Minor Potion of Hologram Slaying

Minor Potion of Hologram Slaying sits in a slender bottle of pale cobalt glass, the liquid inside the color of a mist-dusted morning. The surface quivers with a micro-film, as if dew clung to silk, and the glass feels cool to the touch, with a faint, almost resinous slip as you roll it between your fingers. The stopper is carved from bone-white wood, a copper pin sealing a rosette of sigils that catch the lamplight and scatter it like rain on a mosaic. The label— parchment slipped around the neck— is etched with fine runes that shimmer when you tilt it toward the glow. In stories whispered along dusty stalls, this tincture is said to descend from a caravan of tinkers who traded in deception and counter-lights, captured from the city’s screens and distilled into a single, sharp truth. The scent is faintly metallic, with an undertone of rain on copper and something like starlight. On the road it matters as more than a curiosity. A drop on the tongue loosens the grip of holograms—those glittering decoys that flicker like ten thousand doors left ajar. In a chase through a tunnel of shadows, the potion pries the veil from a dozen shimmering foes, and the real silhouette underneath becomes visible as if a window had been wiped clean. It is not a weapon so much as a verifier: a moment when the world’s light is misled, and this tiny vial insists on the truth. In the hands of scouts and wardens, it is a quiet countermeasure against tricksters who flood approaches with false presences, a glimmer of torque and metal that tells friend from mirage before the charge freezes in midair. I followed a patched-together convoy through a half-lit river market, where the potion found its way into daily trade. A hunter, leather worn to the grain by years of weather and patience, pulled the bottle from a battered satchel and weighed its worth in a calm, practiced voice. He spoke of demands from protectors who need more than reflexes: a method to know when sight itself is bending, a tool that cuts through glimmers to reveal the stone beneath. The coin changed hands at Saddlebag Exchange, that crowded rope-walk of merchants and maps, where a chalk-dusted price tag read like a confession: three silver coins, negotiable if you could name the hour when the holograms would falter. The stall’s keeper, with a smile that had learned the value of quiet, tucked the bottle back into its burlap wrap, murmur-talking of scarcity as a force in the market and of what it means to have a tool that refuses to lie. Back on the road, I realized the minor potion is not merely an instrument of combat but a thread in a larger tapestry of trust. In a world where sight is often bent by suggestion, a single vial can restore certainty, confirm a friend, unmask a foe, and remind a traveler that what gleams may veil what lies beneath. When the last lantern flickered and the holograms dissolved into nothing, the bottle’s label seemed to glow with a quiet endorsement: truth is fragile, yet never wholly gone—so long as someone remembers to test it with the right remedy.