The Last Alchemist of Ashara

The jar was wrong.

Nara knows it the moment she uncaps the seal. The contents should be arima powder, fine and pale, smelling faintly of citrus and wet clay. Instead the jar holds safar root, bone-pale and dead, and the recipe she's following has a gap where the fifth ingredient should be. In the only apothecary left in the desert town of Ashara, three years abandoned and thick with dust, a missing ingredient is more than a small problem. It's a sign that Nara is in over her head.

She came to...