Alchemised

by SenLinYu

This is a work of fiction which explores many of the darker aspects of war and survival. Reader discretion is advised.

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.

Depression connection.

They were her only sense of time.

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

All the books she’d read.

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.

When light came, it nearly split Helena’s brain open.

Slick fingers dug into her arms, against bone, dragging her up. Air hit her lungs, sending them seizing as the fluid came back up.

Started screaming when we lifted the top and pulled her up.

She was in a tank?

She lurched upwards, eyes wide, just in time to see a syringe pulled away.

“That should get you lucid and talking.”

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.

A necrothrall, an empty automaton corpse.

Trumpies 😜

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.

she was locked inside her body and left in the dark. Waiting for someone to come for her.

Just like my sleep paralysis!

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

The gas used reactive particles to mirror the shape and pattern of a resonance channel.

Your thoughts run along various streets to reach their destinations. Those lines you see are your streets that have been rerouted. There are barriers, transmutationally crafted, and so instead of following a natural pattern through the brain, someone has created alternative routes. Some

Principate Apollo?” “Killed.”

Your darling Luc, as you all liked to call him?”

All of the Undying, regardless of their forms, are the High Necromancer’s most ascendant followers.

She couldn’t remember any injury, just shock, and grief, and horror.

Whatever she’d been injected with was a brutally effective drug. There was a sharp bruise forming on her chest where the needle had punctured its way to her heart. It hurt with every beat.

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

The Sacred Faith held that resonance was a gift, intended by Sol, godhead of the elemental Quintessence, to elevate humanity. Resonance was a rare ability in many parts of the world, but not in Sol’s chosen nation of Paladia.

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

“Is the Eternal Flame still—” “No.” Grace shook her head violently, and her expression turned angry.

After Luc was dead, they sent the rest of us out to the factory Outpost below the dam. Most of us can’t leave.

“She’s mostly bones now. The Warden thinks it’s—funny.”

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.”

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

“So I have two eyes to watch my brothers starve? There’s no food!”

“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?”

Necrothralls. They were all necrothralls.

undead creatures created through necromancy, a term used in fantasy settings and novels. In the novel Alchemised, necrothralls are a key element, created by necromancers to serve as guards and for gruesome purposes, sometimes forming living thrones or weapons.

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

Memory is a mysterious thing, very changeable as it’s moved around. Not a place, it is—the mind’s journey. A path. The more important, more journeyed, the stronger the path. The less journeyed”—fingers fluttered—“it fades.”

The High Necromancer was not what she remembered. When he’d killed Luc, he’d been human. Now he was mutated. His limbs stuck out in ways that were impossibly jointed, and he was nearly the size of two men.

Everywhere she looked, people were dying. Her hands were covered in blood. There were bodies everywhere.

She was kneeling on the floor, holding together torsos and faces and limbs, trying to put them back together, knitting them into wholeness. Again and again and again. Bodies raw with burns, so consumed by fire that she couldn’t find their features.

She saw Luc. Vivid as if he were there with her. His beautiful face, and eyes as blue as a summer’s sky, golden sunlight reflecting in them.

“I believe she was a healer,”

“Of course I knew there were vivimancers who supported the Eternal Flame. As if martyring themselves could earn acceptance, even though the Faith spurned their gifts as an abomination.” Her eyes were scathing. “I just didn’t realise this was one of them.”

Wait Helena is a vivimancer??

Helena felt a brief tingle of Stroud’s resonance before all sensation from hand to elbow vanished and her body went limp with paralysis. Without explanation or warning, Stroud plucked something out of the case. It gleamed in the light, revealing the bulbous handle and long pointed spike of an awl.

Stroud drove the tip straight through Helena’s wrist. Helena felt nothing, but her throat closed, stomach inverting as she watched Stroud work the awl in slow circles as it sank between the bones, the tip emerging on the other side.

“Warden Mandl.”

“No! It was not a betrayal! I am loyal. Loyal to our cause, and loyal to you! It was my foolish desire for vengeance—I confess it. I wanted her to suffer. But I would never betray you.”

“You tampered with a prisoner and her records out of—jealousy?” Stroud looked astonished. “Why didn’t you report her abilities?”

“I feared that she would be favoured if it was known. That you might find her useful and not punish her as she deserved to be punished.”

Dang, what is her abilities? isnsheba healer or maybe more?

When it came loose, Mandl’s body dropped to the ground. Silent. Dead.