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Remembered that she’d been placed there as a prisoner, kept preserved, but someday, someone would come for her.
She had to endure. To stay alert. That way she would be ready. She had to stay ready. She would not let herself fade away.
vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.
“This is elaborate, beautiful, professional work. A vivimancer manually rewiring the human consciousness.”
doubt you understand any of this, but imagine your mind is a—a city. Your thoughts run along various streets to reach their destinations. Those lines you see are your streets that have been rerouted. There are barriers, transmutationally crafted, and so instead of following a natural pattern through the brain, someone has created alternative routes. Some areas are cut off entirely. I can’t even imagine how…The skill this would take…”
All of the Undying, regardless of their forms, are the High Necromancer’s most ascendant followers. Their immortality is the reward for their excellence. In this new world, death claims only the unworthy. No matter what insults you attempt, it is your friends who are nothing but ashes to be forgotten.”
Usually, resonance was channelled into the alchemy of metals and inorganic compounds, allowing for transmutation or alchemisation. However, in a defective soul which rebelled against Sol’s natural laws, the resonance could be corrupted, enabling vivimancy—like what the woman had used on Helena—and the necromancy used to create necrothralls.
All she knew was that as long as those manacles remained locked in place, she wasn’t an alchemist at all.
“They use the greys for listening sometimes. There’s one in here, can’t you smell it? You can’t call the Undying liches.”
The High Necromancer was not what she remembered. When he’d killed Luc, he’d been human. Now he was mutated. His limbs stuck out in ways that were impossibly jointed, and he was nearly the size of two men.
“The Eternal Flame found a way to make living subjects survive soul transference? And you never thought to mention
She wouldn’t be a traitor. Whatever she’d allowed to be hidden in her mind, she wouldn’t let the Undying discover it.
Alchemists tended to keep metal everywhere: as jewellery, and woven into their clothes, walking sticks, weapons.
“The war is over. What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours?”
The last fugitive of the extremist group calling themselves the Order of the Eternal Flame has been apprehended and faces interrogation. New Paladia’s Central office has confirmed the identity of Helena Marino, a foreign alchemy student from the southern islands of Etras. The Etrasian government denies any involvement in or support of the Eternal Flame’s terrorist activities. To protect the citizens of New Paladia from further violence, Marino has been imprisoned outside the city at Spirefell while her fate is decided.
Alchemisation, the transformation of one metal into another, was the most difficult form of alchemy.
“What kind of ring is that?” she asked. He looked down. “This?” he asked, as if there were any other rings she could have been referring to. He turned his hand. “Just an old piece.” He slipped it off and tossed it to her. She caught it reflexively, disappointed to discover that it wasn’t an unusual black metal at all, but a severely tarnished silver ring, as if he never took it off to care for
“Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed. “I suppose you do.”
Stawpppp... Came back to reread this.
was well known that necrothralls could go only so far from their necromancer or else they’d “die” again. Most necromancers could manage a few miles at most.
“We’re not always bound to him exactly.” He sighed. “We’re—he uses his bones, pieces of them, when we’re made. Part of the outer bone of his right arm was used on me. He calls them phylacteries. It’s what creates our physical immutability. A part of that is used to make the talismans.” He gestured at his chest. “He takes the phylacteries out sometimes and either grows a new bone or takes a spare from some necrothrall. That’s what he did when travelling, so he could leave some of us behind during his trip. He doesn’t like to do it often, but if he travelled without leaving the phylacteries, the
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I believe you call them liches when they’re dead like that. That was when we began to realise what being ‘Undying’ meant.”
that explained why Ferron needed the Eternal Flame; he was dependent on them defeating Morrough for him.
“You’re like a rose in a graveyard,” he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I wonder what you could have turned into without the war.”
she pressed her thumbs up across the palm until his fingers flexed and began massaging it from the wrist to the fingertips. “Why do you do that?” he asked after a minute. “My father used to do this for me,” she said without looking up. “He said alchemists were like surgeons, so we have to take care of our hands.” “But why are you doing it for me?”
“You’re mine. You swore yourself to me. Now and after the war. I’m going to take care of you. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you. You don’t have to be lonely. Because you’re mine.”
She would know him blind.
“No!” she said sharply. “Look at me. I’m going to save you. That’s why I became a healer, remember? So that someday, when you needed me, I could save you.”
“Lila—she thought he was me—” “I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what else she could say. His jaw trembled. “Don’t tell her.”
