Shopkeepers of Sapience,

We hear your cries and desire for logic. The answer is simple: gold. Go to any village and the price for a single goldbar will cost 500 sovereigns. Mine and process the goldore in a city and this price drops to about 200 sovereigns. Why is goldbar important? Because it provides the optimum production of elixirs. Where one batch without the goldbar will yield enough for one, non-artifacted vial, with the goldbar it will yield twenty. Some may say it is fine to tax the creatures of this land to produce these goods for sale, that using goldbar is a choice. To them we say stop wasting; the footprint left would make a better impression anywhere else.

We made a call for a sustainable market place and a healthy economy. Balancing the price of elixirs to the price of goldbar does this. We have seen prices as low as six sivereigns for a vial. Assuming the shopkeeper is using goldbars to produce their goods, we can only assume they have embraced insanity and in doing so poison the economy by undercutting the apothecaries of the land.

There was a time, before innovations brought us our fluid caches, that we all walked with many, many vials of elixirs, each of them costing at least three hundred sovereigns upfront. The apothecary thrived then, it does not thrive now. Some call it greedy to insist on making the goldbar our standard for price, to them we say it is not avarice that guides our hands. It is to draw emphasis on how little we value ourselves. In keeping our customers supplied, we work ourselves to the bone for a sacrifice few appreciate, but expect.

We are the Seirathi. We say no more. For blood and gold.

X. Seirath

Penned by my hand on Gosday, the 7th of Haernos, in the year 502 MA.