Page 3 of Alchemised

Helena flinched.

“See? You do understand me.”

Her stomach shrivelled, but she locked her jaw.

The woman stepped closer. Helena’s eyes strained to make her out. A squarish face with impatiently pursed lips. A medical uniform.

“Perhaps an example is in order.” The woman’s hand pressed against Helena’s neck. Helena gave a sharp gasp as burning-cold energy surged through her, towards her spine.

It wasn’t an electric jolt like in the tank; it burrowed from the woman’s hand and into Helena like a needle. The channel of energy sang through her like a tuning fork, until both resonated along the same wavelength.

The woman clenched her fingers. Pain burst through every nerve in Helena’s body. She gave a gasping, garbled scream, body seizing, hands wrenching at the cuffs.

“Be still.”

A flick and Helena went limp. She couldn’t feel anything below her chest. As if her spine were severed. Her blood roared in panic.

A wave of the woman’s hand, and the void of numbness vanished.

Soap-roughened fingers trailed dangerously along Helena’s arm.

“Understand now?”

The woman’s resonance was still running through her like a current, a visceral warning. Helena managed to nod shakily. She should have realised: The woman was a vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.

“I knew you’d catch on. Let’s try again.”

Helena’s throat grew thick, her eyes burning. Every nerve twinged, her blood roaring in her ears. What was the harm in answering?

“Where did you come from?”

“Wsss—th—w-housss—” Helena fought to make her tongue cooperate.

“None of that foreign nonsense. Speak Paladian,” the woman said sharply.

There was no such thing as a Paladian language; the woman was speaking in Northern dialect. Helena wanted to tell her that but didn’t think it would help. She swallowed and tried again, but her tongue slurred everything together.

The woman sighed. “Why do you Resistance fighters always waste my time? Perhaps if we jolt your brain, you’ll remember how to speak a proper language.”

She gripped Helena’s head this time. A wave of resonance surged through from both sides like cymbals slammed together.

Everything went red. The scream wrenched from Helena’s throat was animal.

The hands were snatched back. “What on earth?”

Helena wasn’t sure if the woman was running in circles overhead or if the room was spinning.

“What is this? Who did this to you?”

Helena stared dazedly up as the red faded from her vision. Her hands were twitching and spasming, convulsively jerking against the chains. She didn’t know what the questions meant.

“Something has been done to your mind,” the woman said, sounding bewildered but also strangely excited.

“Some kind of transmutation. I have never encountered anything like it. I’m going to have to report this.

I’ll need a specialist. You have—” The woman paused.

“There’s no name for this! I’ll have to come up with a name … ”

She seemed to be talking mostly to herself. “Transmutational barriers inside a brain. How is that possible? I have never—there are—patterns in it.”

She touched Helena again. Helena flinched, but the resonance was not for torture this time, just a frisson of energy through her brain that turned everything luridly red again.

“This is elaborate, beautiful, professional work. A vivimancer manually rewiring the human consciousness.”

Helena lay there, not understanding.

The woman’s face came close enough that Helena could make out blue eyes with deep creases between them and around the mouth. She stared at Helena with avid fascination.

“If Bennet were still here, he would marvel at the precision of this work.” Resonance ran through Helena’s mind as tangibly as if fingers were gliding inside her skull.

The woman’s pale eyes lost focus as she worked.

“The smallest mistake anywhere, and you’d be vegetative, but whoever did this kept you almost completely intact. This is genius.”

“Whaa—tt?” Helena finally managed a clear word.

“I wonder … What does it look like?” The woman walked away, then returned a minute later, carrying a sheet of glass.

Helena squinted and recognised the object. A resonance screen. They were frequently used for academic presentations and alchemical medical procedures. The gas used reactive particles to mirror the shape and pattern of a resonance channel.

The woman held the glass overhead, her other hand resting on Helena’s forehead, and ran resonance through Helena’s skull.

Her vision turned red again, but Helena squinted through and watched as the dim cloud between the panes morphed into the vague shape of the human brain and then into an incomprehensible spiderweb of lines that wound all over.

“I doubt you understand any of this, but imagine your mind is a—a city. Your thoughts run along various streets to reach their destinations. Those lines you see are your streets that have been rerouted. There are barriers, transmutationally crafted, and so instead of following a natural pattern through the brain, someone has created alternative routes. Some areas are cut off entirely. I can’t even imagine how … The skill this would take …”

Her words trailed off. She set the screen aside and peered probingly at Helena.

“Who worked on you?” The question was loud, slow, and over-enunciated.

Helena just shook her head.

The woman’s expression hardened dangerously, but then she seemed to reconsider. “I suppose you wouldn’t know, given the state of your brain. You’re probably lucky to remember your own name. You were an alchemy student, I presume.” She idly tapped a metal cuff around Helena’s wrist.

Helena gave a wary nod.

“And foreign. Obviously.” She gave Helena a pointed once-over.

Helena swallowed. “Etras.”

“Ah, quite far from home then. Do you remember your resonance repertoire?”

“Div … erse.”

“Hmm.” The woman’s eyebrows furrowed, and she studied Helena more carefully. “Wait. I remember hearing about you. You’re that little savant the Holdfasts sponsored. That must have been more than a decade ago, so you must be what, twenty-something now?”

Helena’s eyes burned, and she gave a stilted nod.

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Do you remember what happened to your sponsor, Principate Apollo?”

“Killed.”

“Mhmm. And the war. I’m sure you remember that. Did you help the Holdfast boy burn down the city? Your darling Luc, as you all liked to call him?”

Helena’s throat tightened. “I didn’t—fight.”

The woman gave a small sound of surprise, and her eyes narrowed. “But the final battle? I assume you remember that?”

Helena’s mouth parted several times, her tongue struggling to untangle. “We—the—the Resistance lost. There were—executions. M-Morrough came—at the end. He—he had Luc. K-Killed him—there. Then—then they—they took me to the warehouse.”

“Who’s they?”

Helena swallowed bitterly. “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. ”

She tapped Helena’s forehead. “You do seem mostly intact, though. So why go to all the effort? And who could have even—?” The woman picked up the resonance screen, glancing at it once more, and then disappeared through the curtains.

Helena was relieved to see her gone.

Her memory or mind had been altered?

She would have thought it a trick, but she’d seen the resonance screen. She knew what a brain should look like. It would have required a highly specialised and extensive degree of vivimancy to transmute a mind into that state.

It wasn’t something a person would forget having happened to them.

Yet she didn’t feel like she’d forgotten anything, except the mention of an extensive injury.

She couldn’t remember any injury, just shock, and grief, and horror.

She swallowed and blinked hard, trying not to think about it.

Looking around, she tried to make out her surroundings. Whatever she’d been injected with was a brutally effective drug. There was a sharp bruise forming on her chest where the needle had punctured its way to her heart. It hurt with every beat.

She looked down. There were bars along each side of the bed, and the metal cuffs around her wrists were shackled to them. The skin was raw and bruised, and beneath the cuffs chaining her to the bed, a greenish band of metal was also locked around each wrist.

Those at least were familiar. They’d been snapped around her wrists during the celebration.

In the darkness, thick with blood, with little torchlight and too many bodies in a cramped cage, she’d barely been able to make them out. But she remembered them.

Inside the stasis tank, she’d been constantly aware of them clamped around her wrists. Their existence had persisted along the edge of her consciousness, an inescapable presence that stifled her resonance, preventing any transmutational manipulation that might have let her escape.

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 laws, the resonance could be corrupted, enabling vivimancy—like what the woman had used on Helena—and the necromancy used to create necrothralls.

As the element of resonance, lumithium could increase or even create resonance in inert objects through exposure, making them alchemically malleable.

However, pure lumithium was too divine for mortals; overexposure caused wasting sickness, and for individuals with reso nance, direct exposure could result in a raw, metallic pain within their nerves.

The lumithium in the manacles didn’t seem to make Helena sick.

Which meant that something had altered it.

The sharp energy inside was keyed into her resonance, but rather than turn it raw, it blurred her senses.

She could feel her resonance, but when she tried to control it, the cuffs were like static in her nerves.

No matter how she tried, she could not push beyond it.

All she knew was that as long as those manacles remained locked in place, she wasn’t an alchemist at all.