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The woman was a vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.
Helena had enlisted in the Resistance and sworn fealty to the Order of the Eternal Flame—not out of faith, but because of Luc Holdfast. Because she might not believe in the gods, but she had believed in him, that he was good and kind and cared about everyone. She’d promised she’d do anything for him. But he’d died before her eyes.
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.
As he drew nearer however, she realised it wasn’t a mask she was staring at. Morrough’s face was skull-like, his features so sunken, the skin so translucently pale, that she could see through to the bone. Where his eyes should have been were two blackened, empty hollows, as if they’d been burned out with live coals.
Had she really forgotten something? Perhaps the Eternal Flame was not gone but remained as a hidden ember, waiting until the time was right. The possibility sparked a glimmer of hope. But how had she been made to forget?
Men prone to violence were generally thoughtless, acting with emotion first and applying reason after.
Alchemists tended to keep metal everywhere: as jewellery, and woven into their clothes, walking sticks, weapons. Unusual alchemists like pyromancers always wore their ignition rings unless they were forced to remove them.
Ferron, unfortunately, was not the stupid, deluded patriarch she’d hoped for. His resonance was like Morrough’s, beyond anything she’d known was possible, but what worried her most was the way he’d gone through her memory. Morrough had done something similar, but that mental violation had been brutal and haphazard; Ferron had been surgical.
He seemed—distilled. As though he’d been taken and sublimated until all that was left was an essence—something deathly cold and gleaming. The High Reeve. Not a person, but a weapon.
Luc…oh, Luc. Of course he would haunt her, refusing to accept a pragmatic choice. If he were there, he’d be telling her that her plan was terrible. He’d hated that kind of thing. People sacrificing themselves because of him or his family. He always felt responsible, convinced that if he was better, he could save everyone.
Iron was one of the eight traditional metals associated with the eight planets: lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter, iron for Mars, copper for Venus, quicksilver for Mercury, silver for Luna, lumithium for Lumithia, and gold for Sol.
Perhaps that ouroboros dragon was not merely a pretentious decoration but something the Ferrons prided themselves on. An omen of a destructive, insatiable hunger which left nothing but ruin in its wake.
It was as if all colour had been leached from the world. Except her. She stood there in blood red, stark against the monochrome.
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,
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Luc had never wanted to be Principate. If there had been anyone else, he would have given it up in a heartbeat.
“Because you thought they’d accept what you are if you only reduced yourself enough.”
She’d admit he hadn’t known everything, but that wasn’t because he was a puppet. The position of Principate was complex. Being a religious head and ruler was a difficult task, especially during war when he was expected to be fighting and governing. He couldn’t be weighed down by everyone else’s personal decisions. Some choices had to be made without him, certain sacrifices that would have paralysed him to make or even know of. That didn’t make him a puppet. It made him human.
Helena had loved him for how human he was. He didn’t need to be Principate or favoured by the gods. He’d been good enough just as he was.
“How many years of your life did you spend in that hospital? And for what? Saving people who would have been better off if you’d let them die. But no, you put them back together and sent them right back out to suffer a bit more.”
“But we have to win this war; we can’t make choices because we want a certain story to tell later. There’s too much at stake.”
“This is how we win. This is how we’ve always won. My father, my grandfather, all the Principates going all the way back to Orion. They won by trusting that good would triumph over evil, and I have to do the same.”
In Orion’s work, alchemisation was predicated upon spiritual purity; only an alchemist with a soul as pure as the metal they sought to create could alchemise it. It was Sol’s own light and purity bestowed in blessing upon the Holdfasts that endowed them with the divine ability to turn lead into pure gold.
She remembered the first time Luc showed her his fire. She’d been sure the flames would burn him, but they simply danced across the surface of his fingers, shining like a star in his hand. Even without the flames, she’d always felt warm near Luc; even the cold Paladian winters were thawed by his presence. All alone now, she missed him so intensely, her bones and skin ached for the familiarity and comfort of a hug.
She kept trying to piece together the bits and pieces of her missing memories, but it was difficult to know if she’d forgotten something or never been informed in the first place. After all, a healer didn’t merit much in the way of security clearance. Her only knowledge of the battles and military strategy was trying to staunch the sea of blood that followed.
According to Matias’s stringent understanding of the Faith, necromancy, in addition to its violation of the dead, was also a violation of the natural cycle and natural law, and vivimancy stemmed from the same corrupt form of resonance. Healing was permitted within limits because it was categorised as a spiritual intercession, something selfless and divinely led.
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.
Helena wanted answers, not sleep, but the warmth seeped under her skin like water. The room blurred, the edges disappearing. The face softening as it faded away. “Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed. “I suppose you do.”
The war had so decimated the alchemist population that now they needed a breeding program to revive it.
Ferron’s lips remained pressed against Aurelia’s, but as he kissed her, he raised his eyes, and his gaze locked onto Helena’s face.
“It wasn’t blind. I chose him,” she said.
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 was almost pristine, as though all the death and destruction he’d caused had never touched him. The only sign that he’d even seen battle was his eyes: There was a hollow rage lurking behind them that she’d only ever seen in those who’d spent a long time at the front lines.
The Undying frequently develop a tendency towards sadism over time. Some more quickly than others.
She’s trying to produce an animancer for Morrough.
The spark she’d once regarded as the most intrinsic part of who she was had gone out. 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.”
“Is there really a difference between having someone die for you and killing them?”
All this time, Helena had thought her imprisonment terrible. Now she was left guilt-stricken by how little she’d had to endure.
She thought she should say something. What she’d tried to tell Lancaster. “Ferron always comes for me,” she whispered.
My father always said that in Paladia, you have to be satisfied with scrap metal until you can make something of it.
the destination was inevitable, her only choice was in how horrifying the journey would be.
“But at this point I suppose I deserve to burn. I wonder if you’ll burn, too.”
He wasn’t kind; he simply wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t as monstrous as he could be. And for Helena’s fracturing mind, an absence of cruelty was sufficient solace. For her starved heart, it was enough.
It was like falling. The past broke free, surging through her mind and swallowing her.
The hibernal solstice was supposed to be all about looking ahead to brighter days, but after five years of war, it was difficult to believe that things would ever get better no matter how much the days lengthened or warmed.
Some were so young, they’d never known a day outside the war.
About the need to make sacrifices, and how sometimes caring about someone meant staying away from them.
Sitting there beside Helena, Luc was an orphan with centuries of legacy resting on his shoulders, and no more idea of how to single-handedly win a war than anyone else.
“What do you know about fighting?”
“You want us to consider the damnation of our soldiers’ souls? You took oaths, Marino. Did I misjudge you? Have your abilities made you forget your humanity?”
