This year is my first time at Euphemia Autumn. The summer has been uneasy with a series of short ups and long downs, leaving not much but only some growlers of flower beers coming with me to the city. Apparently, my offerings are modest beside the others who arrived at the city a few days earlier with ships full of exotic beers, cheered by local governors and tastemakers. As I feel more visitor than vendor, I decided to set up my stall a short walk away from my counterparts, and by chance, settling beside a fortune‑teller and a chef.
The fortune‑teller greeted me with a kind nod at his reading table. He seemed at ease here — casual, ready, a fixture of the fair. It took me a short while to unpack and set up my station before I could chat my neighbors. The fortune teller told me that he had been coming to Euphemia since he was young with his parents, who were deep‑sea fishers. But they retired from selling the vastness of the sea twenty seasons ago, he has come on his own, and the cook beside us is his childhood friend, whose family often bought fish from his.
They return to Euphemia every spring and autumn. He is in the hunt for new fate maps while she searches for ingredients ferried in from the seven seas. Both glanced at my small haul and blinked, surprised at how little I’d brought; I smiled — realizing that I had no idea how to arrive with more than I had. I watched as the fortune‑teller pulled a card from his hexagram deck, murmured “Heavenly Fire,” then broke the silence to say this fair would be a good one for me. I smiled again and nodded back, passing them each a beer just as the first visitors show interest in our offerings.
I think the teller was right with his card as I sold all my beers, shook new hand, spread old smiles while trying to remember all the names and deals I made just before the sun passing over my head. Although I made just enough to cover the trip, mornings like this give me those quick, bright highs that feels like if I will keep on going then my achievements are only a few conversations away.
Anyways, selling out early meant I was free for the day. The teller offered to watch my things so I could wander and see what the seven worlds were laying out on their tables. I was so glad for his suggestion that I hurried to tidy my stall, making extra space for visitors to sit and eat the czarische and ladirta my neighbor served for lunch. The old fortune-teller reminded me to come back at sunset for tale-trading — a ritual I had never witnessed, and the very reason I’d come to Euphemia at all.
My trip around the food and drinks intersection quickly turned into a mind-expanding tour de Gastro Obscuro. The pride I had carried for my flower beer—and the easy eloquence it lent me whenever the topic arose—quickly evaporated as I found myself standing in conversation with masters and their products from far-flung worlds. I was drawn to the tea master from the volcano of Aeterna, who offered me a rare tasting of her white teas: one from this summer’s harvest, another from last summer, and a third from seven summers ago. Each was delicate in taste, and a subtle vibrance in my imagination for the places that these leaves were grown—unfolding as the leaves opened and floating on the tea pot.
Noticed that I am into taste and aroma conversation, she told me about an unsettling new aroma emerging from this year’s harvest— something she had never encountered in her two decades of tea cultivation. I tried to pick up the difference by sipping them again, but I could not detect anything noticeable. The conversation went on and one as tea often brought people along. When it was time to part, I bought a tea cake from last year’s harvest, telling her it would commemorate my first year in trade. She lifted her eyebrows and smiled, then pressed a small bag of aged tea into my hand and wished me good luck.
The next stop was the stand of three Pure Kina monks, improbably popular despite its bare setup and the long queue curling into the lane. A chatty person waiting beside me caught my curiosity and feed me with what I need to know. This, he said, was one of Euphemia’s oldest presences, dating back hundreds of seasons. The draw was simple and singular: Euphemia Autumn is the only place in the world—and the only time each year—when the monks sell their ten‑thousand‑herbs elixir: 10 cl per bottle, one per person, only 1 000 bottles each season. After the fair, they wander back into winter meditation until spring loosens its first buds. Some even say that a young Carolus Linnaeus spent few summers among the flowers and herbs of their temple, long before he learned to name the world.
The line moved slowly while he told me how many bottles he’d managed in past years, and how kind the monks were. Our talk widened on its own until the queue became a ring of voices—people told their reasons for being here, their hopes for a deal this year and some fears for being too late. I looked around and felt the tug of elsewhere. I was impatient with the pace, so I slipped out of line and thanked people for the stories. They smiled and waved me off, my neighbor queuer smiled — “Maybe I’ll see you next year.”
Realizing I had little time before sunset, I went hunting for newness. There were flavor‑changing fruits from Bontiöl—peel like citrus that turned tart too sweet in a breath—spirits of Asilomar that smelled of blue moon and sky red, and the delicate work of Fabricano Ma’umi, latticed confections that melted into peppered honey. It felt like walking through a new garden of ingredients I hadn’t known existed. The thrill of imagined formulations quickly turned into a gentle collapse; my energy emptied, and conversation no longer came easy. I was indeed in need of a nap that I headed back to my stall and let myself drift into a nap.
I woke up from a dream where I was startled by strange noise coming from outside in the middle of the night. Lying in bed and listening intently to see if the sound is coming from the other side of the window or somewhere in the building. It sounds like gas escaping through a small, well-regulated hole rather than a threat of an impending explosion.
This unsettling feeling reminded me of many other nights last winter when I began brewing. I was frightened with mind wide open while eyes are fully shut, thirsty in the mouth and I could notice every sounds around, while lying. Waking up from the nap, there are the fortune teller, the chef and few others sitting around the fire, the night is dark and there is this one person speaking while everyone was listening.
She was saying something rituals, something to commemorate the dying microbes but I could not register as I tiredly sitting up from the nap. I wandered into her story, but it was too late in the story for me to catch up. The fortune teller passed me a bottle, silently pointing back and forth between the it and the taleteller. Half-hearing, half-reading, the label read
"... for the love of man, and for the death of microbes".
When the taleteller seems to end her story with a short silence, another person tapped in with his two years story on the road with a village of microbes from nation to nation, region to region and kingdom to kingdom. His story gripped my interest, yet the setting around us grew too warm, too drowsy. The fire crackled with a low and steady burn, its light soft and flickering; the night air weighed gentle; people drifted slowly about with unhurried steps. His voice, deep and measured, lulled me further that I surrendered to sleep.