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vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.
“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. In this new world, death claims only the unworthy. No matter what insults you attempt, it is your friends who are nothing but ashes to be forgotten.”
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.
The Sacred Faith held that resonance was a gift, intended by Sol, godhead of the elemental Quintessence, to elevate humanity. Resonance was a rare ability in many parts of the world, but not in Sol’s chosen nation of Paladia. The pre-war census had estimated nearly a fifth of the population possessed measurable resonance levels. The number had been expected to rise further with the next generation. 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
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As the element of resonance, lumithium could increase or even create resonance in inert objects through exposure, ma...
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However, pure lumithium was too divine for mortals; overexposure caused wasting sickness, and for individuals with resonance, direct exposure could result i...
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All she knew was that as long as those manacles remained locked in place, she wasn’t an alchemist at all.
High Reeve instead. He’s some kind of vivimancer, but not like the rest. He kills people without even touching them.”
“They’re offering really good money for eyes. Just one, and it’d cover us for months.”
Mandl stopped speaking as she was jerked up onto her feet by an unseen force. The front of her grey uniform tore open as her ribs unfurled in a gush of blood, her chest rent apart.
The corpse-woman shuddered, and then her expression morphed, the blankness vanishing. She stumbled and gave a wild screeching moan as she looked down at her blackened fingers and deteriorating body. “No! Please, no—it wasn’t my—” “Do not fail me again, Mandl,” Morrough said, “and in time perhaps I will permit you a better reliquary. Perhaps your original.”
Stroud’s eyes narrowed. “How?” “The transmutation done to her isn’t something another person could do. Those memories are too deeply enmeshed with her mind. However, if you had someone capable of such complexity—a healer, as our friend says she was—perhaps she…” “You’re saying she did this to herself?” Stroud gestured towards Helena with scathing disbelief.
“That would be animancy, not healing,” Stroud said with slow incredulity. “I do not know, the words were—different,” Shiseo said.
“Mithridatism,” Morrough said slowly. He straightened into his full, tremendous height. “Soul mithridatism…”
if intending to rip the answers out of him. “The Eternal Flame found a way to make living subjects survive soul transference? And you never thought to mention this?”
“If the Eternal Flame did have an animancer who developed a temporary transference method…could that explain this form of memory loss? If another person could enter someone’s mind like that, they might be able to alter thoughts and memories, just as we see here.
“I’m sure Bennet would have been thrilled by the opportunity, but unfortunately souls are not within my resonance repertoire, and there’s only one other.
“The High Reeve was Bennet’s favourite after all.”
“I know they didn’t teach modern astronomy at the Institute, but did you ever study the newer astrological theories? You’re from the trade islands after all; you must have been exposed to all kinds of ideas. 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?”
“According to your academic records, you were considered bright. Surely you didn’t swallow every story you were told about the Holdfasts.
for Morrough. He appeared amid the upheaval seemingly from nowhere, offering immortality. Not an endless life of decay, but one impervious to age and injury, discovered not through any divine power but through science.
The guilds seized the opportunity, and the Undying began to appear.
immortal but also capable of advanced forms of alchemy.
Power and eternal life were suddenly within the grasp of anyone prepared to prove themselves loyal to Morrough.
When the Eternal Flame moved to restore order, the Undying revealed another ability: necromancy.
among the Aspirants,
Luc, newly crowned as Principate,
Necromancy had been a mortal crime throughout most of the continent for centuries. Not even the guilds would go so far. He had been wrong.
In the corner was a crescent shape with a slash across it. “This?” Helena gave a short nod.
The island of Paladia, later called the East Island, was home to industry, trade, government, the perihelion cathedrals, and the Alchemy Institute.
The West Island was built centuries later, engineered to accommodate the exploding population. All of it was newer, bigger.
During the war, the Undying held diluted control over the West Island, while the Resistance had headquartered in the Alchemy Institute, giving them an established point of defence on th...
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Contrasted with the ruins of the East Island, the West Island looked almost unscathed, its vast interconnected buildings vaulting up towards the sky, gleaming and unmarred.
could begin to make out any details. Pale skin. Silver-white hair. He was old, then. He must be one of the guild patriarchs.
He turned. Helena’s throat closed as the world around her vanished, footsteps faltering.
It was the iron guild heir. Kaine Ferron.
He’d been one of the few guild students who’d stayed at the Institute for undergraduate study. They’d been the same year, shared classes, even worked as assistants on the same research floors.
silver-grey eyes that met hers were sharp, the sclera white, pupils black, no darkened veins anywhere beneath his skin. There were no veins visible at all, as if his blood were quicksilver.
She’d assumed his quick kills were a sign of impulsiveness, but there’d be no need to keep prisoners if he could look inside their minds and take the answers.
The Faith said that a soul and body remained joined together as one until cremation. It was only when fire consumed the flesh that the ethereal soul was untethered from the crude earthly form. A person who had lived devoutly and without vice would release a pure soul that could ascend to the highest of the heavenly realms.
If a body was not burned, the soul was left trapped, unable to ascend and in danger of becoming tainted by the body’s putrefaction. Left too long, the impurity of the body could metamorphise the soul into maggots and insects, plagues, and other grotesque forms of evil, doomed to sink beneath the surface of the earth to be consumed forever in the dark wet fire of the Abyss.
Reanimation risked that metamorphosis. Tethering both body and soul to a necromancer meant that even the purest souls could become too corrupted to ever asce...
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If the war had ended fourteen months ago, that would have been in late summer of 1787. Which meant that she had no memory of nearly nineteen months of the war. It blurred out of focus when she tried to think back, to remember anything more than the hospital shifts. She had no recollection of anything, not of conversation or the seasons, or Lumithia’s Ascendance and Abeyance, of anything but the endless loop of shift after shift in the hospital, like an eternal scream.
but instead civil unrest caused by a small group of religious extremists who refused to acknowledge the democratically elected Paladian Guild Assembly.
It made Luc out to be a power-hungry monster who’d tried to burn down the entire city rather than let anyone else have it.
The head of the new science and alchemy department at Central, Irmgard Stroud, was heading up a program to bolster the next generation of alchemists using new scientific selection methods to give them the best start.
Volunteers were wanted. Participants would be provided food and lodgings, and upon completion of the program, those with criminal convictions would be eligible for retrial.
It was a breeding program being passed off as an economic solution.
As if alchemists were dogs to mate in pursuit of economically desirable transmutation abilities.
As she looked down, she discovered scars that she had no memory of.
