Alchemised

by SenLinYu

he shoved the metal piece into her. There was a soft crunch of breaking bone that left a hole purpled with old blood in the centre of her chest.

“Elain Boyle, I imagine.”

“She was Luc Holdfast’s personal healer. The Eternal Flame was rather lax in their record keeping, but Elain Boyle’s name appeared frequently in the last year of the war. She seemed to have become unusually distinguished.”

“The High Reeve was Bennet’s favourite after all.” Morrough waved a dismissive hand as he vanished into the shadows. “It’s time he’s given more to do than hunting.”

She couldn’t fail him. Not again.

“No matter. I imagine they taught you to enjoy suffering. After all, sacrifice is a healer’s calling, isn’t it?”

Where was her alchemy resonance first tested? At the Paladian embassy in her homeland, the southern islands of Etras. How old was she when she immigrated to Paladia to study at the Alchemy Institute? Ten. How many years of education did she complete at the Institute? Six. Did she remember Principate Apollo Holdfast’s death? Yes, she had been in class with Luc. When did she join the Resistance? When the guilds overthrew legitimate government and there was a Resistance to join.

“I didn’t know I was a vivimancer,” Helena finally said. “And after—once everyone knew—Luc didn’t care. He didn’t think a person’s abilities changed who they were, only what they did with them.”

“According to your academic records, you were considered bright. Surely you didn’t swallow every story you were told about the Holdfasts. Look me in the eyes and tell me: Do you really think the Holdfasts had a right to rule?” Stroud’s fingers dug beneath Helena’s chin, forcing her to look up. She stared squarely into Stroud’s face, feeling the threat of her resonance. “Better them than people like you.”

He could have been entirely ordinary, and she would have made all the same choices.

She’d wanted to prove him right—that she was something, that she’d be worth believing in. His family wouldn’t be wrong about her. She’d focused on her education and ignored the political hostilities around her.

“Healing is a miracle; it’s not something you’re supposed to put your name on,”

The act of vivimancy, he said, could only be purified through intentions of selflessness.

Jan Crowther, one of the five members of the Eternal Flame’s Council.

One of the Undying was wearing his corpse.

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.

“You were right. I’m so sorry. We should have listened to you.”

She wouldn’t be a traitor. Whatever she’d allowed to be hidden in her mind, she wouldn’t let the Undying discover it.

Lila Bayard, dead, her face ripped off, her corpse used to imprison the people she’d once protected, made Helena’s chest grow so tight, it ached.

The foyer was large and cold, and the first thing she saw was a bright smear of blood.

“The blood,” she forced herself to say, unable to look again. All the executions flooded through her mind, the smells and sickening taste in the air, washing like a flood across the white marble.

She looked again and discovered her mistake. There was no blood.

The house felt dirty. There was no visible dust, but Helena couldn’t shake the sense that the place was untended. The air was stale, as if the building also were a mouldering corpse.

He was not old at all. It was the iron guild heir. Kaine Ferron.

His index finger barely touched her temple, and then she truly felt his resonance, vivid as a live wire.

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

Luc. She was protecting Luc. “Holdfast is dead,”

There’s no one left for you to save.”

Ferrons being among the wealthiest families in Paladia.

Unless their bodies were so destroyed that they became liches, they were immutable. They could lose entire limbs and grow them back.

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.

“I’m sorry, Luc. This is the best I can do.”

one dress, red as blood.

She’d beaten Ferron before. If she was careful, and clever, she would do it again.

It was not the Lila that Helena remembered. Not the beautiful, statuesque girl in armour who wore her pale-blond hair plaited in a crown around her head like the statues of Lumithia. Lila’s hair was cropped short as a boy’s. She looked shrunken, despite her unusual height.

It felt safer to be dirty.

she watched Ferron like a cornered animal.

taking a long sip as he stared at her over the glass, his gaze starting at the floor and working slowly up.

His gaze lifted. “Come here.” When she didn’t obey, a slow smile curved along his lips. “I can make you, if you don’t.”

Helena’s limbs began moving against her will, like a puppet manipulated across a stage.

Ferron stepped behind her. She could hear him but not see him, which made her heart beat faster, ears straining for any sound.

her consciousness was crushed as though collapsing in on itself.

She was drowning inside her brain, trapped as the water rose and the pressure grew and there was nowhere to go. He swallowed her whole.

She realised sluggishly that he was in her mind, looking at himself through her eyes.

But Luc was dead. No matter what she did, it wouldn’t bring him back.

Her body was freezing, but her brain was on fire.

She was picked up and plunged into ice-cold water, dragged out to breathe, and then shoved under again.

There was a boy in her arms, dying. She tried to calm him, trying to focus, not to feel the building panic of the room catching like claws through her lungs, but he wouldn’t let her heal him.

Then he was gone, like a fist through her chest. Too late.