Alchemised

by SenLinYu

Willems was so startled, he nearly drowned her, and when we did get her out, she was fucking feral. Scratched the shit out of me until we got her knocked out. Had the intravenous and all, but the sedation was turned off. Someone must’ve bumped it.”

Prisoner 1273, or are you Prisoner 19819? You have two inmate numbers, and there’s no record of either in this facility. Do you happen to have a name?” Helena said nothing.

“None of that. You’ll break your bones before you break out of those shackles. Answer my questions and I might let you get up before that drug wears off. I understand it can be quite painful otherwise.”

“Helena Marino. You”—there was a sound of shuffled pages—“should be dead according to your 1273 file. You were marked for culling, due to unspecified ‘extensive injuries.’ But the 19819 designation means you were selected for stasis.”

“You have not existed anywhere in our file system since Augustus of last year. Fourteen months. And now we find you in the very stasis warehouse you never arrived at. How is that?”

Before the warehouse, 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.

Some necromancer in the crowd would hurry forward, eager to show off, and in a matter of seconds that dead body would get up again. Someone Helena had trusted or served under, brought back with reanimation. 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. The executions had not stopped until the air was red with a mist of blood.

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.

vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.

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

A resonance screen. They were frequently used for academic presentations and alchemical medical procedures. The gas used reactive particles to mirror the shape and pattern of a resonance channel.

“I suppose you wouldn’t know, given the state of your brain. You’re probably lucky to remember your own name. You were an alchemy student, I presume.”

You’re that little savant the Holdfasts sponsored.

“Do you remember what happened to your sponsor, Principate Apollo?” “Killed.”

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

Even in the tank, she could feel the lumithium inside them.

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

Usually, resonance was channelled into the alchemy of metals and inorganic compounds, allowing for transmutation or alchemisation. However, in a defective soul which rebelled against Sol’s natural laws, the resonance could be corrupted, enabling vivimancy—like what the woman had used on Helena—and the necromancy used to create necrothralls.

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

“It’s Grace. I was an orderly in the hospital.” She crept through the curtains as she spoke. She had a heavy Northern accent, the kind that pulled hard on the consonants.

“They’re all dead. Every one of them. After Luc was dead, they sent the rest of us out to the factory Outpost below the dam. Most of us can’t leave. Takes months of good behaviour to get permission, and we have to wear these.”

Says it’s so we don’t forget the rules.”

Lawd

She was in the Alchemy Tower.

Helena had come halfway across the world to study in this Tower. Luc had been so proud of the Institute his family had built. It had been the heart of Paladia. She’d known it through his eyes, all the history and meaning of it. Now it was ravaged and mutilated.

“There’s nothing confirming it, but based on the records, Mandl was overseer at the time. It was shortly before her ascendance and transfer to the Outpost.”

“Mandl is on her way. And—” She hesitated. “I brought Shiseo. I thought he might have some insight into our prisoner. He did consult with the Eternal Flame.

Thought herself better than me for having been a part of the Holdfasts’ Institute, her vivimancy blessed by the Eternal Flame. She had to be punished!”

“Elain Boyle,

“She was Luc Holdfast’s personal healer.

“The High Reeve was Bennet’s favourite after all.”