Page 8 of Alchemised

W HEN H ELENA WAS ROLLED BACK INTO THE lift at Central, she counted the floors of the Tower as they passed.

The Alchemy Tower had been an architectural wonder for centuries.

It was only five storeys when initially constructed as a memorial to the first Necromancy War.

Back then, alchemical resonance was an arcane ability, regarded as magic.

Its practitioners, figures cloaked in myth and mystery, like Cetus, the first Northern alchemist.

The Holdfasts and the Institute had changed that, establishing alchemy as the Noble Science, something to be studied and mastered.

When the Alchemy Institute threatened to outgrow the Tower, it was raised with alchemically wrought pulley systems to add additional storeys to the base.

It had stood as the tallest building on the Northern continent for almost two centuries, growing ever taller as the city around it expanded and alchemists flocked through its gates.

The study of Northern Alchemy itself was entwined with the Tower structure.

The lowest five levels with the largest lecture halls were the “foundations,” filled with initiates still discovering their resonance and mastering basic transmutation principles.

Annual exams were required to ascend. After five years, most students would depart with their certification to join the guilds, with only qualifying undergraduates ascending to the next tier in the narrowing Tower to study more technical fields and subjects.

Even fewer would rise past the graduate and research floors to achieve the rank of grandmaster.

The lift stopped somewhere amid the former research floors.

Helena strained her eyes, forced to peer through an aura of pain steadily fogging her vision. The walls blurred, her eyes failing to focus until she was rolled to a stop in the centre of a sterile room.

It had probably been a private laboratory once.

The straps pinning her in place were unfastened, and Stroud paused, checking Helena’s wrists.

The tubes running between her ulna and radius were nauseating, evoking a deep sense of wrongness. She couldn’t even twitch her fingers without feeling the way her muscles, tendons, veins, and nerves in that narrow space were all forced to accommodate the nullification driven through her.

“Very good,” Stroud said to herself before she turned to leave. Just before the door shut, Helena heard her say, “No one enters this room without my approval.”

There was a heavy click and the grind of a lock, and Helena was left alone.

She lurched up, but the drug had burned itself out of her blood and her muscles were cramping, contracting as though pulled taut. She tried to straighten, but the instant her feet touched the ground, her legs collapsed under her.

She slumped to the floor.

Run, a voice kept telling her. But she couldn’t; her arms and legs couldn’t hold her. In the absence of any physical ability, her thoughts turned inwards.

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?

Transference. Animancy.

Both words were unfamiliar.

She turned them over in her mind. Trying to contextualise the comments that had been made. Souls and minds and occupying the mental landscape of another person to transmute them from within. And the Eternal Flame had discovered this?

Surely not. Souls were considered inviolable among those of faith. The Eternal Flame considered even the physical alterations of vivimancy and necromancy a risk to an immortal soul.

Alteration of a mind, the transference of a soul: Surely that would be seen as infinitely worse.

Yet Shiseo claimed that the Eternal Flame had developed a way to perform this animancy-transference process. Something that Morrough, who’d unlocked the secrets of immortality, had not discovered.

Who was Elain Boyle? Helena didn’t know the name, and she was sure there had never been any other healers, much less a personal one, designated for Luc alone.

Luc would never have consented to receiving anything that wasn’t equally distributed to all the rest of the Resistance, and that included medical care and healing. He’d struggled with having paladins sworn to protect him, despite it being a tradition older than Paladia.

Stroud had to be mistaken.

Yet there was something hidden, changed about her. A secret so painstakingly concealed, Helena could not even guess at what it was.

Her muscles cramped harder. She lay on the floor, her body curled and contorted inwards like a dead spider, but her mind raced on.

What would Luc do if he were the one still alive? Captive. He’d already have a plan. He would have charmed Grace into passing a message for him, begun coordinating a way to escape, and plotted to rescue everyone on the Outpost.

That’s what he would do. Now it was up to Helena.

She couldn’t fail him. Not again.

H ELENA HAD EXPECTED THE TRANSFERENCE to begin immediately, but instead she spent what felt like days barely able to move as her muscles gradually un-cramped.

“Withdrawal,” Stroud said with a look of condescension as she forced a feeding tube down Helena’s nose and inserted a saline drip into her arm to keep her sedated. “No matter. I imagine they taught you to enjoy suffering. After all, sacrifice is a healer’s calling, isn’t it?”

Stroud was unveiled in her disdain for Helena with the revelation that they were both vivimancers, but on opposite sides in the war.

Stroud considered her a traitor.

“I don’t like those spasms,” Stroud later said during an examination, her mouth pursed when Helena’s fingers seized, making her drop a cup. “It’s not caused by the nullification set; do you remember when they began?”

Helena shook her head, flinching as the cold burning sensation of Stroud’s resonance sank into her left wrist, winding through the bones as she twisted and manipulated it for several minutes.

“From the condition of it, it appears you’ve broken this wrist several times. There’s old nerve damage. Do you remember when it happened?”

Helena had no recollection of ever seriously injuring her hands. Dexterous hands were vital for channelling and controlling resonance in both an alchemist’s practice and a healer’s work. She’d always been very careful with them.

“There wasn’t any mention of it in your student files, so it must have been during the war, but there’s no records there, either.”

Helena’s academic records had been unearthed, and Stroud liked to use them to interrogate her about the smaller details of her life. She suspected it was because Stroud was allowed to punish her for refusing to answer.

Where was her alchemy resonance first tested? At the Paladian embassy in her homeland, the southern islands of Etras. How old was she when she immigrated to Paladia to study at the Alchemy Institute? Ten.

How many years of education did she complete at the Institute? Six.

Did she remember Principate Apollo Holdfast’s death? Yes, she had been in class with Luc.

When did she join the Resistance? When the guilds overthrew legitimate government and there was a Resistance to join.

Stroud had not liked that answer.

When did she become a member of the Order of the Eternal Flame? Helena tried to avoid answering, but Stroud had the book of members, with Helena’s vows and name all written in her blood.

“Did the Eternal Flame’s Council know you were a vivimancer when you joined?”

Helena shook her head.

Stroud sat glaring at her, waiting for a verbal response.

“I didn’t know I was a vivimancer,” Helena finally said. “And after—once everyone knew—Luc didn’t care. He didn’t think a person’s abilities changed who they were, only what they did with them.”

“How magnanimous.” Stroud’s voice was chilly. Her fingers were creasing the file in her hand. “A pity he didn’t also step down. A great many people might still be alive then.”

“His family was Called,” Helena said, despite knowing there was no point in arguing.

“Yes, by the sun,” Stroud said, scoffing, her voice growing sharp.

“I know they didn’t teach modern astronomy at the Institute, but did you ever study the newer astrological theories?

You’re from the trade islands after all; you must have been exposed to all kinds of ideas.

Did you really believe that the sun looked at the earth and chose a favourite?

That a drop of sunlight endowed Orion Holdfast with such godlike abilities that all his descendants deserved to rule Paladia like gods themselves? ”

Helena set her jaw, but Stroud would not stop.

“According to your academic records, you were considered bright. Surely you didn’t swallow every story you were told about the Holdfasts. Look me in the eyes and tell me: Do you really think the Holdfasts had a right to rule?”

Stroud’s fingers dug beneath Helena’s chin, forcing her to look up.

She stared squarely into Stroud’s face, feeling the threat of her resonance. “Better them than people like you.”

Stroud’s hand dropped, her resonance vanishing before she slapped Helena across the face so hard her head cracked against the wall.

“If you’d joined our cause, you could have been great.” Stroud was breathing heavily as she stood over Helena. “You would have been somebody. You’re nothing now. You spent yourself on the wrong side. No one will ever remember you. You’re ash, like all the rest. And a traitor to your kind.”

Once she was alone, Helena cradled the swollen side of her face, head throbbing.

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?