(It was also possible that Apothecary Jim, too, felt something of an immaculate glowing for Madame Bufon, but eventually he grumblingly agreed to the sale, and ascended the teetering ladder to fetch me my half-squib.)
Lucida Obscura, though, wasn’t a remedy, per se, and it didn’t come as tincture or salve. It was a looseleaf herb, rough-chopped and dried in the dark, harvested from the tip-top of mature Cloudtree trees during a particular point of the mooncycle, info that stayed closely guarded, along with the rest of the details of the herb’s harvesting and preparation. It is a Mixed Tea, never tasting the same twice, quaffed at bedtime, and is quaffed for the specific application of unlocking and dropping down through the trapdoor of a dream. It has a bad rap. Fools burble tales of Lucida Obscura quaffers dropping down through the trapdoors and then never climbing back up, which is a bunch of washed hogs. If mixed your quaff with Chickwheal; fine, yes. But mix Chickwheal with much of anything, and guess what happens? Everybody knows. No, being trapped on the dreamside of the trapdoor, that wasn’t the dangerful thing. The real danger was an overall sapping of the color.
“It’ll sap you of your color,” Apothecary Jim warned, as he handed me the half-squib jar, “until you’re beige.”
I thanked him, tipped him an extra quabbin, placed the jar carefully at the bottom of my pluck sack, and went supply down the baldroad.