Alchemised

by SenLinYu

The executions had not stopped until the air was red with a mist of blood.

General Titus Bayard’s dead body was used to kill his wife. Slowly. Making him eat the strips of her as he cut them off.

She should have realised: The woman was a vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.

“Something has been done to your mind,” the woman said, sounding bewildered but also strangely excited. “Some kind of transmutation. I have never encountered anything like it. I’m going to have to report this. I’ll need a specialist. You have—” The woman paused. “There’s no name for this! I’ll have to come up with a name…”

“Transmutational barriers inside a brain. How is that possible? I have never—there are—patterns in it.”

“This is elaborate, beautiful, professional work. A vivimancer manually rewiring the human consciousness.”

By its nature, lumithium bound the four elements of air, water, earth, and fire together, and in that binding, resonance was created.

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.

But—the use of vivimancy on a brain has always been a most delicate procedure. Transmutation of this scale and complexity is beyond all known scientific possibility. Memory is a mysterious thing, very changeable as it’s moved around. Not a place, it is—the mind’s journey. A path. The more important, more journeyed, the stronger the path. The less journeyed”—fingers fluttered—“it fades.”

“This is alteration of the unalterable. Someone—has disassembled the pathways of her mind and created alternative routes for them. How could it be done without knowing all her thoughts and memories? No. No. This is scientifically impossible.”

“I was only aware of this because they hoped there were similar techniques used in the Eastern Empire. The healer, I was told, had a special ability to—to alter not just the brain but the mind. They proposed to enter the mind of Bayard and heal him from within.”

He advanced on Shiseo as if intending to rip the answers out of him. “The Eternal Flame found a way to make living subjects survive soul transference? And you never thought to mention this?”

“I didn’t know I was a vivimancer,” Helena finally said. “And after—once everyone knew—Luc didn’t care. He didn’t think a person’s abilities changed who they were, only what they did with them.”

On the rare occasions when they couldn’t regenerate anymore, so grievously wounded in battle that their immortal bodies could no longer heal, the Undying could move themselves into their necrothralls instead. It was why the Resistance had called them liches.

Penny leaned over the arm of the chair, looking back, her face stricken. “You were right. I’m so sorry. We should have listened to you.”

“The war is over. What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours?”

In a way, it was strangely poetic that it was Helena who’d been brought as a captive to Spirefell. She’d beaten Ferron before. If she was careful, and clever, she would do it again.

The Faith said that a soul and body remained joined together as one until cremation. It was only when fire consumed the flesh that the ethereal soul was untethered from the crude earthly form.

Through the obscuring rain, the house around her looked almost like an immense slumbering creature, curved inwards, the spires like spines.

She curled up on the floor, the wood like bones beneath her hands. She was disappearing into the nothing again. Into the nothing where she couldn’t move…couldn’t scream…and no one ever came…

“You’re scared of the dark?” His silver eyes were burning, his voice thick with disbelief.

I-In the stasis tank, it was always dark no matter how hard I tried to see, and I couldn’t feel anything around me, just my body floating and not moving. It felt—endless. Like I was nowhere. I was—I was there so long. I kept thinking that eventually someone would come but—” She shook her head. “When I see dark places and I don’t know where they end, I feel like I’ll disappear inside them, but this time, I’ll never be found.”

It was the first time she’d bothered to just look at him, to see him for what he was, rather than who he was.

“You know,” Ferron said, jolting her from her thoughts, “when I heard it was you I’d be getting, I was looking forward to breaking you.” He shook his head. “But I don’t think it’s possible to exceed what you’ve done to yourself.”

Helena looked away, staring across the room so hard, her vision blurred. “It was one of the conditions the Falcon had for allowing me in the city. Since vivimancy is a corruption of the soul that begins in the womb, it could—it could be passed on. I’d already taken vows as a healer that I wouldn’t ever marry or have children, but he—” She swallowed. “He wanted to be sure.”

He scoffed. “How many years of your life did you spend in that hospital? And for what? Saving people who would have been better off if you’d let them die. But no, you put them back together and sent them right back out to suffer a bit more.” He gave a slow smile. “Perhaps Stroud’s wrong, and you were sympathetic to our cause.”

All those years. All the people she’d healed, her resonance knitting them back together so they could live to fight another day, and for what? So they could be tortured to death, or enslaved, or—worse? Until that moment, healing had been the only thing she hadn’t felt guilt over.

“You used to believe in me. What did I do to make you stop?” His voice was faraway. “I still believe in you, Luc,” she said. “But we have to win this war; we can’t make choices because we want a certain story to tell later. There’s too much at stake.”

she said. “Everyone who wins says they were good, but they’re the ones who tell the story. They get to choose how we’ll remember it. What if it’s never that simple?”

“I promised I’d do anything for you.” She curled her fingers into a fist. “Maybe you didn’t realise how far I was willing to go.”

She kept trying to piece together the bits and pieces of her missing memories, but it was difficult to know if she’d forgotten something or never been informed in the first place. After all, a healer didn’t merit much in the way of security clearance.

“Come here,” he said, withdrawing a vial containing several small white tablets, watching her reaction to it. “What are those?” she asked when he unscrewed the top and tapped one out. He raised an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you if you swallow it like a good girl.”

She could tell that he was doing some kind of complex transmutation to her. Something was happening. She should have been panicking, trying to resist as Ferron’s resonance sank into her biochymistry. Instead, she became completely calm. She could feel him altering her as if she were an instrument he was tuning; tampering, adjusting, manipulating her until she felt empty.

“Why would I torture you when you won’t react?” he asked softly in her ear.

She stood on the chair and finally resorted to tilting it against the wall, clambering up the back so she could get a good look at the high-up corner nearest the door. Tucked into the shadow was an eye encased in glass. It swivelled, the pupil contracting, as if it were still alive, and stared straight at her. The iris was a beautiful, deep blue. They’re offering a lot of money for eyes, Grace had said.

“You’re not a homunculus, are you?” She felt ridiculous asking the question. Artificial humans were considered as mythical as chimaeras or philosopher stones. One of the many ideas attributed to Cetus in the prescientific era.

“Why all this sudden interest in me?” he asked. She shrugged. “You don’t make sense.” He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that all? And here I was hoping you were plotting to seduce me.” She stared at him blankly. He gave a mocking smile. “Steal my heart with your wit and charms.” Helena scoffed. “Who knows, perhaps I have a proclivity for—” He paused, studying her, trying to find something. Helena walked away. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“I’m in charge of your care,” he finally said very slowly, saying each word precisely. His hand slid across the side of her neck, making her tremble. His fingertips touched the dip at the base of her skull. “Go to sleep. You’ll remember when you wake.” Helena wanted answers, not sleep, but the warmth seeped under her skin like water. The room blurred, the edges disappearing. The face softening as it faded away. “Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed. “I suppose you do.”

There was no emotion in Ferron’s voice or face as he said it. It was one of the things that Helena realised was most strange about him: how little his body and tone communicated at times.

Helena had learned to be still and watch for subtle tells. To understand that when the pupils got small, and the eyes skipped over her face, and the feet pointed away, that the smiling and nice-sounding words didn’t mean that she was liked or her presence wanted.

pair of shearling gloves made with an odd design, very long in the wrist. Not formal length, but strangely proportioned, rather like a hawking glove. She pulled one on curiously and realised the shape and length was to cover the manacles, preventing the metal from growing frigid and burning her skin. When she went out for her walk, it was the first time her hands and feet didn’t begin immediately aching from the cold.

She was not so foolish as to mistake calculation for kindness.

he gleamed somehow. There was something so distinctly strange about him.

“I was told that the transmutations in her mind would cause difficulty,” Ferron said. “Those difficulties are because she is resisting, because she can resist. This—she is the animancer.”

“There is only one answer: She is the animancer. Even now, with her resonance all but gone, she is still resisting. She erased her memory of what she is in an attempt to escape me.”

“The Undying. You’re his source of power, and the Resistance—we figured that out, didn’t we? How to kill him. How to kill all of you.”