Alchemised

by SenLinYu

she’d learned to take herself away when her mind teetered on the edge. That was how she’d survived. She’d learned she could endure.

It was beautiful, and it felt like a betrayal. The world was not supposed to be beautiful any longer. It was supposed to be dead and cold, forever mirroring the misery of Helena’s life. Instead it had moved on, tilting into a new season, and she could not. She was trapped forever in winter, in the season of death.

“You’re like a rose in a graveyard,” he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I wonder what you could have turned into without the war.”

They were the inverse and counter to each other. A healer and killer, circling slowly, the push and pull inexorable.

Property. No, not even that. She was a trinket. Something he’d thrown into his demands. So insignificant that Ilva and Crowther had looked at her and seen no reason to refuse.

Sometimes she wished she’d died in the hospital with her father, to be remembered and mourned for her possibilities, rather than live day by day growing ever lesser. Now it didn’t matter if she’d been an alchemist, or a healer, or anything else. To anyone who ever learned of it, she would only be that one thing. Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.

“You’re wrong because I’m part of the universe,” she said. “A tiny piece, I admit, maybe never an important or mathematically significant one, but still a piece. You and I are not separate from it. No one is. It matters to me, everyone who’s died and everyone who will, and everyone who suffers. As long as I exist, I will always care. And that means that part of the universe does.” She smiled at him. “Doesn’t that make it all a little brighter?”

Officially Hevgotian prisons were all state-run, but that didn’t prevent the “rental” of prisoners when it suited them to whoever could pay. Slavery was illegal on the Northern continent, so Hevgoss had reinvented it.

If he couldn’t hide her, he would hoard her to himself as much as he was able to. She’d fallen for a dragon.

Helena had nothing left to sacrifice. Everything remaining would cost too much to lose. Yet she was expected to be docile and cooperative, a comforting possession, and she was not.

“This whole war was just two brothers fighting over who gets to play god?” Kaine gave a disbelieving, bitter laugh. “You think you’re picking a side, and you’re just on the opposite end of the same fucking coin.”

“Every time you asked, I promised I was yours. Always. There aren’t any exemptions or expiration dates on always.”

“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.”

Having a living, breathing member of the Eternal Flame who had done the impossible made it harder for the allied nations to treat Paladia as an utterly failed nation that needed external control. Lila was offered all sorts of ceremonial roles, but she refused them. She had not come back to rule. She wanted those lost remembered, and she wanted the tragedy of the war confronted, not buried, so that it could not happen again.

“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.”