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vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.
The Resistance had considered the war a holy war—a divine battle between good and evil, a testing of the Faith. But Helena’s motives had been more personal than that. Luc didn’t need to be divine for her to want to save him. He could have been entirely ordinary, and she would have made all the same choices. Was there something she could have done that could have changed things?
When the Eternal Flame moved to restore order, the Undying revealed another ability: necromancy. On a scale never seen before.
Aspirants, when attacked they’d kill the Eternal Flame’s soldiers, and then use reanimation to turn them back on their own compatriots, building an army with the Eternal Flame’s dead.
Her vision recovered, the necrothralls were horrifying to see. The adipocere gave a taut waxy sheen to the greyish-purple mottling of their skin, and the sclera around their clouding pupils were red or vivid yellow. Their fingertips were blackened and rotting off.
Penny leaned over the arm of the chair, looking back, her face stricken. “You were right. I’m so sorry. We should have listened to you.”
He turned. Helena’s throat closed as the world around her vanished, footsteps faltering. He was not old at all. It was the iron guild heir. Kaine Ferron.
“Quite,” he said, his gaze splinter-sharp. He raised an eyebrow, still looking at Helena. “The war is over. What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours?” She met his stare without flinching.
“Holdfast is dead,” he said sharply, as if he’d seen the answer in her eyes. “The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”
In a way, it was strangely poetic that it was Helena who’d been brought as a captive to Spirefell.
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.
Ferron usually wore nothing, not even a wedding band. The only piece visible was a slender, dark metal ring on his right hand.
Prior to the Faith, there had been a cult of alchemy devoted to a masculine version of Lumithia. The cult claimed that mankind itself was the first product of the alchemy, created by Sol at the beginning of time and scattered across the earth. However, the human beings created were lowly and corruptible, much like the most ignoble of metals, and Sol for all his power could not make them better. Then came Lumen, whose alchemical processes were much harsher. Lumen joined together the other four elements of fire, earth, water, and air, using the entire earth as an alembic, with the creatures of
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Both vivimancy and necromancy were regarded as a corruption of resonance caused by a “poisonous womb.”
“There is only one answer: She is the animancer. Even now, with her resonance all but gone, she is still resisting. She erased her memory of what she is in an attempt to escape me.”
“It was after the final battle,” Ferron said, sounding far away. “Seems you were captured after levelling more than half the West Port Laboratory. You’d disguised yourself as a Hevgotian during the attack, and then disappeared into that tank afterwards, resulting in contradictory reports. The investigation was considered inconclusive until my father realised where he recognised you from. He was present that night.”
“The West Port Laboratory was Bennet’s experimental research site.”
“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.”
“You know, the Undying have never made much sense to me. Scientifically or logically. Immortality seems like a dangerous thing to just—gift to people, and Morrough’s hardly the altruistic type. I know how vivimancy works. 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.”
“When the Undying are in dead bodies, they don’t retain their old resonance; they get whatever resonance the new body has. Like your father: He’s an iron alchemist, he doesn’t know anything about pyromancy. So if someone like you, an animancer, lost their body, you’d lose that ability, and if you thought being a lich was a punishment, something you do to teach someone a lesson, you’d cling to your body no matter what condition it was in and be desperate to figure out transference. But even if you did, you’d still need to find an animancer. But someone like that would fight the transference.”
“So…that’s where the repopulation program comes
“Morrough doesn’t care about the economy or what kind of alchemists there are in New Paladia. The real reason Stroud’s using selective breeding is to find a way to control what resonance children are born with. That’s why they brought back your father and I saw him at Central. She’s trying to produce an animancer for Morrough. If transference is perfected by the time she does, he’d have the means and the perfect vessel to use, but he’s—he’s running out of time.”
She was a vibrant corpse, hardly different from the necrothralls haunting Spirefell.
Ughhh my heart for Helena
There had been so many women in the Resistance. Not many in combat, but everywhere else; they’d staffed the hospital, gone to the front lines as field medics and dragged the wounded bodies to safety, operated the radios and relayed messages, washed and repaired the clothes and uniforms, and cooked the meals. All the ordinary tasks that never ended, not even when a war began. It had been women doing them.
