Alchemised

by SenLinYu

“Well, you may have noticed, the High Necromancer wasn’t pleased about the ports.” He drooped, his head dipping, but then he jerked up sharply, face contorting in pain. “Bad luck—for the commander in charge.”

“Ferron, what’s happened to you? What’s wrong?” Her voice rose sharply as she hovered, not sure what to do. His eyes shut. He was breathing shallowly. “F-Fuck off, Marino.”

“Don’t pretend to care,” he spat. “You expect me to believe you didn’t know this would happen?” She shook her head. “I didn’t. I would have come back sooner if I’d known.”

There were no bandages underneath. His entire back was a rotting wound, lacerated surgically from his shoulders down past his ribs.

“Should I not call you Kaine? It seems odd to keep going by surnames. We’re going to be around each other for the rest of our lives, you know.”

She needed to make herself think about him differently. She’d made too many wrong assumptions while seeing him as Ferron.

standing in did not feel professional. Despite his haggard state, Ferron—Kaine, she mentally corrected—looked oddly striking, as if she’d never seen him in the proper environment before.

It’s not fair to expect you to tame something like that when you can’t heal properly or raise your arms.” He looked condescendingly down at her. “Marino, this may be a shocking revelation for you, but the High Necromancer does not care about fairness. It’s his opinion that anyone without the wits and will to survive deserves to suffer and die. Ideally for his amusement.”

“If you were me, what would you do?” “I—” she stammered. “I would see if I could make it loyal.” “And if you couldn’t? If a monster can’t be made loyal, what would you do then?”

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

“This war is your fault. Everyone who’s died. It’s on your head. And now, because of you, even when it’s over, I’ll still have nothing.”

Helena wished she could save him from it, but she knew that left to his own devices he would blindly sacrifice himself at the first opportunity.

“I’ll—I can have Ferron healed by next week,” she said in the lift afterwards, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She was cold all over, and the light hurt her eyes. Complicit. Complicit. Complicit. The word rang through her head. “I’ll get it done.”

The injury has made him more emotionally vulnerable than he would have been otherwise.” Crowther’s fingers stilled. “Don’t mistake that for loyalty.”

“No, you don’t. If you did, you’d realise the error in your strategy. He is not a person, he’s not human, and you are not creating a relationship of trust with him. He is an animal.”

“I have no use for tools I cannot control.

They do not share. They are obsessive about what they regard to be theirs. You do this and Kaine Ferron will never let you go, and he will not be content with being secondary to anyone.”

Pragmatism had stolen away any lustre of heroism from her, and she kept telling herself it was all right… But she was so lonely.

She couldn’t fix herself anymore, and no one else seemed inclined to even notice she was breaking. You are all alone, and when the war is over, you will still be alone.

Do you think he could be looking for the Stone of the Heavens?” He set down the drink he was pouring. “You think the High Necromancer came here to steal a magical orb that doesn’t exist?”

The stone was a fairy tale. The belief that Sol’s blessing was a physical object was a misinterpretation of the early artistic renderings of Orion Holdfast.

Ferron scoffed. “You believe in Sol?” She shifted, gripping the strap of her satchel. “Yes, well, maybe not exactly the way people here do, but—you don’t? Not—not at all?” Kaine’s lip curled. “Not at all.”

She used to dream about Luc visiting her lab, seeing her work, and realising everything she was doing for him, but instead of elation, all she felt was worry. She couldn’t be late tonight.

His smile vanished. “Well, I guess there’s a lot I don’t know, isn’t there?” Her spine went rigid.

“I was afraid you’d think it meant I didn’t believe in you, and I do, I just—want this to be over.” “Hel…” He looked down, fidgeting with the ignition rings on his fingers. “This isn’t your war.” She flinched. “What do you mean, it’s not my war? I’ve been here from the start. I promised you—” She shook her head. “You’d never say this to Lila. To anyone else.”

The way he moved reminded her of a panther she’d once seen in the zoo. No bandages, no shirt. There was so much bare skin and now that she was not healing it, it was simply there.

What kind of person was Kaine Ferron without inhibition?

“You’re going to regret this if I start crying.” She could already feel the alcohol in her face. “I get emotional when I’m drunk.” His eyebrows furrowed. “Is there a reason to cry?” She looked down, rubbing her thumb over the etched pattern on the decanter. “There’s always a reason.”

She smiled at him. “See? Not so hard.” He stared at her without smiling back, and she tried not to be distracted but he was so close, and still without a shirt on. Her eyes kept dropping involuntarily. She was trying not to look, but ordinarily when she saw people without their clothes on, it was because they were dying.

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.”

She stared at him, startled by the remark, and then tears welled up and streamed down her cheeks. His eyes widened. “Gods, Marino, don’t cry,” he said hastily. “Sorry,” she said, pulling her hand free and scrubbing her face. “I’m just—really drunk.”

“My father used to do this for me,” she said without looking up. “He said alchemists were like surgeons, so we have to take care of our hands.” “But why are you doing it for me?”

he’d hold my hand until I fell asleep, so I’d know he was there. You looked lonely just now, so I thought…” She shook her head and let go. “I don’t know. It’s nothing. Sorry.”

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

He seemed to be mapping her with the span of his fingers, a topographer exploring the curve of her clavicles, every dip and rise of bone and flesh.

His touch sent a heady rush through her, her mind tumbling as if caught in a wave. She hadn’t realised how much she’d wanted to be touched. That she was starved of it, too.

She pressed closer, wanting to erase every sliver of space between them, so tired of being always alone. A thing apart, reduced to her functions. Healer. Chymist. Liaison. Tool. Whore.

“Why are you crying?” he finally asked. She smeared at her cheeks with her hand. “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’d let herself become wrapped up in her feelings at being compared to a rose and called lovely, at having aspects of herself that no one had ever liked treated as a source of desire. Apparently that was all it took for Ferron to seduce her.

She didn’t let herself look in the mirror until she was done, until there was not a stray curl to be seen.

However, whatever flicker of desire or fondness he felt was barely kindled. Too much fuel too fast would smother it. It was for the best they’d stopped when they did. That he was left wondering what could have happened. She suspected he burned for things more deeply than he knew. Therefore, the key would lie in cultivating that spark into something beyond his control.

make sense of them all. So he was back, no explanation for his month-long disappearance, while she’d been left to endure being written off as a failure and castigated for wasting critical resources on a gamble that had failed to pay off.

“Vivimancy is a corruption of resonance that can use vitality as well as the energy of resonance. It’s caused when an unviable soul sustains itself by stealing life from another. Souls like that can only be purified through a life of self-sacrifice. The toll is—penance. It’s giving up what was stolen.”

Her mother’s mysterious sickness, diagnosed as a kind of consumption, was the Toll. Not because her mother had been a vivimancer, but because from the moment of conception, Helena’s defective, corrupt self had leached her mother of life from within her womb, stealing all but those seven years away.

That vivimancers were parasites by nature, and they would rot and burn in the bowels of the earth for an eternity if they did not repent and purify themselves by giving up every drop of the vitality they’d taken.

All the years she’d spent hovering over her mother, watching her father attempt cure after cure, running them into debt buying expensive ingredients...

“I don’t need you to get it, I need you to believe it. You’re being driven by the guilt over crimes you never committed, that you think you deserve to suffer for, and that’s making you a liability for me.”