Alchemised

by SenLinYu

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 had to endure. To stay alert. That way she would be ready. She had to stay ready. She would not let herself fade away.

Even the ones properly done are mostly dead. Lot of the tanks are just soup and bones.” The man laughed nervously.

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.”

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.

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.

The lumithium in the manacles didn’t seem to make Helena sick. Which me...

altered it. The sharp energy inside was keyed into her resonance, but rather than turn it raw, it blurred her senses. She could feel her resonance, but when she tried to control it, the cuffs were like static in her ner...

All she knew was that as long as those manacles remained locked in place, she was...

Its practitioners, figures cloaked in myth and mystery, like Cetus, the first Northern alchemist.

This wasn’t Crowther. One of the Undying was wearing his corpse. 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.

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

The High Necromancer wants your secrets, and until he has them, you will not die.”

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.

If a body was not burned, the soul was left trapped, unable to ascend and in danger of becoming tainted by the body’s putrefaction. Left too long, the impurity of the body could metamorphise the soul into maggots and insects, plagues, and other grotesque forms of evil, doomed to sink beneath the surface of the earth to be consumed forever in the dark wet fire of the Abyss.

Reanimation risked that metamorphosis. Tethering both body and soul to a necromancer meant that even the purest souls could become too corrupted to ever asce...

“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.”

But whenever she left her room for long, the necrothralls began materialising. They didn’t try to stop her or herd her back into her room; they just watched her, hovering like ghostly apparitions.

“The Holdfasts did love collecting rare alchemists,”

“What happened to us, Hel?” he asked as she crouched down beside him. She stared at the horizon, past all the towers, towards the south. “A war,” she said.

The nervous, intense way his fingers moved as he’d sparked his rings, bringing the flames to life. She’d loved his pyromancy. It always felt more like magic than alchemy, the way he could make fire an extension of himself with those sun-bright flames.

Tucked into the shadow was an eye encased in glass. It swivelled, the pupil contracting, as if it were still alive, and stared straight at her. The iris was a beautiful, deep blue. They’re offering a lot of money for eyes, Grace had said.

“You’re not a homunculus, are you?” She felt ridiculous asking the question. Artificial humans were considered as mythical as chimaeras or philosopher stones. One of the many ideas attributed to Cetus in the prescientific era.

The Great Disaster, two millennia past, which nearly shattered both earth and humanity, had been the processes of alchemisation itself.

First the fires that rained upon the earth: the calcination. The rising tides that swallowed the great cities were the dissolution. The earthquakes that shattered even the mountains were the separation. The aftermath as the survivors emerged from the destruction: the conjunction. The plagues and sickness and starvation that followed: the fermentation. The death

toll, so immense that humanity nearly blinked from existence: the distillation. And finally in culmination, the result of Lumen’s great experiment, mankind itself manife...

Don’t look at the shadows.

Helena stared in horror at the sight before her. She barely recognised the grotesque shape. Morrough lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him.

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

Her consciousness was split between herself and him, but with every passing second, she felt more like him than she did herself. Slowly devoured.

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

And for Helena’s fracturing mind, an absence of cruelty was sufficient solace. For her starved heart, it was enough.

“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.”

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

Calculating, Cunning, Devoted, Determined, Ruthless, Unfailing, Unhesitating, and Unyielding.

“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.”

“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.”

Despite how cold he often was, a dragon was an apt sigil for the Ferrons. He kept walls of ice around himself, but there was fire in his heart.

Even now, his jaw was tense. His expression guarded. His mouth held in that hard, flat line. But his eyes… She could tell— He was hers. The realisation broke her heart.

His expression turned guarded and embittered, as if he’d wept out all his softness and once again only his venom remained.

Her bones cracked. Teeth sank into her flesh. The tendon behind her knee ripped out. Wet hands found her mouth, clawing in so deep she couldn’t bite down. Her jaw gave way, ripping until her throat tore open. She was still fighting as water closed over her head.

She hadn’t known necromancy was like that. That she would never be free of the person she brought back. No wonder necromancers went mad. Who could stay sane with the minds of the dead inside them?

Lumithia hung overhead, bright as a white sun in the black abyss.

She was delirious. Truly delirious now, because Kaine was there with a giant winged dog standing behind him.

Kaine was

like a furnace, and when she buried herself in his arms, face pressed against his chest, she could scarcely feel the cold dead fingers anymore.