Alchemised

by SenLinYu

“You really are full of surprises.”

And what I was.”

“I didn’t think I could change, but it’s like being cold-forged. I’m gradually being beaten into a new iteration of myself. It doesn’t countermand who I am, but I feel certain things less than I did. It’s easier to be ruthless and focused, harder to dissuade myself from impulses that align with what I want.”

“I designed it,” he said

“I expected it would kill me, but if I survived, I didn’t want them to choose what I became. So I asked to design it, as proof of my penance.”

“There may be a number of potential uses for suppressing alchemy, but there’s currently no evidence that they’ve discovered a reliable means of doing so, only that they’re attempting it.”

“Don’t mistake that for loyalty.” Dread shivered in her lungs. “I don’t. I realise that it’s not necessarily leverage yet, but—the array affects him. He mentioned that it’s become harder to dissuade himself from what he wants. I can take advantage of that.”

“Kaine Ferron remains the youngest of the Undying. In all this time, there has never been another so young.”

He is calculating and mercurial and takes risks that anyone else would consider insane.”

He is not a person, he’s not human, and you are not creating a relationship of trust with him. He is an animal.”

I did not ask for something irreversible, I asked for a vivimancy-controlled obsession.”

“You can’t just turn human emotions on or off, not in a way that gives you the kind of leverage you’re wanting. It’s not magic.”

You do this and Kaine Ferron will never let you go, and he will not be content with being secondary to anyone.”

“You gave me to him,” she said, her voice full of fury. “Now, and after the war. Those were the terms.

“The Abeyance. Resonance will be at its lowest ebb. It would make working with the lumithium in the alloy on your shoulders easier, but I’m not sure if completing the array with its effects reduced is safe or not.”

“You mentioned once that Morrough thinks Paladia is key to the immortality Hevgoss wants. Do you think he could be looking for the Stone of the Heavens?”

The stone was a fairy tale. The belief that Sol’s blessing was a physical object was a misinterpretation of the early artistic renderings of Orion Holdfast. The region had been prescientific and illiterate at the time; the imagery was all that many people knew.

Helena had believed there was a real stone for years until Luc awkwardly corrected her.

Extrapolating heavily on the way he’d regenerated when he lost his arm, she believed her vivimancy could guide his regeneration back on track, but she had to proceed

cautiously. Make a mistake and he might be stuck with it.

His hazel-grey eyes were gone, replaced by a silver-bright glow.

This was no mere transmutation; Kaine Ferron was becoming something altogether new. She had finalised the process with her bare hands, drawn into completion something that he alone knew the entire purpose of.

“I must admit,” he said in a low voice as though making a confession, “if anyone had told me you’d become so

lovely, I would never have come near you. I was rather blindsided when I saw you again.” Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “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.”

“If you don’t want me to kiss you, you should say so now,” he said.

Because healing was considered separate from medicine and medical care, the two did not always complement each other. Many sedatives inhibited vivimancy, requiring countering or workarounds in ways that made the healing process unnecessarily complicated. Healing Kaine, far from Matias’s purview, had allowed her to begin considering the possibilities of chymiatria designed for vivimancy.

Blackthorne was one of the Undying that everyone feared. He didn’t wear a helmet as most of the Undying did, making no effort to hide his identity. Whether he won or lost his battles, the devastation he left behind was terrible. He was known for eating his victims on the battlefield.

Relying on Kaine Ferron was like walking on black ice, knowing that at any moment it might break beneath their feet.

that can only be purified through a life of self-sacrifice. The toll is—penance. It’s giving up what was stolen.”

Her mother’s mysterious sickness, diagnosed as a kind of consumption, was the Toll. Not because her mother had been a vivimancer, but because from the moment of conception, Helena’s defective, corrupt self had leached her mother of life from within her womb, stealing all but those seven years away. That vivimancers were parasites by nature, and they would rot and burn in the bowels of the earth for an eternity if they did not repent and purify themselves by giving up every drop of the vitality they’d taken.

“you use your vitality to save—anyone you’re told to save, as penance?”

“It didn’t work,” he said. “It’s not possible to take it by force like that. If it was that easy—” He scoffed. “—Morrough wouldn’t be bothering with most of this. Try it yourself now.”

“I don’t need you to get it, I need you to believe it. You’re being driven by the guilt

over crimes you never committed, that you think you deserve to suffer for, and that’s making you a liability for me.”

“Vitality is a strange thing,” he said, stepping away. “It doesn’t take much to do things like necromancy or healing. If it did, necromancers would hardly be a threat, and you would’ve been dead in a week as a healer. Here’s what’s interesting, though: If I were a necrothrall, you could have ripped out my vitality. Reanimation doesn’t fully bond with other bodies, it just reactivates a corpse. Bennet would give almost anything to be able to transfer souls between living bodies, but it always kills them instead.” He arched an eyebrow. “Do you see where I’m going with this?”

The living had a vibrancy, but the necrothrall was dead. It was like a perpetual electric shock on an animal corpse to make the systems function.

“I didn’t know that was something vivimancers could do,” she said, trying to get her thoughts straight. “I don’t think that most can,” Kaine said, straightening. “It’s something only animancers are capable of.”

No matter how similar their abilities, murder was exclusively within his purview.

“You have an interesting repertoire,” he said in his quiet voice as they moved into the third row of vials. “Very unusual. Good attention to detail. I am surprised you are not a metallurgist.”

“You are exceptional with titanium. I met the titanium guildmaster once, and even his work was not so perfect.” Then he picked up a piece of her nickel work, studying it as well. “Have you ever tried nickel-titanium alloy?”

“They got Lila,” he said, taking her hand without hesitation.

Lila had been taken. Whatever happened next, the implications were horrifying. Lila as a necrothrall, all her proficiency in combat now targeted at the Eternal Flame. At Luc. Or Lila in a laboratory, being used for experimentation.

Paladins were as intrinsic as the Holdfasts in the history and tapestry of the nation. The country was named for them, in acknowledgement of their vital role in the first Necromancy War. As the centuries passed, the role had gradually become mostly ceremonial.

Lila had been something altogether new, though, a once-in-a-lifetime talent. Her parents had wanted her to have all the chance for the greatness traditionally limited to sons. Lila was placed solely in the combat track, training to join the crusades to experience real combat when she was only fifteen, while Soren was double-track at the Institute, like Luc. Soren would have been considered an excellent combat alchemist if his twin sister wasn’t his competition, but no one compared to Lila. There’d been a procession when Lila came back after a year crusading. Helena hadn’t really known Lila then, aside from her being Soren’s sister.

“In the East, there is a rare metal found deep in the mountains. It is—rarer than gold. Only the Emperor himself is permitted to possess it. We called it mo’lian’shi. It—creates inertia.”

“You wouldn’t have. It is a part of the Emperor’s power. As lumithium can create resonance, mo’lian’shi takes it back. What this is—” He looked down and seemed deeply troubled. “This is mo’lian’shi fused with lumithium. The simultaneous effect of both together creates a resonance haze.” He looked at his notes again. “It is unstable. The fusion is deteriorating, but they may perfect their methods in the future. This was probably only a first attempt. But…” His voice trailed off. “I don’t know how they have this.”

“You don’t understand how carefully mo’lian’shi is protected. It is a rare and delicate thing. Once mined, it must be carefully processed to bring out the effects. It is often immediately alloyed to prevent it from degrading. But this—” He touched the vial lightly. “—this was made from pure mo’lian’shi. Only someone of royal birth, with an Emperor’s seal, could access it.”

“Aurelia, perhaps.” He smiled. “Right. Quite forgot about her.”

There was something haunted about him. “Don’t die, Kaine,” she said. The line he walked frightened her. If the array was the punishment for a failure, what would the price of betrayal be? A smirk twisted his mouth as he looked at her. “There are far worse fates than dying, Marino.” She nodded. “I know. But that one you don’t come back from.” He gave a bitter laugh.

“All right, then, but only because you asked.”