Alchemised

by SenLinYu

He lived among immortal men all consumed by their own desire for power and vengeance. He couldn’t possibly risk trusting anyone.

Helena was beginning to understand how the Undying were “immortal.” He was not ageless; his body was trapped in time, his regeneration keeping him exactly as he was. It did not let him change, not with age or injury. But the array was designed to change him. The mutated power existed for the sole purpose of alteration, and that contradiction was killing him in a way far more profound than the mutilation of his back. He was in a crucible, and he was the crucible, and he would either die terribly or be wholly alchemised into something that could survive the paradox.

Pragmatism had stolen away any lustre of heroism from her, and she kept telling herself it was all right… But she was so lonely. Her fingers wrapped around the empty amulet, the points catching on her palm. There was a dull sense of emptiness that never went away now, a slowly growing wound that she couldn’t heal. She couldn’t fix herself anymore, and no one else seemed inclined to even notice she was breaking.

It was not a slow, sweet kiss. It was not a kiss caused by alcohol or insecurity. It was born of rage, despair, and desire so hot, it threatened to burn her into oblivion. It was possibly a kiss goodbye. She wanted him to know. It was real. For her, it had always been real.

Like a star, he was glittering and ice-cold from afar, but when the space was bridged, the heat of him was endless.

Kaine Ferron was a dragon, like his family before him. Possessive to the point of self-annihilation. Isolated and deadly, and now he held her in his arms as if she were his. The temptation to give in, to let him have her, and to love him for it terrified her.

Her need to love people and her desperate longing for them to love her back—she had given that up, locked it away and buried it, giving its place to the coldness of logic, realism, and the necessary choices of war. This could only lead to ruin.

“You’re mine. I’ll always come for you.” He always did.

There was a part of her that felt she might doom them if she said it. If there were important things left unspoken, tomorrow would come. She kissed him instead. I love you. She told him in the way she held him close; in the way her mouth met his; in how her hands trailed across his skin, mapping him, memorising every detail of what it was to be with him, his scars under her fingers. I love you. I love you. She told him in the way she let go of herself and held on to him instead. With every beat of her heart. I love you. I will always love you. I will always take care of you.

“What if it’s not that simple, though?” she said. “Everyone who wins says they were good, but they’re the ones who tell the story. They get to choose how we all remember it. What if it’s never that simple?”

She stood there, watching the space around her disappear into shadows. It was haunted after all. She had been the ghost.

He could not occupy the impossible in-between where she wanted him because there was no distance large enough to erase what had happened that still left him within her reach.

“Is this not enough? There are, undoubtedly, still unexplored depths to the potential misery between us. Shall we endeavour to achieve all of it?”

“Love isn’t as pretty or pure as people like to think. There’s a darkness in it sometimes. Kaine and I go hand in hand. I made him who he is. I knew what that array meant when I saved him. If he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.”