Alchemised

by SenLinYu

“Whether you win a battle or lose it, all I see is the cost.”

“Kaine Ferron has offered to spy for the Resistance,”

Most healers could practise for decades without consequence, but to heal injuries that cheated death came with a price. It was called the Toll. To heal a mortal wound or reanimate the dead required vitality, a drop of life itself. The greater the scale of the work, the greater the cost. Healing came with the highest cost; that was why the Faith considered it a purifying act and allowed its practice while forbidding all other forms of vivimancy. Becoming a healer would slowly carve away Helena’s life span, like a candle being burned at both ends. Someday, she didn’t know when, her resonance would begin to wither and fade, and Helena would go with it. She felt it sometimes while healing, a sensation like sand in an hourglass being diverted, flowing from her fingertips and into her patients. She never knew how much was left, just that she was spending it.

Morrough can raise the dead and grant immortality. The Ferrons have found a way to turn their lowly iron into seemingly infinite mountains of wealth. In a world like that, what purpose is there in fire or endless gold?”

With her hood pulled up, hiding how dark her hair was, she was hardly memorable. Just a person trying to stay out of the war’s path.

“Yes,” she said, without emotion. “I’m yours.”

“I swear it, on the spirits of the five gods and my own soul, Kaine Ferron, I’m yours as long as I live.”

If he’d been raised on ancestral ambition and little else, always being watched for signs of weakness or vivimancy, he’d probably never had anyone he could risk trusting. Now in war, the stakes had only grown. He lived among immortal men all consumed by their own desire for power and vengeance. He couldn’t possibly risk trusting anyone.

He hurt her so much, without even trying, without needing to know anything about her. He’d simply spoken her name and reduced her to property, his whims locking an iron chain around her throat.

“You think you’re better than us because you’re immortal, but you’re dead inside already.”

For months, he’d been something bloodless and soulless. Not a person, but an evil to endure and an obstacle to overcome. Seeing him injured, stripped of the shell of a uniform that he hid inside, had altered her perception of him. There was a fragility that she had been unprepared for. He’d seemed so human, and she didn’t like thinking of him as human.

“No one’s forcing me to do anything I didn’t—agree to.” “What have you ever said no to?”

This amulet didn’t represent Ilva, it stood for Luc. Ilva had exploited that, but it wasn’t Luc’s fault. Helena was doing this for him, and he was worth it.

As if she’d forgotten how to be human anymore.

He was in a crucible, and he was the crucible, and he would either die terribly or be wholly alchemised into something that could survive the paradox.

A southern ritual had no place in the North, but she’d given everything for the war, and it had not been enough. Superstition was all she had left.

“Don’t die, Marino. I might miss you.”

“Healing’s efficient. Things that can take weeks or months to recover from, can be fixed in minutes or hours with vivimancy. They needed someone who could save people.”

His features had grown more defined, still gaunt from sickness, but it had carved the boyishness from his face. He actually looked like an adult now. She tilted her head to the side. If she saw him, without the context of who he was, she might find him rather handsome.

Luc had an overpowering sense of what was right, his decisions ruled by conscience, but as a result, he was left out of many of the Council’s deliberations, nudged to spend his time at the front where choices did not involve such delicate politics. Helena watched him sitting among the Council, Ilva and Matias on one side and Althorne and Crowther on the other, like a marionette unaware of its strings. Helena wished she could save him from it, but she knew that left to his own devices he would blindly sacrifice himself at the first opportunity.

She couldn’t fix herself anymore, and no one else seemed inclined to even notice she was breaking.

He stilled, eyes instantly opening, and reached towards her. “Don’t go.”

She knew that people enjoyed sex, but she had always thought it was an indulgence. She had not known it was a hunger. Or that she was starving.

“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.”

She entered another tunnel, trying to get away, but no matter which one she took, or which way she turned, they all seemed to lead back to the same room. As if to mockingly remind her that she could not escape herself, and what she had become. This was what the war had made her.

“So…” Ferron said slowly, moving idly towards her, “you use your vitality to save—anyone you’re told to save, as penance?”

The water streamed around Luna’s pedestal, but despite it, even after months, the prayer tower she’d built still stood. All Helena’s prayers were rejected.

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

“Everyone wanted a lot for me, and I’m not sure I ever knew what I wanted.”

There was an intense pressure that grew inside her whenever he was close, a sort of frantic desperation, like swimming up towards the surface yet never reaching it.

“When I was a kid,” he said, his words rough, “I used to think it wasn’t fair that all the real wars were over before I was born. Used to be afraid I’d be one of the Principates everyone forgot, because nothing happened.” He looked down; he was ripping at his nails, all his fingers bleeding. “I’d do anything to have that now. I can’t taste anything now except blood and smoke, and I don’t feel anything except when I’m on fire. The stories made it sound so good. Fighting for a cause. Being a hero.” He shook his head. “Why does everyone pretend it’s anything like that?”

“No. It’s always about power. And what people will do without caring about the cost.”

Helena paused as she reached the door. “In the future, perhaps tell me what you want instead of expecting me to fail where it’s convenient to you. Maybe then we’ll both end up less disappointed in each other.”

All Luc knew was Paladia, alchemy, and the Eternal Flame, with their ideals about the refinement of fire, of trials and sacrifice, the purity of suffering. That it would be worthwhile eventually, in the next life if not this one. Maybe if Helena were at the front, she could believe in all that, too. But she’d spent every day of the last six years watching people die. She lived in the aftermath of every battle, breathed in the devastation until she was drowning in it. Nothing and no one would ever convince her that anything noble or purifying could come from this scale of suffering. That any rewards could ever be worth it.

“I’m tired of this war. I’m tired of trying to save people and watching them die anyway, or saving them only to watch them die later—in a worse way. It’s the same cycle, over and over. I don’t know how to get out, and I don’t know how to keep going, either.”

Why was it always the hospital’s fault when things went wrong? If Helena had come out and said that surgery was a success and Lila was already getting out of bed, they’d all be off to the perihelion to offer Sol flames of thanksgiving. But bad news was always the hospital’s fault. How nice it must be, to be a god.

She folded over Soren. Her body was shuddering, but she cried silently. There was a trick to sobbing like that; it was something a person had to learn to do.

“After you nearly bled to death here, I thought, at least I can keep her alive. She deserves to have someone who cares enough to try to keep her alive. I thought eventually you’d give up. But you will do anything to save the people you feel responsible for. Of course you’d weaponise your guilt in order to use mine.” He gave a low bitter laugh. “I’m sure there’s something poetic in it all, but right now all I feel is a new set of manacles.” He let go and stepped away from her, heading for the door. “So forgive me if I dislike looking at you. I’m still adjusting to the ways these new ones chafe.”

“You are not expendable. You don’t get to push everyone away so that they’ll feel comfortable using you and letting you die.”

“You are not replaceable,” he said, his hands trembling against her shoulders. “You are not required to make your death convenient. You are allowed to be important to people. The reason I’m here—the reason I’m doing any of this—is to keep you alive. To keep you safe. That was the deal.”

When he kissed her, it felt like the beginning of something that could be eternal.

“Yes. You. The Resistance has latched on to you like a parasite, and you think it’s all worked out because they’re kind enough to keep you alive while they eat you?”

“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.”

There are prisons the size of towns. To keep order, it is important that the guards are not the enemy. Instead, you make the prisoners think their trouble is other prisoners, a different unit or sector. Those prisoners are the reason this prisoner has less; the rules they hate are those prisoners’ fault. By making privileges always at the expense of others, the prisoners forget who has made those rules.

Penny was smiling at Helena, fervently trying to convince her. “That’s why it’s better for all of us to die true to what we believe than to live on by betraying and corrupting ourselves. I know you meant well, saving us, but you should have trusted Sol.” Helena pulled her hand free. “Penny, if I thought we’d all die, I wouldn’t be so afraid of losing. What they’ll do to us if we lose will be far worse than death.” She shook her head. “There will be nothing purifying about it.”

The war had drilled itself into her bones, carving away at her until there was hardly anything left except what made her useful, an ideal component in an elaborate machine, but Kaine had reminded her that she was human; that not every trait and ability and quality she possessed only mattered insomuch as it was useful to someone else. That she was allowed to breathe sometimes.

“You can tell me. I’ll help you carry it.”

“You are so much more than what the war has done to you.”

“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.”

The war was an abyss that took everything and was never satisfied. There was always more required. Another life. An additional measure of blood. Be better. Smarter. More ruthless. Quicker. More cunning. Accept a second portion of pain. It was never enough.