mourned, cannot be studied, cannot teach you anything at all. It only accumulates, quietly, year after year, into a life shaped by the promises you kept circling and never made.
I do not think this is cowardice, exactly, though it wears cowardice’s clothes well enough to fool most who glance at it. I think it is closer to a kind of self-protection so old and so practiced that we no longer notice we are performing it. As long as a hope stays private, it cannot be watched failing. As long as no one has heard you say it, no one can watch you fall short of it. The silence feels like safety. It is, in its own way. It is also a slow kind of vanishing, the kind that leaves no mark and draws no notice, which is precisely what makes it so easy to keep choosing, morning after morning, without ever deciding to.
I have wondered since whether this is why the old formularies were so often sealed, why the masters of my apprenticeship kept their true recipes locked away rather than spoken aloud in the open market. A sealed thing cannot be tested against the world. It can be admired, or imagined, or quietly perfected in theory, forever, without ever once being proven wrong. There is a comfort in the seal. There is also, I have come to think, a kind of death in it. A recipe that is never poured is not a secret. It is only a wish wearing the costume of a plan.
I want to be careful here, because I know some of you will hear this and think of patience, of the long years I spent under study before I ever dared attempt a true elixir. Do not mistake the two. Patience is a discipline you choose, eyes open, knowing exactly what you are waiting for and why. The circling I am describing is not that. It has no eyes open. It does not know what it is waiting for, only that waiting feels safer than finding out. Patience builds something in the waiting. Circling only postpones the finding out. I spent fifteen years in patient study, and I do not regret a season of it. I spent perhaps two more years circling a vow I already knew I meant to make, and those years taught me nothing I could not have learned in the speaking itself, on the first evening I had the courage to say it.
What changed for me, at that table, was not courage arriving from nowhere, dramatic and sudden as the stories like to tell it. It was Osric, and the noise of the tavern around us, and the particular exhaustion of having circled the same private hope for longer than I could admit even to myself. Something in me simply grew more tired of the circling than it was afraid of the speaking. I do not offer this as a formula, for I have found no reliable way to summon that exhaustion on command, no exercise that produces it faster than time and honesty allow. I only know that when it finally arrived, the vow that followed felt almost effortless, because the harder work had already been done in silence, over years, long before any words were spoken aloud at all.
I think, too, of the difference between a vow spoken to oneself and a vow spoken where another can hear it. I had, in truth, told myself a hundred times what I meant to do. Alone, in the dark of my room, in the quiet after a long day of study, I had rehearsed the words until they were smooth from repetition. And still nothing changed, because a vow spoken only to yourself can be quietly renegotiated the moment it becomes inconvenient, with no one but you ever the wiser that the terms have shifted. It is remarkably easy to break a promise no one else remembers you making. It is a different matter entirely once Osric is sitting across the table, and the words have already left your mouth, and there is another set of eyes now holding the same picture of who you said you would become. The witness does not make the vow true. But the witness makes it costly to quietly forget, and I have come to think that cost, uncomfortable as it is, may be the entire point.
I tell you this not to prescribe a method. This is not the place for exercises or ledgers or careful stepwise instruction. It is only the place where I set down, as honestly as I know how, what I have noticed in myself, in the hope that you might recognize something similar quietly circling in you, and find it a little less strange, a little less shameful, for having heard it named by someone else first.
So I will not tell you what to do with what I have written here. I will only ask you to sit with it a while, as I have had to sit with it, and to answer for yourself, quietly, in whatever private ledger you keep, whether it is made of paper or only of memory.
What promise am I circling but haven’t said out loud yet?
Until the next batch,
Eldric
Eldric & The Entrepreneurial Elixirs is published by ProfSpirit LLC.