Alchemised

by SenLinYu

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.

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

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

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

“I should have refused your mother’s pleas and had you killed in the womb,” Atreus said, his face contorted with rage. “You deserve none of the suffering we endured for you.” Ferron seemed unfazed, even slightly bored. “A pity you didn’t, if it would have spared me this tedious conversation.” He turned away, his grey eyes still alight with scorn. “Get out of this house, Father, before I have it throw you out.”

Despite knowing how dangerous it was, she couldn’t help but try to unravel the mystery of what she’d forgotten. Her mind itched for context. Yet she was playing a cat-and-mouse game with Ferron, and her ignorance was her only defence.

“Come here,” he said, withdrawing a vial containing several small white tablets, watching her reaction to it. “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.”

“Why all this sudden interest in me?” he asked. She shrugged. “You don’t make sense.” He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that all? And here I was hoping you were plotting to seduce me.” She stared at him blankly. He gave a mocking smile. “Steal my heart with your wit and charms.”

Unsolvable puzzles seemed fated to be her primary occupation.

He was glaring at her. “It’s impressive how determined you are to be difficult.” “Were you expecting something else?” she asked with a loose shrug.

She looked over towards the cage. “Keep a lot of people in cages, Ferron?” His jaw clenched, throat dipping as he swallowed. “Only you,” he said, glancing around at the intricate, iron interior of his ancestral home. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“I don’t care what you do with her, just keep her out of my sight!” She turned on her heel, storming away. Ferron stared after her with a look of annoyance, then turned and directed his scowl at Helena. “You irritate my wife,” he said. “Seems I do,” she said blandly. “If you want to do something about it, you could kill me.”

It was beautiful, and it felt like a betrayal. The world was not supposed to be beautiful any longer. It was supposed to be dead and cold, forever mirroring the misery of Helena’s life. Instead it had moved on, tilting into a new season, and she could not. She was trapped forever in winter, in the season of death.

“If I’d known what pain you’d cause me, I never would have taken you.”

He kept kissing her, hard enough to hurt but not bleed, like a storm poured down her throat.

Trapped in Spirefell, she was latching on to any glimpse of kindness, any sense of tenderness her mind could fabricate. But it wasn’t kindness. He wasn’t kind; he simply wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t as monstrous as he could be.

She could bear the horror of being betrayed by her body, but she wouldn’t let herself be betrayed by her mind.

It was as if she were a tapestry. He found the threads of emotion and ripped them out.

“I think there’s something wrong with me,” she said at last. He gave her a sidelong glance which communicated that this was obvious.

You can’t bear being alone. You’ll do anything for the people who’ll let you love them.”

“I appreciate you have a fanatical devotion to his memory, but psychologically torturing a prisoner does very little when she has no memory that it even happened.

Despite the impression of coolheaded, sharp-eyed talent that Lila radiated as paladin, behind closed doors she could be chaos personified.

“You think you’re better than us because you’re immortal, but you’re dead inside already.”

He shares a piece of himself with us, and we give all of ourselves to him.”

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

Helena watched him sitting among the Council, Ilva and Matias on one side and Althorne and Crowther on the other, like a marionette unaware of its strings.

“This is probably going to hurt a lot.” “You wouldn’t believe how often people say that to me.”

“Stay,” he said, his voice coaxing, pleasure-soaked, his face so close to hers. “Have a drink with me.” 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 so near, she could taste his breath, the burn of alcohol on it. Everything had become blurred and dreamlike, except him.

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.

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.”

She wasn’t crying. It was just the spray of the shower. It was just water on her face.

They were the inverse and counter to each other. A healer and killer, circling slowly, the push and pull inexorable.

Now it didn’t matter if she’d been an alchemist, or a healer, or anything else. To anyone who ever learned of it, she would only be that one thing. Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.

She leaned closer, her hand sliding up from his chest to his shoulder to pull him forward and kiss him. It was not a slow, sweet kiss. It was not a kiss caused by alcohol or insecurity. It was born of rage, despair, and desire so hot, it threatened to burn her into oblivion.

For the first time, Kaine Ferron was fully human to her. She’d slipped through his walls and peeled away the defensive layers of malice and cruelty, and found that there he carried a broken heart.

Why was it always the hospital’s fault when things went wrong? If Helena had come out and said that surgery was a success and Lila was already getting out of bed, they’d all be off to the perihelion to offer Sol flames of thanksgiving. But bad news was always the hospital’s fault. How nice it must be, to be a god.

She folded over Soren. Her body was shuddering, but she cried silently. There was a trick to sobbing like that; it was something a person had to learn to do.

“You are not expendable. You don’t get to push everyone away so that they’ll feel comfortable using you and letting you die.”

“You made me as expendable as I am now. And you didn’t even want me, either.”

“You are not replaceable,” he said, his hands trembling against her shoulders. “You are not required to make your death convenient. You are allowed to be important to people. The reason I’m here—the reason I’m doing any of this—is to keep you alive. To keep you safe. That was the deal.” He searched her face. “They didn’t tell you.”

“I—I liked foraging. I used to go with my father, during the summers.” There was a pause. “I didn’t realise it was important to you.” She was silent for a moment. Thinking of the wetlands stretched out around her, nothing but the wilds and the mountains and the brilliant blue sky above, the only place where she could breathe without smelling blood. “Sometimes it was the closest thing to freedom I still had.”

If he couldn’t hide her, he would hoard her to himself as much as he was able to. She’d fallen for a dragon.

The war was a cage with no escape.

His hands slid up until her face was cradled in them. His forehead pressed to hers, breath mingling a moment before he kissed her again, drawing her farther inside. Their every step hurried. They were always running out of time. Someday, she promised herself, someday I am going to love him in a moment that isn’t stolen.

“You’re mine,” he said almost against her lips. “Mine. You swore it. Your Resistance sold you to me. I’m not going anywhere without you. And if anyone touches you, immortal or not, I will kill them.” He didn’t wait for a reply; he kissed her as though his lips were a brand on hers.

Kings and kingdoms rise and fall. We were made for eternity, my brother and I, we were gods.

Helena had never been inside Luc’s consciousness, but she knew from her interrogation work that a mind was like a home. It had the feeling of the person. Luc’s mind was like walking into a house and finding the walls covered in blood and torn apart. A parasite had grown through his consciousness and fed on every glimmer of the person who should be there.