Alchemised

by SenLinYu

“You look awful,” he said as she came through the door. She stopped short. “You look worse.”

“Don’t pretend to care,” he spat. “You expect me to believe you didn’t know this would happen?”

He was simultaneously dead and alive because it was a sort of repeating cascade of regenerative failure.

“No,” he said dully. “Everything wears off. I can barely get properly drunk.”

Calculating, Cunning, Devoted, Determined, Ruthless, Unfailing, Unhesitating, and Unyielding.

If it worked, it would carve Ferron down into these eight compounding qualities, potentially erasing everything else about him.

Reaching out tentatively, she tucked his dark hair back from his face. His features were sunken, hollows in his cheeks, temples, and eyes, all that eerie youth gone. He looked broken.

She touched his temple, leaning closer, searching his face. “Why are you doing this?”

As he was regaining consciousness, she took his nearest hand, careful not to shift his shoulder as she started massaging the palm and worked slowly to his fingertips, knuckle by knuckle, her resonance seeking out every bit of tension and knotted muscles.

Awww what he did to her

“I’m so sorry, Kaine.”

“If I’d known healing would make you so familiar, I would have said no.” He almost sounded like himself.

“I don’t care what you call me, but I’m not changing anything.” “Good. Then it’s Kaine now.”

She could feel his annoyance at the question. “Because we’re bound to Morrough.”

“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 connection would sever, and we’d—die.”

He nodded. “Yes. He shares a piece of himself with us, and we give all of ourselves to him.”

Don’t make me responsible for Kaine Ferron’s death.

She noticed the streaks of silver while treating Kaine’s back. They were just barely visible at his temple, glimmers of silver-white threaded through his dark hair.

She leaned in closer, trying to convince herself that he was simply going grey, and that it was not the exact shade of silver-white the stone had been.

“Don’t die, Marino. I might miss you.”

AHHHH

“Perhaps I did slightly underestimate you.”

Did he live here? She pulled them on slowly.

but he still didn’t fight back when they caught him.”

“It was my punishment,” he said. “I expected it would kill me, but if I survived, I didn’t want them to choose what I became. So I asked to design it, as proof of my penance.”

She tilted her head to the side. If she saw him, without the context of who he was, she might find him rather handsome.

You do this and Kaine Ferron will never let you go, and he will not be content with being secondary to anyone.”

She backed into the wall. “I’m not sure—” “Stay,” he said softly, and his head dipped so close she felt his breath in her hair. “You know, there’s something about you, Marino, that inspires the most terrible decisions from me. I’ll know better, but then I’ll still…”

He pushed the bottle towards her and when she tried to demur, he slid closer, his body closing in, sending her heart skyrocketing.

She looked up and realised she found him handsome.

“I must admit,” he said in a low voice as though making a confession, “if anyone had told me you’d become so lovely, I would never have come near you. I was rather blindsided when I saw you again.”

“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.”

Ahhhh

He tilted his head. “Will you take your hair down? I want to see it.”

“If you don’t want me to kiss you, you should say so now,” he said.

She kissed him. A real kiss this time.

“Because I’m lonely, and kissing you, and you don’t even like me.”

“You made me feel like the parts of me that aren’t useful still deserve to exist. Like I’m not just all the things I can do.”

She wasn’t crying. It was just the spray of the shower. It was just water on her face.

Ivy looked up with her sharp eyes glittering. “I like hurting them. It’s the best part of the job. The rest is boring.”

Burnout was common for defence alchemists, who frequently strained the limits of their range and abilities. It also happened to healers. Once it started happening a lot—

“I don’t think that most can,” Kaine said, straightening. “It’s something only animancers are capable of.”

“Man, woman, or child. When the Eternal Flame was constantly losing territory, the Undying could afford to be magnanimous, but the goal is eradication now.”

She knew very well that if it ever came down to her and Kaine, she would die. No matter how similar their abilities, murder was exclusively within his purview.

Her death count was the numerical representation of her failures. All the lives she hadn’t saved, the ways she fell short.

They were the inverse and counter to each other. A healer and killer, circling slowly, the push and pull inexorable.

She couldn’t imagine giving Kaine Ferron, heir of the iron guild, a resonance alloy without any iron in it. Titanium and nickel might not even be in his repertoire. She’d be asking for a weapon he couldn’t sense or transmute. It would seem like a threat.

If Lila died, so would Luc. Maybe not immediately; if he never saw combat again, physically he’d live, but every day, bit by bit, the guilt and grief would kill him.

“Idiot. You know you’re not allowed to die.”

Luc, who’d always been a bit of a larker about combat training and dismissive of the idea of a paladin, developed a passion for it overnight. He’d started constantly disappearing from study sessions and social events to practise with Lila.

Lila took the vows. To protect Luc with her life, to die for him. Luc had no choice but to accept them. Whatever had or hadn’t briefly existed between them was buried beneath the weight of those vows.

“I’d do anything to have that now. I can’t taste anything now except blood and smoke, and I don’t feel anything except when I’m on fire. The stories made it sound so good. Fighting for a cause. Being a hero.”

We called it mo’lian’shi. It—creates inertia.”