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.

The woman was a vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.

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.

Men prone to violence were generally thoughtless, acting with emotion first and applying reason after.

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.

She looked up at him. “You’re a monster.” He raised an eyebrow. “Noticed that, have you?”

There were statistics presented about how Paladia’s economy was expected to continue to shrink due to a multigenerational loss of alchemists. The solution, the author declared, was sponsored births.

“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.”

“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.”

“There are a few things scheduled to arrive tomorrow, to spare myself any additional inconvenience from all this. Please”—he placed overt emphasis on the word—“do not mistake it for a sign of affection.”

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

When she climbed into her bed, she could still see Ferron’s shadow outside her door. Somehow, knowing it was his, the sight of it didn’t frighten her even though it should have.

Soren. Remember Soren. What happened to him? Her skin crawled, a painful ghastly ache rose through her body, her lungs seized as if there were water inside them, and her vision turned a violent red. When her head cleared, her temples were throbbing. What had she been thinking about? Something about—Lila?

He regularly returned to the house covered in mud, soaked from rain, and pale with rage. Helena was thrilled.

“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.”

She looked healthy. Pretty, even. A Helena from a different life. But her eyes— Her eyes were dead. There was no fire in them.

She was a vibrant corpse, hardly different from the necrothralls haunting Spirefell.

She began to suspect that Morrough was torturing him regularly. Since Ferron couldn’t stay dead, Morrough got the pleasure of killing him over and over.

“Who do you hate so much?” Until then, she hadn’t realised the depths of his anger. It was like the ocean that went on and on, and all its promises were death. He seemed briefly startled by the question, then his emotions vanished like a box snapped shut. “Many people,” he said with an insolent shrug. He smiled, mouth curving like a scythe. “Most of whom are dead now.”

“I’m very particular about the alchemists in my program. The war cost us so many priceless lineages. You should be grateful to still provide something with such lasting significance.” “You’re having me raped, and you expect me to be grateful about it?”

“But at this point I suppose I deserve to burn. I wonder if you’ll burn, too.” His face was so close the words brushed against her lips, and his mouth crashed against hers.

“No, the thing eating you alive isn’t surviving or some subconscious instinct to appease me. What you can’t bear is the isolation. The Eternal Flame’s lonely little healer, with no one left to save. No one needs you, and no one wants you.”

“You appear to have forgotten that I do not suffer fools tampering with her. I have gone to considerable expense and effort to maintain her environment, regardless of how inflated your sense of importance is over being outside of the lab when it exploded. The only reason you hold any rank whatsoever is because those more suited to the task are all dead. If anything, you should be grateful to her. You’d be no one now if anyone else had survived.”

“I’m so sorry.”

When they’d gone, Ferron would sit on the edge of the bed and smooth her hair. Sometimes he would take her hand, his fingers moving absently against hers. The first time he did it, she thought he was playing with her fingers; then she realised he was massaging them. He always started at her palms, careful not to bend her wrists or bump the manacles, working slowly to her fingertips, knuckle by knuckle. It made them spasm less, so she let him, but she told herself she didn’t like it.

“I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat. It is a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them.”

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.

“Kaine Ferron has offered to spy for the Resistance,” said Crowther.

“He wants a full pardon for all of his wartime activities.” That seemed an obvious demand, although entirely out of the question. Luc would never pardon his father’s murderer. There was something about the way Ilva said it that made Helena feel that a pardon was not all Ferron had asked for. “And…?” “He wants you, Marino,” Crowther said. “Both now and after the war.”

“You understand the terms?” he asked, tilting his head appraisingly. His face might be deceptively young, but his eyes weren’t. She met them. “A full pardon. And me. In exchange for your information.” “Now and after the war.” His eyes glittered as he said it. Helena didn’t let herself react. After years in the hospital, she’d learned to ignore her feelings and do her job. “Yes,” she said, without emotion. “I’m yours.”

“Promise?” he asked. “If you want.” He flashed a quick grin, the expression slicing like a scythe across his face, more a wound than a real emotion. “Swear it, then. I want to hear you say it as a vow.” She didn’t let herself pause or think, just pressed a hand over her heart. “I swear it, on the spirits of the five gods and my own soul, Kaine Ferron, I’m yours as long as I live.”

“You don’t ever summon me. You burn me, ever, and this deal is off. I’m not a fucking dog. If you want me, you can come here and wait or leave a note, and I’ll get around to it when I have time.”

“You’re Marino, I know. This is Marta Rumly, Claire Reibeck, and Anne Stoffle. I’m Elain Boyle.”

“Previous commander—rather attached to it.” He gave a lopsided shrug. “Insulted his mother—few times. Insinuated some unfavourable things about his wife and a certain horse.” His head lolled back again. “Didn’t like that. Duelled to the death. Well—close as we can get. I won, so now I get his command posts.”

A southern ritual had no place in the North, but she’d given everything for the war, and it had not been enough. Superstition was all she had left.

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.”

“You have no idea how hard it is to save someone, to fix all the ways the people like you break them.” She glared at him. “I hope someday you have to try. See how little you think of it then.”

If she saw him, without the context of who he was, she might find him rather handsome.

Instead of perpetually ice-sharp and guarded, he felt like something she might drown in.

“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.”

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

He was gentler than she thought he could be. He looked at her like he saw her. And he was asking. She kissed him. A real kiss this time.

She knew that people enjoyed sex, but she had always thought it was an indulgence. She had not known it was a hunger. Or that she was starving.

“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.”