This is for Katie, again. At the end of the tunnel, a light ...

First, he discovers that experiments frequently fail: sometimes explosively (which at least proves to the surviving observers that he tried), but more often silently, without even a whiff of ozone or a crackle of static discharge once the light of the reaction fades, leaving him with an inert heap of reagents that look exactly the same as they did before he started. He's supposed to learn from his errors -- the master interrogates him minutely after every transmutation (Did you calcine the earth properly? Did you invoke the Pure Form as the Mother of Perfect Being? Great gods, boy, you didn't use the last of the white magnesia, did you?) -- but nine times out of ten he hasn't got a clue why his circle didn't work, and says so.

Then he takes his thrashing and scrubs the floor clean and and teases hints from the bottle-imp in the corner (Try thinking, Hohenheim, instead of invoking purity of being or whatever. What's the difference between magnesium carbonate and magnesium hydroxide?). And when he curls up on his mat at night, back stiff and palms raw and brain full of witty retorts devised too late for use (Seven letters!), he remembers the one time in ten when he did realize what went wrong, and corrected it, and felt the world reshape itself under his fingers, sand into glass. He shivers with the aftershock of that elation, still vivid even after weeks of disappointment.

He'll know it again, he promises himself. He'll know everything someday, and never fail.