Alchemised

by SenLinYu

This is a work of fiction which explores many of the darker aspects of war and survival. Reader discretion is advised. For more details, please see this page for content notes.

A necrothrall, an empty automaton corpse. They’d be slit open, their skin in ribbons, organs excised, eyes blank, face slack, and they would be used to kill the next “traitor” in an even more brutal way.

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

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

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.

“Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed. “I suppose you do.”

“Whatever the High Necromancer wishes to be done, I fulfil,” Ferron said with the impatience of someone who’d had this argument many times already. “If he wanted handmade paper clips, I’d do that with equal devotion.”

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

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m so sorry for everything I did to you,” he said, his voice hoarse and broken. “I love you. You left, and I’d never told you.”

Alchemised is a work of dark fantasy containing wartime violence, religious abuse, depictions of complex trauma, suicidal ideation, self-harm, human experimentation, medical torture, eugenics, cannibalism, sexual assault, rape, and allusions to necrophilia. Please remember that depiction is not authorial endorsement. Because Alchemised is told in third-person limited point of view, it necessarily involves some distortions of vision as well as missed or misconstrued events. Reader discretion is advised.