Alchemised

by SenLinYu

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

Before the warehouse, she’d been captured along with everyone else, crammed into cages outside the Alchemy Tower, where all the prisoners had been brought so they could witness the “celebrations” of the war’s end.

Someone Helena had trusted or served under, brought back with reanimation. A necrothrall, an empty automaton corpse.

they would be used to kill the next “traitor” in an even more brutal way.

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.

Each death had carved out a piece of Helena until there was a cavern of grief inside her chest. When there wasn’t anyone left worth publicly killing, they’d put her in that stasis tank.

Not Helena. She had been kept awake, aware of the claustrophobic horror of all that was happening to her, as she was locked inside her body and left in the dark. Waiting for someone to come for her. No one ever did.

vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.

“Something has been done to your mind,”

“Some kind of transmutation.

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

“I suppose you wouldn’t know, given the state of your brain. You’re probably lucky to remember your own name. You were an alchemy student, I presume.”

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.

All she knew was that as long as those manacles remained

locked in place, she wasn’t an alchemist at all.

Helena shook her head, struggling to accept it, but of course Lila was dead. For Luc to be captured and killed, his paladins had to be killed. That was the oath they took, to die for the Principate.

“Who’s the High Reeve?”

“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.”

“All there is now is surviving. That’s all that matters.”

“They’re offering really good money for eyes. Just one, and it’d cover us for months.”

“What do they want eyes for?”

“I don’t know. I just want the money.”

“You don’t know—you don’t have any idea what it’s like now. Where have you been? Why didn’t you save Luc? You were supposed to, but you didn’t. He died! We all watched it. And the Bayards are dead. And everyone in the Eternal Flame is dead—except you. And you think I should care about my eyes?”

“The High Necromancer has sent for you. He wishes to watch your examination personally.”

The only time she’d ever seen the High Necromancer, Morrough, he’d killed Luc.

Luc, who’d been the whole world to her.

She’d promised she’d do anything for him. But he’d died before her eyes.

She was in the Alchemy Tower. In the very heart of the Alchemy

Institute that the Holdfasts had founded. This was Central.

“The—the thing is. This is—impossible. This—can’t be done.” “It’s obviously possible. The evidence is right here,”

“This is alteration of the unalterable. Someone—has disassembled the pathways of her mind and created alternative routes for them. How could it be done without knowing all her thoughts and memories? No. No. This is scientifically impossible.”

“Is there any way to uncover what is hidden?”

“I believe she was a healer,”

But why would someone transmute a healer’s mind?”

“You’re saying she did this to herself?”

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.”

“That would be animancy, not healing,”

“Mithridatism,”

“Soul mithridatism…”

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

“Record every detail Shiseo remembers of this procedure before his departure east. We will begin testing this gradual transference method. I want it perfected. If it

is possible, we’ll use it to remove the transmutation on her and see what the Eternal Flame was so desperate to hide from me.”

“Let the High Reeve manage it.”

“The High Reeve was Bennet’s favourite after all.”

Stroud was unveiled in her disdain for Helena with the revelation that they were both vivimancers, but on opposite sides in the war.

Stroud considered her a traitor.