Page 76 of Alchemised

She knelt down, reaching towards it. It was like quicksilver, a puddle of liquid metal on the ground, but the gleam was pearlescent, sort of glowing. When she touched it, it turned solid and cold.

She picked it up and it melted again. Without using her resonance, she could feel a warm hum of energy coming from it, seeming to seep through her skin. The feeling faded when it moved, turning solid like a stone.

She watched, mesmerised. The hum seemed to grow as though she were in a dream. Things were almost real, but the details blurred when she focused on them.

Raw and exposed, it had a burn to it almost like the talisman inside Ferron’s chest, but softer, more familiar somehow. Like an old friend.

She’d always dismissed the claims of a healer’s intuition, the idea that vivimancy endowed any kind of fundamental understanding of human physiology that was divine or intuitive, but she was certain that the object in her hand could heal Ferron. It would.

She went over to him, carrying it. Very carefully with her free hand, she pulled him back, trying not to put pressure on the lacerations.

She tilted her hand against his chest, near the talisman, and the liquid turned solid and rolled. When it touched his skin, rather than melt again, it stayed solid, only warm and liquid against Helena’s palm.

She pressed her hand flat over Kaine’s heart and used her resonance. It was like plunging her hand into scalding water. Heat ran up her nerves.

The stone was solid, but as her resonance pushed through towards Kaine, it flushed warm beneath her palm and vanished.

She snatched her hand back in time to see the silver brightness disappear through Kaine’s skin.

For a moment, his body was illuminated from the inside out.

She could see the shadows of his bones and veins and heart as it shone inside him and then disappeared.

Helena blinked as if she’d just woken from a daze. The humming was gone, the room still, and all that remained was the disfigured shape of the suncrest and the broken red glass on the floor.

She touched Ferron’s chest, tentatively, wondering if she’d just hallucinated. It didn’t feel like anything in the last several minutes had been real.

She reached out with her resonance, not sure what she’d just done. He felt the same, a dissonant sense of deadness and energy. There was no apparent change—except maybe he was a little warmer?

She leaned him forward in the chair, and her fingers trembled as she looked around.

She swept up the glass with a calm she did not feel, pouring it into an empty glass vial and tucking it into her satchel, warring between trying to convince herself that it had happened and telling herself that it hadn’t. Neither option felt fully plausible.

She went back and examined Ferron again as she would any patient.

To her resonance, there seemed nothing distinctly different except that he was warmer now; the flashes of coldness didn’t tear at her resonance so intensely when she touched him.

But there was nothing inside him except the talisman, still burning and glowing near his heart, and the lumithium alloy on his back.

She closed her eyes for a moment, reaching up out of habit to grip the amulet before remembering that it was gone. She’d just have to wait and see what happened.

She began applying the salve she’d made with Shiseo. They’d used morphine as the numbing agent, bonded in various forms of petroleum jelly and beeswax for prolonged release, along with copper and honey to prevent infection.

Then she bandaged him before putting her amulet back on, trying to flatten the empty setting before hiding it beneath her shirt. The gold was cool against her skin.

As she woke Kaine, she took his hand again, rigid with tension, working it slowly, coaxing it to relax. She felt him regain consciousness, but he didn’t move or speak for several minutes. Finally, he slipped his hand away and stood, reaching wordlessly for his shirt.

She helped him dress, feeling his eyes on her as she fastened each button. She tried not to stare at the place where the stone had vanished.

She only looked up when she reached his throat. His eyes seemed clearer. More alert, but she suspected that was only because he was sober again.

“I’ll come back tomorrow night,” she said.

The next night, Ferron’s skin was no longer so visibly grey-tinged.

He still looked skeletal, his face tight from pain, but along with his colour, his skin was a touch warmer.

He refused to be knocked out again. She could tell he was suspicious of her and wanted to know exactly what she did, but he wouldn’t ask, and she wasn’t about to volunteer what had happened.

He wasn’t healing or regenerating; he just wasn’t dying so aggressively. There was still a long journey ahead that relied on his body somehow adapting to the array.

She tried to be gentle, but he shuddered, gripping the back of the chair until his knuckles turned white as she washed and cleaned the wounds. She worked quickly, warning him each time she touched him, explaining each step, trying to help keep the end in sight.

He still flinched every time she touched him.

Every night she came back to the Outpost, following the same routine.

Most nights, Kaine didn’t speak to her at all.

He was always slightly drunk and somehow seemed annoyed that she kept coming back.

After five days, the talisman stopped radiating energy as if it were a leaking battery, and she could feel the aggressive decay from overstrain slowing.

After more than a week of wordless treatment, he spoke abruptly when she was washing her hands. “The High Necromancer wants someone.”

She paused. “Who?”

“A guard from one of the Hevgoss’s prison complexes.”

“Why?”

“I’m still persona non grata, so I don’t know all the details of what’s going on.

Apparently at some point, Morrough promised the Hevgotian militocrats the key to immortality.

It’s been decades, and he hasn’t produced the version of it that they want.

The reason they’re supporting the Guild Assembly is because the High Necromancer somehow convinced them that he can develop it if he can take Paladia.

The alliance soured with the latest setback, and now Morrough’s suddenly concerned with getting his hands on this guard without Hevgoss knowing.

A few aspirants are going in quietly, trying to track him down.

If the Eternal Flame wants more details, they should send someone after them. ”

“Why not send the Undying?” she asked.

“It’s more complicated to send us. It takes special preparations, and there’s limits to how long we can go.”

She paused. “Why?”

She could feel his annoyance at the question. “Because we’re bound to Morrough.”

Her hands froze. “Do you mean like”—there was no polite way to phrase it—“are you like—the necrothralls?”

He glared from the corner of his eye.

It was well known that necrothralls could go only so far from their necromancer or else they’d “die” again.

Most necromancers could manage a few miles at most. The Undying’s reanimations were particularly powerful; the necrothralls in Paladia moved so freely, no one was sure of their limits, but they were assumed to be somewhere within Paladia’s borders.

That a limitation of distance applied to the Undying indicated parallels between the two.

“Yes,” Kaine said, his tone begrudging.

“But Morrough left, and he didn’t take everyone. You were still here. How did that work?” she asked as she began applying the salve to lacerations that were still fresh and raw.

“We’re not always bound to him exactly.” He sighed.

“We’re—he uses his bones, pieces of them, when we’re made.

Part of the outer bone of his right arm was used on me.

He calls them phylacteries. It’s what creates our physical immutability.

A part of that is used to make the talismans.

” He gestured at his chest. “He takes the phylacteries out sometimes and either grows a new bone or takes a spare from some necrothrall. That’s what he did when travelling, so he could leave some of us behind during his trip.

He doesn’t like to do it often, but if he travelled without leaving the phylacteries, the connection would sever, and we’d—die. ”

“His bones?” Helena was stuck on that point.

He nodded. “Yes. He shares a piece of himself with us, and we give all of ourselves to him.”

He was silent, and Helena just kept working, her mind churning, until he spoke again.

“A few tried to run, back when the war started. When they realised it wouldn’t be a tidy little coup to depose the Holdfasts.

The High Necromancer had the corpses brought back.

He’d made new talismans from each of the phylacteries and put them into the corpses.

I believe you call them liches when they’re dead like that.

That was when we began to realise what being ‘Undying’ meant. ”

“What would happen if you stole your phylactery?”

He laughed under his breath. “You’ve never been anywhere near Morrough if you think that’s doable. He can fill rooms with his resonance. But even if it were possible to steal from him, they start crumbling after a while. That deterioration doesn’t kill the Undying, but—their minds start to go.”

Well, that explained why Ferron needed the Eternal Flame; he was dependent on them defeating Morrough for him.

“I’ll let Crowther know,” she said as she finished.

H ELENA PAUSED HALFWAY ACROSS THE bridge to the East Island, looking back towards the dam and mountains. Lumithia was a waning crescent, approaching the summer Abeyance, but still her light gilded everything.

A few more weeks and the summer tides would fully ebb, making passage across the seas possible, and the month-long deluge of trade would pour across the sea, hurrying inland. The Resistance had secured the ports just in time for the annual trade season.

Helena stood, studying the stark world around her, cast in black and silver.

She felt lost. Kaine’s injury was eating into her detachment. She could feel herself losing focus. Now that he was showing signs of recovery, she couldn’t let herself forget her task.

Hold his attention. Make him loyal. Or obsessed. Whichever came more readily. As vital as his information was, he remained a liability if his service was solely at his own discretion.

Undying. Murderer. Spy. Target. Tool.

She repeated the list to herself, but her conviction in them rang hollow.

The motives Crowther attributed to Kaine felt like an ill-fitted facade, something that Kaine hid behind. Helena was an alchemist; she was not in the habit of manipulating or altering things until she understood their nature.

She crossed the bridge, heading towards Headquarters, but a rain garden caught her eye. She’d passed it countless times but never stopped. Tonight something drew her. It had probably been pretty once but was neglected now. In the middle of the stream sat a shrine to the goddess Luna.

Acknowledgements of Luna were a rare thing in Paladia. Outright snubbing one of the gods was regarded as dangerous, but she was rarely recognised except as part of the Quintessence.

In Paladia, Luna was regarded as fickle and vain, treacherous as the tides.

According to the Faith, it was because of Luna’s inconstant nature that Sol had birthed Lumithia from his own heart, placing her in the night sky so that mankind would not fear the dark.

Luna, envious of Lumithia’s greater brilliance, had sought to drown the world in retribution.

Lumithia had faced Luna in a celestial battle so devastating, it had rained fire across the earth.

After the battle, Lumithia settled in the sky and—to repair the destruction caused by the Great Disaster—bestowed the gifts of alchemy upon mankind.

Meanwhile Luna, remorseless even in defeat, continued to express her fury by keeping the ocean and sea frothing with her endless jealousy, only calming when she ruled the skies alone.

Millennia later and Luna remained reviled, small and insignificant compared with Lumithia’s brilliant beauty and power.

The statue of Luna was worn featureless, leaving little more than a vague figure behind.

The Paladian treatment of Luna had been a shock when Helena first arrived. She’d known of Paladia’s great devotion to Sol and Lumithia, but the very concept of religion was different.

The islands of Etras had little metal for alchemy, and being in constant proximity to the sea meant that Etrasians regarded Lumithia as the one responsible for the severe tidal shifts that ruled them.

In their myths, Lumithia was a violent interloper who’d sought to destroy the earth, and Luna had thrown herself into Lumithia’s path.

The act had left Luna so grievously wounded, she nearly fell from the sky, and the seas had tried to rise from their beds to catch her.

Lumithia, chastened by this act of self-sacrifice, was quieted from her violence and came to share Luna’s vigil over the night sky.

But the seas did not forget: They still rose in rage when Lumithia waxed full, only quieting in her absence.

Because of this, in Etras, Luna did not merely rule the seas; she was also regarded as the patron goddess of protection, an intercessor. A mother.

Helena picked up a smooth stone from the creek.

In Etras, to pray to Luna, they’d balanced rocks in stacks along the beach, each stone a prayer for the tides to carry to her.

There would be no tides here to wash it away, but Helena had always loved the meditative focus of the ritual.

She made a neat stack, the first stone Luc, then Lila, and Soren, Matron Pace, the medics and nurses and trainees in the hospital, Shiseo, Ilva (begrudgingly), the Eternal Flame, and the Resistance.

The tower grew until it wobbled dangerously.

Helena held one last stone. She hesitated.

If she knocked the tower down while building it, it would be for naught. She almost put the stone back.

She placed it.

Don’t make me responsible for Kaine Ferron’s death.

The stack wobbled, threatening collapse. Then it settled.

Her throat thickened, and a weight in her chest lifted, as if the universe was telling her it was possible.

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.