"Lad!" roared Nikovo with a dramatic wringing of the boy's shoulder. "Who else would be the head alchemist if not me!"
Someone more competent, no doubt. But his influence had been questioned, his legacy had been announced all but worthless, his reputation among the, ah, youth shown to be all but unknown!
He had no love for these sober-blooded simperers, with their unpurpled tongues and unflushed cheeks. Bowing so prettily before their little lords and ladies, the whole flock of them intoxicated by the stench of perfumes and carefully cultivated roses. Better to Nikovo that the smell be of crushed grapes, that the flowers be wild and forced, blood-fertilized, from the ribs of decaying corpses - the rutilant splendor of nature's cycle, life and pleasure and pain and death all as part of a single, magnificent order!
No matter.
Bringing the fat-engorged ouroboros that was his arm around the messenger's shoulders in a sign of offered friendship (making sure that it was his left arm instead of his mutilated, copperhanded-right), he gestured for the boy to take his flask in exchange for the letter.
Peeling it open with his wine-stained fingers, what he found inside was a rather neat - certainly royal - script with symbols that (as always) were indiscernible to him.
"Alaric!" A silent pause. "Alaric!" The sound of boots strutting proudly on stone floors (the arrogant, self-important bastard). "Alaric!"
A thin man whose grey hair gave him the look of a smoking pipe turned vertical came walking in, parchment and pen in his right hand whilst the left cradled what was often mistaken for a miniature pot of wildfire. But alas, while Nikovo would have liked nothing more than to set every written word in the world aflame, it was instead what had become under his term as Grand Master the signature green ink of the Alchemists's Guild - what, after all, was Nikovo if not an arbiter of aesthetic taste?
As a man more fond of poetry spoken than poetry penned, Nikovo remained proud that his illiteracy was still yet uncorrected. If he needed a letter sent, dictation to his scribe helped retain not only the pragmatic uses of written conversation over longer distances but also the stylistic flair of his own way of speaking - which, he might have added were he the narrator and not yours truly, was the toast of conversationalists, sellswords, artists, and lovers in a thousand cities on four continents.
Once the dictation was complete and the letter was sealed, he released the messenger from his grasp, retrieved his flask, and sent the boy back to whichever monarch or princeling was in the midst of plotting this time with his reply:
To my prospective procurer of potted immolation,
I quote one great poet from my home city of Lys, whose own words are better suited for this reply than any measly verses I myself might offer: "time is a diseased horse..." - if I can remember the metre of this one... - "whose metal-shoed hoof is all that remains upon its passing." Something of that nature, if you'll excuse my decaying wits.
Come as you wish!
*Nikovo of Lys, Grand Master of the Alchemists's Guild; former Captain of a company of free riders; the Stupendous, the Glorious, the Great; known variously by both friend and foe under the sobriquets of Nikovo Bloodhand, Nikovo Copperhand, and Nikovo Redhand; the Magnificent.