Alchemised

by SenLinYu

She hadn’t even considered this. She should have. She knew he was a monster, but he’d never shown interest.

The only moment in which she felt any glimmer of a reaction from him was at her constant thoughts of Luc, the scale of her grief.

“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’ll remember it. What if it’s never that simple?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you if you swallow it like a good girl.”

The tablets took away the good feelings as much as the bad. She was carved out and empty. An abyss instead of a human.

It was undeniable that Ferron had a horrific talent for necromancy.

“Why all this sudden interest in me?” he asked. She shrugged. “You don’t make sense.” He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that all? And here I was hoping you were plotting to seduce me.” She stared at him blankly. He gave a mocking smile. “Steal my heart with your wit and charms.” Helena scoffed.

Helena learned to hold her tongue and pretend that her unusual talent for healing was divine and not because she understood the systems and functions of the human body.

The tablet Ferron had forced down her throat was a clear demonstration of the potential if healing were allowed to be scientific. It seemed to have some kind of vasoconstriction component. A glycoside, perhaps synthesised from foxglove. She tried to remember if she’d noticed anything that might have indicated mineral acids, and maybe…

I wanted to punish one of mine once, and Kaine showed up saying they’re his and if I want to torture any, I’d have to make my own…Well, I would if I could.”

I hate you. Traitor. Coward. I hate you.

Every time she closed her eyes she was at the Institute, bright and golden and gleaming as it had once been, hurrying up the Tower steps for a class, her textbooks pressed tight against her chest, Luc ambling beside her. There was someone else with them, but even her dreams flinched away from the face.

Paladians valued stillness. Expert alchemists would only move their fingers for precise and controlled use of their resonance. It was culturally ingrained. Expressions were also valued most when they were subtle; insults often came in the form of sarcastic flattery that didn’t translate easily for a newcomer.

She was not so foolish as to mistake calculation for kindness.

The Undying had seemingly solved the mining issue by using necrothralls, avoiding both lumithium shortages and exponential competition, which made for bitter irony: The war had so decimated the alchemist population that now they needed a breeding program to revive it.

“Lose your way, Lancaster?” Ferron said as he entered, his eyes burning an irate silver. A flood of relief rushed through Helena.

Faster than Durant could move, Ferron stepped forward and snapped the neck of the youngest prisoner. A boy of ten or twelve. The crack was audible all the way up to where Helena watched in horror.

“I was commanded to marry her, so I married her. I was never commanded to care.”

“You think the guilds invented the divide between us and the Eternal Flame? The Holdfasts claimed all their preferences were divinely moral and treated any concessions as a violation of their consciences; where exactly did that leave the wants and needs of the rest of us? When anything we wanted became a sin or form of vice simply because it inconvenienced them for us to have it? All we did was become what they’d already convinced themselves we were. Ignoble and corrupt.” He stopped, hands clasped behind his back. “You think it was an accident that we hated sponsored students like you? If we hadn’t, how would they have kept you so lonely and desperately grateful to them?”

“You irritate my wife,” he said. “Seems I do,” she said blandly. “If you want to do something about it, you could kill me.”

An enormous creature, black as night, lunged towards them. It was a wolf.

Grace had said the High Reeve had a monster, but Helena had not taken that literally. The creature was monstrous. Fangs longer than her fingers flashed in the light. Wind rushed across the room. The smell of blood struck her face as a foaming mouth burst from the shadows, jaws snapping.

However “beloved” Enid Ferron had been by her husband and son, it had not been enough to be granted the immortality they enjoyed. Then again, the guilds had always been intensely patriarchal.

Both vivimancy and necromancy were regarded as a corruption of resonance caused by a “poisonous womb.”

Women associated with Lumithia were not expected to be traditional; they could be alchemists, surgeons, paladins, anything. But there was a price. Were they to marry or bear children, they had to give it all up. Lumithia was a virgin goddess. Mothers and married women were not welcome at her altar.

Lancaster was Aurelia’s lover? The same person who’d just happened to find her room during the party. That couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.

Could Lancaster be a spy? What if he was from the Resistance and that was why he’d looked for Helena? Was that what he’d been trying to communicate to her?

“Lancaster will be one of the Undying soon,” he said. “In belated recognition for his exceptional services during the war.”

Lila’s prosthetic leg clicked as she shifted and then said, “I think the hospital’s worse than the battlefield.”

“At the front—everything’s so focused, you know. The rules are simple. We win some. We lose some. You get hit sometimes. You hit back. You get days to recover if it’s bad. But—” She looked down, her fingers tapping absently along the place where her prosthetic was joined to her thigh. “—in the hospital, every battle looks like losing. I can’t imagine what that’s like.” She looked at Helena. “All you see in there is the worst of it.”

There’d been a paladin secondary. Soren. Lila’s twin brother. Where was Soren? Helena’s head throbbed. Why would she forget Soren? He— A face briefly flickered in her memory. Helena’s mind swerved violently, as if recoiling. No. She tried to focus. Soren. Remember Soren. What happened to him?

A vivimancer could force blood regeneration, but with enough blood loss, the energy and materials for new blood would take their own lethal toll. Stroud might be knowledgeable enough to avoid it, but someone like Ferron wouldn’t be.

“Why don’t you ever stop?” He let go of her, shoving her back. Her hand, numb with pain, lost its grip. “Why don’t you die?” There was no point in being coy. She wanted to kill him; they both knew it. Blood was still flowing down the hilt of the knife, dripping scarlet across the white marble floor, spattering across the ouroboros mosaic. His lips curved into an insincere smile. “Prior commitments, I’m afraid.”

Helena knew the continent had to be alight with speculation of how it had been done, and how it might be replicated. There was a way to kill the Undying. Her steps were light for days.

“So…” Morrough’s voice came from somewhere in the dark. “The Eternal Flame’s animancer is not dead after all.” “You believe Boyle is still alive?” Ferron sounded startled. “Who?”

“Those difficulties are because she is resisting, because she can resist. This—she is the animancer.”

“There is only one answer: She is the animancer. Even now, with her resonance all but gone, she is still resisting. She erased her memory of what she is in an attempt to escape me.”

“Watch her carefully. The Eternal Flame will come for her soon, I am certain of it.” “I will die before I lose her,” Ferron said, his grip tightening. “I want them alive this time, High Reeve. These last embers who dare mock me. You will bring them to me, to kill at leisure.”

You’d disguised yourself as a Hevgotian during the attack, and then disappeared into that tank afterwards, resulting in contradictory reports. The investigation was considered inconclusive until my father realised where he recognised you from. He was present that night.” She shook her head. “I was a healer,” she said. “I wasn’t—they didn’t let me fight.”

“The Undying. You’re his source of power, and the Resistance—we figured that out, didn’t we? How to kill him. How to kill all of you.”

She was a vibrant corpse, hardly different from the necrothralls haunting Spirefell.

Things that seem too good to be true usually have a price you don’t know about until it’s too late.”

Had it just been her, hiding herself all this time? Was that all it was in the end? Surely there was something, but nothing she remembered, none of her glimmers of returning memory, hinted at anything of importance.

I’m the one who caught her. She should be mine.” “She’ll never be yours.”

There was plenty of monster in Ferron, lurking beneath the surface.

“Oh, Marino.” His thumb trailed along her neck, following the scar below her jaw. “If I’d known what pain you’d cause me, I never would have taken you.”

He wasn’t kind; he simply wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t as monstrous as he could be.

Helena shrank away, but Ferron wasn’t done. “Let me be very clear, then. I don’t want you. I never wanted you. I am not your friend. There is nothing I want more than the moment I’m finally done with you.”

Helena closed her eyes. Now she understood: She was expected to die, and they’d all known. She only hoped it would happen too early for the pregnancy to be viable.

“I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat. It is a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them.”