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“L-Liches.” The woman chuckled. “I haven’t heard anyone dare use that word in a long time. All of the Undying, regardless of their forms, are the High Necromancer’s most ascendant followers. Their immortality is the reward for their excellence.
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. As the element of resonance, lumithium could increase or even create resonance in inert objects through exposure, making them alchemically malleable.
Souls were considered inviolable among those of faith. The Eternal Flame considered even the physical alterations of vivimancy and necromancy a risk to an immortal soul. Alteration of a mind, the transference of a soul: Surely that would be seen as infinitely worse.
Did you really believe that the sun looked at the earth and chose a favourite? That a drop of sunlight endowed Orion Holdfast with such godlike abilities that all his descendants deserved to rule Paladia like gods themselves?”
Luc would mention things from time to time, how the guilds were convinced that his family was stifling alchemy’s scientific progress and preventing industrialisation, and then he’d wave towards the factories below the dam filling the sky with black clouds of smoke. That his father was being accused of allowing the country to fall behind because of his derelict governance. Or that the guilds had proposed that the Principate’s power be limited to religious affairs, and that they be the ones to run the country.
When Principate Apollo was murdered, the guilds didn’t see a tragedy at all, but an opportunity. They used Luc’s age, only sixteen, as a pretext for declaring a reformation: No longer would religious elites and a warrior class rule Paladia. The city-state would be governed by the newly formed Guild Assembly.
There was no use in a healer when everyone was dead.
There were some vague allusions to grain shortages. It was strange. The countries on both sides of Paladia were significant agricultural exporters. The Novis monarchy had historical ties with the Holdfasts, so an embargo by Novis was predictable, but Hevgoss, their western neighbour and a heavily militaristic country, had been angling for better trade agreements with the guilds for decades. The Holdfasts had always blocked the negotiations, refusing to have alchemy used for industrialised warfare. Guilds found to be violating the trade restrictions with Hevgoss had their access to lumithium
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While an alchemist’s resonance repertoire was as heritable as hair or eye colour, resonance could also appear or vanish at random.
“And of course you agreed,” Stroud said, withdrawing her hand. “Because you thought they’d accept what you are if you only reduced yourself enough.”
The guilds, for all their talk of progress and equality, and freedom from rigid traditionalism, had very specific ideas about precisely who deserved that equality and freedom.
“Mandl wasn’t the first of the Undying to be killed,” she said at last. “They’ve been dying for weeks. I didn’t realise what the disappearances had in common until now. I thought it was censorship, that maybe they were dissidents, but it’s the Undying. They’re disappearing because they’re being killed, and you’re the one who’s been covering it up.”
There’s a price for complex regeneration, and someone always has to pay it. There’s no way around that. In order to regenerate the way the Undying can, someone is paying for it.”
It was beautiful, and it felt like a betrayal. The world was not supposed to be beautiful any longer.
She was going insane. She couldn’t do this. A choice like this—it wasn’t fair to make her choose between things like this. No good choices, just worse and worse, which way to hate herself forever.
“Hurry up,” she said through clenched teeth, trying to hold herself rigid. There was no need for oil, but he used it anyway. She arched back until she could see the headboard, spine trembling, burying her face in her hands, biting down viciously on her palm, and felt ruined. Whimpers formed in her throat when he moved. Her fingers twisted, clawing the duvet, threatening to tear it. She was nauseous with horror. She hated every fibre of her being—the physicalness of herself that she could not overcome, that was perpetually scared, and weak, and now wanting—and she could not escape from any of
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Trapped in Spirefell, she was latching on to any glimpse of kindness, any sense of tenderness her mind could fabricate. But it wasn’t kindness. He wasn’t kind; he simply wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t as monstrous as he could be.
Murderers are still men, she told herself. And he was merely a boy.
As she kissed him, she let her fingertips brush the back of his neck, fingers sliding up through his hair, following the curvature of his skull, and then she let a whisper of her resonance slip beneath his skin. Ferron was not human.
“My resonance for silver is only passable, but I think I can manage a temperature shift. Do I call you the same way?” she asked. “No,” he said sharply, his voice startlingly vehement. “You don’t ever summon me. You burn me, ever, and this deal is off. I’m not a fucking dog.
“Ferron!” Her voice was sharp, a note of hysteria in it. “Call them off. I don’t want to do this!” “This is war.” His voice came from somewhere beyond the bodies crowding around her. “You don’t get to want; you get to live or die.”
“You made me feel like the parts of me that aren’t useful still deserve to exist. Like I’m not just all the things I can do.”
“Maybe that’s what they had to tell themselves, to live with it. Maybe it’s all they let themselves remember,” Helena said, but she, too, wondered that anyone who’d seen war’s true face would let it be so gilded.
Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.
Despite how cold he often was, a dragon was an apt sigil for the Ferrons. He kept walls of ice around himself, but there was fire in his heart.
She pulled him close, tight against her body until she could feel his skin on hers. She bit him without thinking. There was a hunger inside her that she couldn’t explain, a pit of want to taste and feel and hold and not be always, always empty.
Perhaps he couldn’t change course now; he’d made his choice. Obsessive and possessive. She had him. If she was smart enough to leverage it. On his knees, ready to do anything, Ilva had said.
“You switched sides because your mother died of a heart attack?” She gave a loud scoff, standing up, hiding a wince. “Her death wasn’t anyone’s fault, and even if it was, did you murder Principate Apollo by ripping out his heart by accident? Ran off with it and joined the Undying for three years, saw her die, kept going, and then what? You got so melancholy because you can’t get drunk that you decided to turn spy?” She was baiting him. She knew it would enrage him. She hoped that if she goaded him enough, he’d finally tell the truth. His eyes snapped open. They’d turned silver, and two
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For the first time, Kaine Ferron was fully human to her. She’d slipped through his walls and peeled away the defensive layers of malice and cruelty, and found that there he carried a broken heart. She could use that.
Apparently, Crowther was right after all. The Ferrons were possessive enough to eat themselves alive before they’d let go of anything they considered theirs.
“If I care about you—I won’t be able to use you. And you’re the only hope I have of keeping everyone else alive.” She curled in on herself, staring at the dancing flames. Somewhere on the Outpost, she was lying on the ground, going into shock, possibly freezing to death. “Then use me,” Kaine said.
“Just live, Helena.” His voice was shaking. “That’s all I’m asking you to do for me.” Helena gave a low sob, lungs whistling as she fought to breathe. “I can’t promise that. You know I can’t promise that. But I can’t risk what you’ll do if I die.” He kissed her. She could taste the plea on his lips. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying again and again, “I’m sorry I did this to you.”
Guilt caught in Helena’s throat like a stone. “I don’t want you to kill people because of me.” He gave a barking laugh. “What exactly is it that you think I do with all my time? I kill people. I order other people to kill people. I train people to kill people. I sabotage and undermine people so that they will be killed, and I do it all because of you. Every word. Every life. Because of you.”
She could feel Kaine watching her and forced herself to speak. “I think your scars are prettier than mine,” she finally said. “I have a better healer.”
Someday, she promised herself, someday I am going to love him in a moment that isn’t stolen.
She wanted to commit everything to memory, the way he felt under her hands and against her skin, as if sufficient detail could make this secret thing real enough to endure; as if she could write it into the universe so deeply that even a war could not erase it.
“After all, not every single horror that I’ve ever imagined has happened to you yet. Losing you and spending fourteen months trying and failing to find you. Finally getting you back, tortured and broken. Keeping you prisoner—the transference—raping you—” His voice was growing raw with grief and rage. He had gone white, that scalding gleaming white. “Is this not enough? There are, undoubtedly, still unexplored depths to the potential misery between us. Shall we endeavour to achieve all of it?”
I’d do it all again, every second, to save you.” He turned to look at her, shock and rage sweeping across his face. “You didn’t save me,” he said when he was finally capable of speech. “You just put us in hell for two years.”
No matter what colour eyes it has, or how old it gets, it will be the child of a murderer, conceived because I raped you while you were my prisoner, and everyone will know that. Everyone.” His face was furious, his fingers curling as if he wanted to shake her, but he turned away, his expression contorting. “Just leave it behind.” He drew a ragged breath. “You want children? Have them with someone else.” She stared at him, incredulous. “Is that what you think I’m going to do? Run away and pretend you were a monster I was lucky to escape?” He glanced at her, empty resignation in his face before
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“We have to stop hurting ourselves for each other,” she finally said. “Both of us. We’re not going to last if this is the only way we know how to love.”
She looked out towards the rising sea. “I’m sure there will be good days and bad days for us. Too much has happened to ever really put it behind us, but if you choose me, and I choose you, I think we’re strong enough to make it.”
