On a cold Alabama winter day in 1839, a wizard of Dee stumbled out of a small log cabin. He had secluded himself there for a fortnight, putting himself through days of incantations and scrying to crack open the dam holding back the future. His efforts bore fruit. He foresaw that there would be three men who would defend the power and influence of the wizards of the South. One would become a leader of men, honed in battle. One would die withered and mad. One would brew an elixir of untold power. And each of those men would be named John Pemberton. Dazed and exhausted, the wizard Alan Pemberton staggered into his house, embraced his equally dazed and exhausted wife, paid the midwife, kissed his newly born child on the forehead, and named him John Quest Pemberton.

The prophecy (which would not become public knowledge until after John Q’s death) would hang over John Q for the rest of his life. His father, in defiance of tradition, began teaching him wizardry at the age of five, in the hopes of pushing him towards success and away from the worst possible fate. Despite contemporary records from tutors claiming he was a brilliant student, he took poorly to studying magic. In John’s late teens, family friends would recall spirited arguments between him and his father about wizardry, with John decrying it as ‘intellectually stillborn’.

John left the family home to study at Florence Wesleyan University, planning to become a professor of literature regardless of his father’s prophecy. Only when the Civil War began did he consider that the prophecy might not be avoidable. Though several members of the student body and faculty left to take up arms, he would not join the Confederate Army until 1862, writing upset letters to his father about the cruelty of God to show him his path so clearly. Though he would make the rank of captain due to his father’s wizard connections, his service record was unimpressive and he relied heavily on his lieutenants when making weighty decisions. His company survived to surrender at the end of the war, and he survived the post-war investigation of Confederate officers with minimal charges and imprisonment, but it was clear that the fate of a great leader would go to John Clifford Pemberton. John would leave his military career haunted by the future, returning to a home ravaged by the war and the graves of his parents, who died resisting an investigation into his father’s wizardry by the post-war American government.

John inherited a sum of money and his father’s books upon his death and threw himself into the study of alchemy, obsessing over brewing a great elixir before the as-of-yet unaccounted by prophecy John Pemberton: John Stith Pemberton of Georgia. As his inheritance dwindled from his attempts at making an elixir of immortality, he used his newfound skills to find work: first as a pharmacist, then a creator of firebombs for the Klan, then a circus act where he’d amaze crowds with bubbling pink vials that shot liquid up into the air. During the Williamson Circus Raid, he suffered severe disfiguring chemical burns which only drove him deeper into his obsession. His incarceration for his role in the event that necessitated the aforementioned raid led him to experiment with his own humors, nearly killing himself on several occasions due to bloodletting. He finished his five-year sentence, but his poor health left him a shell of his former self. He would work as a scrivener in Virginia for two years, unable to find better work due to his prison record and burn scars, abandoning attempts at the elixir of immortality in favor of a cheaper elixir that would let him survive long enough to reach the age of 45. He wouldn’t make it. His body was found on the side of the road in 1883, dead from a heart attack. Three years later, John S Pemberton would create the first iteration of the most popular soda recipe in the world.

Noting that John S Pemberton also died withered and mad two years later in 1888, augur-historians have questioned whether John Q was ever covered by the prophecy in the first place or if his cruel fate was entirely self-inflicted. His story is told as a cautionary tale to new augurs as a warning about the consequences of knowing the future. A collection of John Q’s last two years of notes were published in 1890 after one of his friends from Florence Wesleyan mentioned the prophecy in his autobiography. The consensus of the alchemical community at the time was that his work, while making some interesting improvements in the preparation of mushrooms, was unlikely to lead to any ‘untold power’. Some still claim that there’s a hidden potency to his concoctions, and variations on his final recipe can be found online wherever ‘specialty supplements’ can be bought, but the larger narco-academic community has thoroughly passed on his work.

EDIT: During October 2025, as part of a study on the long-term effects of 1800s alchemy on the human body, John Q Pemberton’s body was disinterred. Shortly after being exposed to oxygen, his corpse exploded with an estimated force of one kiloton, leading to seven fatalities and forty-two casualties. It’s believed that, due to testing his elixirs on himself, his body became a crucible for a new kind of alchemical explosive, far more potent per pound than any others currently known. Multiple parties, including two government agencies, are trying to gain access to the body in order to formulate the recipe for the explosive. Will update with more details later.