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or someone would come.
Remembered that she’d been placed there as a prisoner, kept preserved, but someday, someone would come for her.
I don’t think I’m mentally prepared for this again..
She would not let herself fade away.
Any corpses intact enough for reanimation go to the mines. The living stock goes to the Outpost.”
Necrothralls.
General Titus Bayard’s dead body was used to kill his wife. Slowly. Making him eat the strips of her as he cut them off.
The woman was a vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.
Her hands were twitching and spasming, convulsively jerking against the chains.
You’re that little savant the Holdfasts sponsored.
Did you help the Holdfast boy burn down the city? Your darling Luc, as you all liked to call him?”
Even in the tank, she could feel the lumithium inside them.
By its nature, lumithium bound the four elements of air, water, earth, and fire together, and in that binding, resonance was created.
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.
There’s no point. The High Reeve kills everyone.
And everyone in the Eternal Flame is dead—except you.
The only time she’d ever seen the High Necromancer, Morrough, he’d killed Luc.
“The Holdfasts are dead,” the rasping voice said, “the Eternal Flame erased from this earth. What would they have hidden within her mind?”
“I don’t like those spasms,”
There she issss
In the stasis tank, she’d told herself over and over that she’d survive, that she had to hold on. She couldn’t explain why.
Men prone to violence were generally thoughtless, acting with emotion first and applying reason after.
🙌🏻
People used to call Lila the embodiment of Lumithia, the warrior goddess of alchemy.
“Welcome to Spirefell.
It was the iron guild heir. Kaine Ferron. She stared at him in stunned recognition.
The High Reeve. Not a person, but a weapon. Well, Helena would be sure to treat him as one.
Just live, Helena, a voice in her mind begged.
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.
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.
“I thought you liked us dead.” Her head hurt so much, she wanted to vomit. He gave a barking laugh. “Consider yourself the sole exception to that rule.
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.
She looked up at him. “You’re a monster.” He raised an eyebrow. “Noticed that, have you?”
“When I see dark places and I don’t know where they end, I feel like I’ll disappear inside them, but this time, I’ll never be found.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you if you swallow it like a good girl.” Helena pressed her lips tightly together.
it was unspoiled by the inferior environment and contributions of a female womb—the source of all humanity’s flaws.
a severely tarnished silver ring, as if he never took it off to care for it. It was hand-forged rather than transmutationally crafted; she could see the hammer marks that had beaten a scaled, almost geometric pattern onto it.
Ferron’s lips remained pressed against Aurelia’s, but as he kissed her, he raised his eyes, and his gaze locked onto Helena’s face.
Somehow, knowing it was his, the sight of it didn’t frighten her even though it should have.
Unsolvable puzzles seemed fated to be her primary occupation.
No one’s coming for her, but you’re still hovering about like you’re hoarding her.”
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.
“Everyone wanted a lot for me, and I’m not sure I ever knew what I wanted.” She shrugged. “Probably good that I didn’t, since it didn’t matter in the end.”
Things that seem too good to be true usually have a price you don’t know about until it’s too late.”
“Worrying about me?” His face twisted into a gloating smile. “I never thought I’d see the day.”
“Ferron always comes for me,” she whispered.
Ferron will come. Ferron will come.
“Well, you—you have a natural talent for it. In another life, you could be a healer.” “One of life’s great ironies,” he said, glancing towards the door, his jaw tight.
the repeated conversations🥲
If the destination was inevitable, her only choice was in how horrifying the journey would be.
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.
