Alchemised

by SenLinYu

Helena wondered sometimes if she still had eyes. The darkness surrounding her never ended. She thought at first if she waited long enough, some glimmer of light would appear, or someone would come. Yet no matter how long she waited, there was nothing. Just endless dark.

Remembered that she’d been placed there as a prisoner, kept preserved, but someday, someone would come for her.

She forced herself to focus on other things, not the wait. Not the endlessness. Not the dark. She had to wait, so she gave herself a routine to keep her mind fresh. Imagined walks. Cliffs and sky. Visited all the places she’d ever wandered. All the books she’d read. 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.

She should have realised: The woman was a vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.

“This is elaborate, beautiful, professional work. A vivimancer manually rewiring the human consciousness.”

Your thoughts run along various streets to reach their destinations. Those lines you see are your streets that have been rerouted. There are barriers, transmutationally crafted, and so instead of following a natural pattern through the brain, someone has created alternative routes. Some areas are cut off entirely. I can’t even imagine how…The skill this would take…”

By its nature, lumithium bound the four elements of air, water, earth, and fire together, and in that binding, resonance was created.

The Sacred Faith held that resonance was a gift, intended by Sol, godhead of the elemental Quintessence, to elevate humanity. Resonance was a rare ability in many parts of the world, but not in Sol’s chosen nation of Paladia. The pre-war census had estimated nearly a fifth of the population possessed measurable resonance levels.

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.

As the element of resonance, lumithium could increase or even create resonance in inert objects through exposure, making them alchemically malleable. However, pure lumithium was too divine for mortals; overexposure caused wasting sickness, and for individuals with resonance, direct exposure could result in a raw, metallic pain within their nerves.

All she knew was that as long as those manacles remained locked in place, she wasn’t an alchemist at all.

There’s a curfew. If anyone’s missed for more than twenty-four hours—” She swallowed. “If they don’t turn up, the High Reeve’s sent to hunt them down, and they’re always dead by the time he brings them back. The Warden likes to string them up, leaves them hanging for days sometimes, and then when they’re starting to rot, she’ll reanimate them and have them ‘work’ with us for a while before they go to the mines. Says it’s so we don’t forget the rules.”

“Who’s the High Reeve?” Helena hoped it was a safe question to ask. She didn’t remember the title. Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. He still wears a helmet the way the Undying did during the war. The High Necromancer’s too important for public appearances, so he sends the High Reeve instead. He’s some kind of vivimancer, but not like the rest. He kills people without even touching them.”

The only time she’d ever seen the High Necromancer, Morrough, he’d killed Luc. Luc, who’d been the whole world to her. Helena had enlisted in the Resistance and sworn fealty to the Order of the Eternal Flame—not out of faith, but because of Luc Holdfast. Because she might not believe in the gods, but she had believed in him, that he was good and kind and cared about everyone. She’d promised she’d do anything for him. But he’d died before her eyes.

The healer, I was told, had a special ability to—to alter not just the brain but the mind. They proposed to enter the mind of Bayard and heal him from within.” The mood in the room suddenly shifted, growing electrified. “That would be animancy, not healing,” Stroud said with slow incredulity. “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.”

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

“The High Reeve was Bennet’s favourite after all.” Morrough waved a dismissive hand as he vanished into the shadows. “It’s time he’s given more to do than hunting.”

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. Alteration of a mind, the transference of a soul: Surely that would be seen as infinitely worse. Yet Shiseo claimed that the Eternal Flame had developed a way to perform this animancy-transference process. Something that Morrough, who’d unlocked the secrets of immortality, had not discovered.

Did you really believe that the sun looked at the earth and chose a favourite? That a drop of sunlight endowed Orion Holdfast with such godlike abilities that all his descendants deserved to rule Paladia like gods themselves?”

“If you’d joined our cause, you could have been great.” Stroud was breathing heavily as she stood over Helena. “You would have been somebody. You’re nothing now. You spent yourself on the wrong side. No one will ever remember you. You’re ash, like all the rest. And a traitor to your kind.”

The Resistance had considered the war a holy war—a divine battle between good and evil, a testing of the Faith. But Helena’s motives had been more personal than that. Luc didn’t need to be divine for her to want to save him. He could have been entirely ordinary, and she would have made all the same choices.

When Principate Apollo was murdered, the guilds didn’t see a tragedy at all, but an opportunity. They used Luc’s age, only sixteen, as a pretext for declaring a reformation: No longer would religious elites and a warrior class rule Paladia. The city-state would be governed by the newly formed Guild Assembly. The guilds’ sedition would have been easy for the Order of the Eternal Flame to stop if it hadn’t been for Morrough. He appeared amid the upheaval seemingly from nowhere, offering immortality. Not an endless life of decay, but one impervious to age and injury, discovered not through any divine power but through science.

Falcon Matias, the spiritual counsellor of the Eternal Flame’s Council and Helena’s direct superior, had been strict in his demands that the use of vivimancy not be documented in any ways which might glorify it. The act of vivimancy, he said, could only be purified through intentions of selflessness. Although healers were relatively common in the remote parts of Paladia, vivimancy was rare enough that there were all kinds of claims about what vivimancers were capable of—that they could enthral the living just as necromancers enthralled the dead, for instance, and perform unspeakable transmutations upon living flesh.

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 an imperfect solution; even when maintained, the bodies rotted slowly around them and lacked the regenerative qualities of the near-impervious originals. Helena suspected this was why Morrough was so interested in transference—the method had the potential to allow the Undying to move into living bodies instead.

After all, the whole point of her healing had been to ensure the survival of the others, to be a fail-safe so that Luc would not die. There was no use in a healer when everyone was dead. She wouldn’t be a traitor. Whatever she’d allowed to be hidden in her mind, she wouldn’t let the Undying discover it. Surviving didn’t matter. She’d kill herself before they learned anything from her. Perhaps her violent captor could be her means to that end. If what Grace had said was true, the High Reeve preferred murder to strategic choices like interrogation. Men prone to violence were generally thoughtless, acting with emotion first and applying reason after.

Lila had been considered a once-in-a-lifetime talent as a combat alchemist. She’d joined the crusades of the Eternal Flame at fifteen, travelling the continent, investigating rumours of necromancy. Her life had revolved around becoming a paladin and serving the Principate. People used to call Lila the embodiment of Lumithia, the warrior goddess of alchemy.

He turned. Helena’s throat closed as the world around her vanished, footsteps faltering. He was not old at all. It was the iron guild heir. Kaine Ferron. She stared at him in stunned recognition. He’d been one of the few guild students who’d stayed at the Institute for undergraduate study. They’d been the same year, shared classes, even worked as assistants on the same research floors.

His hair had been dark, now it was colourless. While the pallor of his skin didn’t come from age, he looked as if he’d been bleached in moonlight. For an instant she thought he must be a corpse, like Crowther’s body at Central, but the silver-grey eyes that met hers were sharp, the sclera white, pupils black, no darkened veins anywhere beneath his skin. There were no veins visible at all, as if his blood were quicksilver.

“The last member of the Order of the Eternal Flame for you, High Reeve,” Stroud said, as if presenting him with a medal. “I believe you knew each other at the Alchemy Institute.” His eerie silver eyes flicked away. “Hardly.”

The High Necromancer wishes to have results before the winter solstice. Per his commands, you’re to perform the temporary transference method upon her as frequently as possible to achieve singularity without extinguishing her soul. Once that is accomplished and you’ve accustomed yourself to her mind, I believe that reversing the transmutations of her memory should be a small matter for you. You may examine what’s concealed, and when it’s done, I’ll come to retrieve her. The High Necromancer intends to extract the memories as well.”

Helena had never seen a guild alchemist wearing so little metal. Alchemists tended to keep metal everywhere: as jewellery, and woven into their clothes, walking sticks, weapons. Unusual alchemists like pyromancers always wore their ignition rings unless they were forced to remove them. Aurelia was covered in metal, but not Ferron. He pulled off a black glove, revealing a pale, long-fingered hand. A vivimancer, Grace had said. Of course he didn’t need metal.

“The war is over. What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours?”

Natural iron resonance was considered somewhat rare among alchemists—though not as unusual as gold resonance or pyromancy. Raw iron was naturally intractable, to the point of being considered generally inert. Most alchemists couldn’t transmute iron without having it repeatedly exposed to lumithium emanations in an Athanor Furnace, and even then they fared better with steel than iron alone. Aurelia’s transmutational work was quick and flashy. In class, she would have been docked for excess movement and imperfect iron distribution, but the ease with which she’d transformed her rings meant she had an extremely high degree of iron resonance, and if the house was iron, that meant Aurelia could wield it like a weapon, too.

The world she’d known was always full of energy, humming with power that she’d been attuned to since birth. Now everything was still. The constant sense of inertia was disorienting.

Ferron, unfortunately, was not the stupid, deluded patriarch she’d hoped for. His resonance was like Morrough’s, beyond anything she’d known was possible, but what worried her most was the way he’d gone through her memory. Morrough had done something similar, but that mental violation had been brutal and haphazard; Ferron had been surgical.

What would make Ferron look like that? He seemed—distilled. As though he’d been taken and sublimated until all that was left was an essence—something deathly cold and gleaming. The High Reeve. Not a person, but a weapon.

She racked her memory for what she knew of the family. The Ferrons were entwined with the alchemical industrialisation of the last century. They had formed the very first iron guild shortly after Paladia’s founding. Iron was one of the eight traditional metals associated with the eight planets: lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter, iron for Mars, copper for Venus, quicksilver for Mercury, silver for Luna, lumithium for Lumithia, and gold for Sol.

Being intractable and highly prone to corrosion, iron was regarded as lowly and ignoble, especially when compared with incorruptible substances like silver, lumithium, and gold. The Ferrons themselves had also been common. Blacksmiths and ironworkers making ploughs and farm tools more often than holding illustrious jobs like forging steel weapons for the Eternal Flame the way other iron alchemists had.

Helena’s first memory of Kaine Ferron was during Year Two, not as a person but merely a name on a list. Helena had ranked first on the National Alchemy Exam for their year, beating out Ferron, who’d taken the spot the year before.

During the six occasions Helena took the national exam, top rank had swung like a pendulum. Helena Marino. Kaine Ferron. A rivalry, albeit an indirect one, never openly acknowledged. He was guild. Guild students didn’t speak to “the Holdfast pet.”

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.

With every minute she spent in the house, her hatred of Ferron deepened, because she knew his history—the luxury and privilege of his family. His easy life. The Ferrons would have been nothing without the Holdfasts and the Alchemy Institute; their wealth would never have existed. They should have been grateful, loyal to Luc for what his family had enabled them to become, but they’d turned traitor and chosen Morrough. Perhaps that ouroboros dragon was not merely a pretentious decoration but something the Ferrons prided themselves on. An omen of a destructive, insatiable hunger which left nothing but ruin in its wake.

The Faith said that a soul and body remained joined together as one until cremation. It was only when fire consumed the flesh that the ethereal soul was untethered from the crude earthly form. A person who had lived devoutly and without vice would release a pure soul that could ascend to the highest of the heavenly realms.

Tethering both body and soul to a necromancer meant that even the purest souls could become too corrupted to ever ascend unless they were freed with sacred fire.

Dressed all in black, with an intricate helmet obscuring his face and hair, stood Ferron, one pale hand outstretched. She could tell it was Ferron just by his posture and the familiar tilt of his long fingers, but the article only referred to him as the High Reeve. There was no reference anywhere to Kaine Ferron being the High Reeve. Was that a secret?

If the High Reeve could be anyone, people were kept paranoid, always wondering. It would also prevent Ferron from gathering his own followers or accumulating enough power to overthrow Morrough. Perhaps Ferron had ambitions that Morrough feared. That was a tantalising possibility. Something Helena might take advantage of.

Marrying into the resonance was a well-known term for the guild families’ tendency to marry those with either the same or a complementary alchemical resonance. Aurelia and Ferron were just such an example. While an alchemist’s resonance repertoire was as heritable as hair or eye colour, resonance could also appear or vanish at random.

His clothing hid it well, but he was strangely slight. Not at all built like an iron alchemist. He didn’t even have the look or presence of a combat alchemist. She couldn’t imagine him with a heavy weapon in hand. Aside from the predatory intensity to his eyes, his features were almost too fine, like a statue carved a stroke too far. Everything about him was slim and sharp-edged.

“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.”