Discovery Set, Volume I

I

Dream Eater

Lavender at the edge of sleep, orris soft as powder upon the pillow. The devouring nightmare leaves warm wool and plush osmanthus.

In Japan they call it the baku. The old story says it was assembled from the pieces left over after the gods finished every other animal, so it wears the trunk of an elephant, the eyes of a rhinoceros, the tail of an ox, and the paws of a tiger. It eats one thing. Nightmares.

Sleepers of the Edo period kept its picture tucked beneath the pillow, and anyone who woke frightened in the dark could call out to it. Baku kurae. Eat it, baku. Some tellings carry a warning with the comfort. Summon it too often, and a baku still hungry after the bad dreams will start on the good ones.

The materials

Lavender arrives twice, as a CO2 extract for its cool herbal clarity and as an absolute for the honeyed weight underneath. Orris butter settles over that like powder on a pillowcase. Iris rhizomes are dried and rested for roughly three years before distillation, and the butter they finally give up is among the most precious materials a perfumer can put in a bottle, which is why so few fragrances carry the real thing. Osmanthus follows with apricot and suede, the flower that scents Japanese streets each October.

Then the creature itself arrives. Wool absolute is rare and genuinely strange, the smell of warm fleece and lanolin, of the sheep we count on the way down into sleep. Beneath it breathes real civet, one of the oldest animal materials in the perfumer's cabinet, with its sourcing set out plainly in our Provenance ledger. Coffee blossom, mimosa, tonka, oakmoss, and sandalwood close the night warm and low, the way a room feels once whatever was in it has finished and gone.

II

Red Hare

Hot champaca blossoms trampled into hide and smoke, costus and deer musk are the horse itself, and Hindi oud meets scorched vetiver to become the battlefield.

Among men, Lü Bu. Among horses, Red Hare. People of the Three Kingdoms had a saying for the finest warrior and the finest horse of their age, and it named the two of them in the same breath. Red Hare was said to cross a thousand li in a day, red from mane to hoof.

In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms he is handed over as the price of a betrayal. The warlord Dong Zhuo gives the horse to Lü Bu, and Lü Bu pays for him with his adoptive father's life. After Lü Bu falls, Cao Cao takes the horse and offers him to Guan Yu, hoping to buy the loyalty of a general who had turned down gold and silk and titles without blinking. For Red Hare, Guan Yu bowed. On that horse he could reach his sworn brother in a single day, wherever in the empire he happened to be, and in time he rode away to do exactly that. When Guan Yu was captured and executed, Red Hare refused every meal offered to him and died.

The materials

Champaca opens hot and golden, a sacred blossom of India crushed underfoot before the charge. Costus root, dug from Himalayan slopes and now rare and closely guarded, carries the warm hairy smell of a horse's coat after a hard ride. Real deer musk runs through the whole thing. Taken from the pod of the male musk deer of the Himalaya, it has traded for more than its weight in gold for centuries, and its sourcing is set out in our Provenance ledger.

The battlefield is oud out of Meghalaya, distilled in the Hindi manner. Agarwood only forms when an Aquilaria tree is wounded and spends decades sealing that wound with resin, and the Hindi method draws out the smoke, the leather, and the barnyard edge of it rather than the sweetness. Scorched vetiver root lays down the churned earth beneath the hooves.

III

Lady of the Lake

Still waters over drowned pine, cold juniper at the bank. Salt, amber, and green violet leaf is the lake itself.

Most people meet her in the Arthurian cycle, as an arm clothed in white samite that lifts a silver blade out of the mere. She gives Arthur Excalibur, and when he lies dying she takes it back, her hand rising from the water to catch it as it falls. She raises Lancelot beneath the lake, which is why the world calls him du Lac. When Arthur finally falls, she rides among the queens who carry him by barge to Avalon, the isle of the nine sisters.

She is older than Arthur. Across Britain, Iron Age people gave swords, shields, and treasure to lakes and rivers, and at Llyn Cerrig Bach on Anglesey the water held onto them for two thousand years. The Lady may well be the memory of whoever was thought to be receiving them.

The materials

Mastic opens the water. This resin weeps only from the trees of southern Chios, where it is still gathered by hand as clear tears each summer, and it smells of pine and cold light. Set against grey pine it becomes the drowned forest under the surface. Juniper stands cold at the bank. Violet leaf, green and wet, is the reed line at the edge.

Red seaweed brings salt and depth. An ambergris accord, composed in the atelier, carries the warm marine glow of one of the rarest treasures the sea ever gives up. Labdanum, angelica root, clary sage, nutmeg, amyris, and Virginian cedar settle underneath like a lakebed.

Some knew her as Nimue.