Alchemised

by SenLinYu

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.

Necrothralls.

necrothrall, an empty automaton corpse.

vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.

“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.”

“L-Liches.” The woman chuckled. “I haven’t heard anyone dare use that word in a long time. 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...

Inside the stasis tank, she’d been constantly aware of them clamped around her wrists. Their existence had persisted along the edge of her consciousness, an inescapable presence that stifled her resonance, preventing any transmutational manipulation that might have let her escape. Even in the tank, she could feel the lumithium inside them. By its nature, lumithium bound the four elements of air, water, earth, and fire together, and in that binding, resonance was created.

Sol, godhead of the elemental Quintessence,

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.

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.”

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.”

“The Holdfasts are dead,” the rasping voice said, “the Eternal Flame erased from this earth. What would they have hidden within her mind?”

spoke was venomous. She cleared her throat, glancing around. “Of course I knew there were vivimancers who supported the Eternal Flame. As if martyring themselves could earn acceptance, even though the Faith spurned their gifts as an abomination.” Her eyes were scathing. “I just didn’t realise this was one of them.”

Shiseo bowed and lifted Helena’s hand as far as it would go, inspecting her wrist and the cuff around it. He had soft hands for a metallurgist.

“I do not know, the words were—different,” Shiseo said. “The mind, I was told, resisted another’s presence, but this healer believed that with many small treatments, it was possible. Like learning to tolerate a poison.” “Mithridatism,” Morrough said slowly. He straightened into his full, tremendous height. “Soul mithridatism…”

“The Eternal Flame found a way to make living subjects survive soul transference? And you never thought to mention this?”

Back then, alchemical resonance was an arcane ability, regarded as magic. Its practitioners, figures cloaked in myth and mystery, like

Cetus, the first Northern alchemist.

Perhaps the Eternal Flame was not gone but remained as a hidden ember, waiting until the time was right.

She turned them over in her mind. Trying to contextualise the comments that had been made. Souls and minds and occupying the mental landscape of another person to transmute them from within. And the Eternal Flame had discovered this?

Surely not. Souls were considered inviolable among those of faith. The Eternal Flame considered even the physical alterations of vivimancy and necromancy a risk to an immortal soul.

charmed Grace into passing a message for him, begun coordinating a way to escape, and plotted to rescue everyone on the Outpost. That’s what he would do. Now it was up to Helena. She couldn’t fail him. Not again.

Stroud was unveiled in her disdain for Helena with the revelation that they were both vivimancers, but on opposite sides in the war.

Dexterous hands were vital for channelling and controlling resonance in both an alchemist’s practice and a healer’s work. She’d always been very careful with them.

When did she join the Resistance? When the guilds overthrew legitimate government and there was a Resistance to join.

“Did the Eternal Flame’s Council know you were a vivimancer when you joined?” Helena shook her head. Stroud sat glaring at her, waiting for a verbal response. “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.”

All she knew was that some students wouldn’t speak to her, laughed when she asked questions, and mocked her accent and way of gesturing with her hands when she talked. Later she learned that those were the guild students and to be wary of them.

The guilds seized the opportunity, and the Undying began to appear. A select few at first, revealing themselves to be not only immortal but also capable of advanced forms of alchemy. Power and eternal life were suddenly within the grasp of anyone prepared to prove themselves loyal to Morrough. Aspirants flocked to join them, aligning with the guilds.

When the Eternal Flame moved to restore order, the Undying revealed another ability: necromancy. On a scale never seen before.

when attacked they’d kill the Eternal Flame’s soldiers, and then use reanimation to turn them back on their own compatriots, building an army with the Eternal Flame’s dead.

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.

It was undeniable that Ferron had a horrific talent for necromancy.

A bizarre thing for an iron alchemist to wear.

She hadn’t been, but perhaps that was what was wrong with her. She should think more about all the people who were dead, whose common trait was the way their life had overlapped with hers.

Whether or not vivimancy was a curse, she was becoming quite sure that she was one.

Everything. Everything was wrong and it was going to be wrong forever, and it wasn’t their fault but they were paying for it. She couldn’t tell him that; it would be too cruel to rip everything away, to expose the lie that was his whole life when it was all he had.

All Luc knew was Paladia, alchemy, and the Eternal Flame, with their ideals about the refinement of fire, of trials and sacrifice, the purity of suffering. That it would be worthwhile eventually, in the next life if not this one.

To trick people into embracing it was cruelty. But how could she tell Luc that? That none of it had ever meant anything. That the miracles he believed in were mere sleights of hand, bought and paid for with betrayal. She couldn’t.

No. She blinked the thought away. The whole reason Ilva and Crowther had lied to her for so long was because they knew Kaine would see straight through her. Her feelings were always stamped right on her face.

“All right…” he said, “but only because you asked.” The words ran through her like a knife through the chest.

She’d thought for so long that she could do anything. For the war. For Luc. That she had it within her to pay any price. Now she’d found her limit.

The Resistance spies and scouts often carried cyanide pills to escape interrogation if their capture was inevitable. That wasn’t an option for him.

Don’t trust me. Don’t trust the Eternal Flame. We’re all liars.

He’d get her by one arm and twist it up behind her back or into some other helpless position, all while relentlessly criticising her, telling her all the ways she was doing things wrong, all the advantages her incompetence gave him.

“I’m tired,” she said, staring at the floor. “I’m tired of this war. I’m tired of trying to save people and watching them die anyway, or saving them only to watch them die later—in a worse way. It’s the same cycle, over and over. I don’t know how to get out, and I don’t know how to keep going, either.”