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Helena was special, though. She’d be the one who’d stay beyond Year Five, who’d study more than just the principal foundations of alchemy. She’d ascend to the highest floors, make discoveries, and do the kind of work that would change the world. Her name remembered forever.
Ow.
“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.”
“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.”
In Etras, gods didn’t require being believed in any more than the mountains did. They existed. A person accommodated them respectfully, and sometimes made little offerings and prayers requesting favour, but the gods represented facets of life on Etras, not purpose itself.
It had been viewed as a fact of nature. Men were of Sol, active, hot and dry, full of vitality, and the source of life’s seed. Women, it followed, were an inferior human form. Wet and cold, passively bound to the monthly cycle of Luna, the lesser moon. While their bodies were the necessary vessels for birth, it was their blood that was the source of all defects. Both vivimancy and necromancy were regarded as a corruption of resonance caused by a “poisonous womb.”
New Paladia sounded more like a factory than a city, intended to produce exactly the variety of alchemists the guilds wanted.
He wasn’t kind; he simply wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t as monstrous as he could be. And for Helena’s fracturing mind, an absence of cruelty was sufficient solace. For her starved heart, it was enough.
The hospital smelled like roast meat, blood, the stench of gut wounds, and the lavender oil they disinfected with. Helena used to like the smell of lavender.
Reminiscent of COVID
Helena heard she’d been a midwife before the national medical licensing laws came into effect. Women needed alchemy certification to qualify, and Pace wasn’t an alchemist, so she’d become a nurse.
He hurt her so much, without even trying, without needing to know anything about her. He’d simply spoken her name and reduced her to property, his whims locking an iron chain around her throat.
Medicine, like everything else in Paladia pre-war, was industrialised, modernised, and licensed, which rooted out would-be charlatans but had a tendency to raise prices.
He was in a crucible, and he was the crucible, and he would either die terribly or be wholly alchemised into something that could survive the paradox.
Helena was an alchemist; she was not in the habit of manipulating or altering things until she understood their nature.
The hospital massacres had been the first major atrocity in the war.
Palestine
The Guild Assembly defended the attacks, saying that the hospitals were run by the Eternal Flame as covers for military bases, and the surrounding countries swallowed the lie, because it was easier than involving themselves in Paladia’s conflict.
“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.”
Her death count was the numerical representation of her failures. All the lives she hadn’t saved, the ways she fell short. For Kaine, it was a mark of power. His victims, even Principate Apollo, all represented what made him so valuable. They were the inverse and counter to each other. A healer and killer, circling slowly, the push and pull inexorable.
Helena said, but she, too, wondered that anyone who’d seen war’s true face would let it be so gilded.
“I live among idealists, but all I see are bodies. I’d like the opinion of someone who doesn’t believe that optimism somehow improves the odds.”
The Institute was founded on the idea of pursuing the heights of alchemy, but that began to crumble the moment the science began contradicting the Faith.
“We are all expendable to Morrough. So you see, I am intimately acquainted with the illusion of choice.” He smiled, slow and cruel. “That’s why I recognise it.”
Sometimes she wished she’d died in the hospital with her father, to be remembered and mourned for her possibilities, rather than live day by day growing ever lesser.
Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.
I thought eventually you’d give up. But you will do anything to save the people you feel responsible for. Of course you’d weaponise your guilt in order to use mine.” He gave a low bitter laugh. “I’m sure there’s something poetic in it all, but right now all I feel is a new set of manacles.”
Kaine Ferron was a dragon, like his family before him. Possessive to the point of self-annihilation. Isolated and deadly, and now he held her in his arms as if she were his. The temptation to give in, to let him have her, and to love him for it terrified her.
The Resistance has latched on to you like a parasite, and you think it’s all worked out because they’re kind enough to keep you alive while they eat you?”
“If he’s that powerful, why doesn’t he come out and win the war?” He glanced up for a moment. “He’s a god. You’ll notice that making humans die for them is the gods’ primary mode of operation. You’d think Sol could personally smite a few necromancers if he hates them so passionately, but somehow, it’s always the Holdfasts coordinating those efforts. Makes one wonder if he really cares.”
If the Eternal Flame wanted to win, they should have made better choices. They all knew the risks, but that was never enough incentive for them. They refused to pay the price that victory demands, and I am sick of watching you try to pay it for them.”
In the papers, all the horror stories about the conditions inside the city, described in lurid detail, were only shared to highlight what the Paladians had been saved from, rather than as an admonishment of what they’d been left to endure.
“Love isn’t as pretty or pure as people like to think. There’s a darkness in it sometimes. Kaine and I go hand in hand. I made him who he is. I knew what that array meant when I saved him. If he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.”
