Page 9 of Alchemised

When she’d first immigrated to Paladia, she’d thought it was paradise.

Etras did not have much metal as a natural resource.

Resonance was rare. There were a few alchemy guilds, but they offered no formal training.

Reaching Paladia had felt like coming home; like finding the place where she’d always been meant to be.

She’d been vaguely aware that there was a hierarchy among alchemists that divided even the student body, splitting the devout families in close alliance with the Holdfasts apart from the guilds, but she wasn’t familiar enough with the city-state’s politics to understand the intricacies of it.

All she knew was that some students wouldn’t speak to her, laughed when she asked questions, and mocked her accent and way of gesturing with her hands when she talked. Later she learned that those were the guild students and to be wary of them.

It was Luc who’d had to explain that the guild students thought Helena’s enrolment had taken a spot that should have gone to the guilds—though Luc assured her that they were wrong.

His family’s Institute hadn’t been founded for guilds but for people like her, the ones who didn’t have opportunities to study alchemy on their own.

The guild students didn’t even need to attend; their places and futures were all as sured.

For them, enrolment at the Institute was a status symbol.

Once they had their certification, they’d all leave.

Helena was special, though. She’d be the one who’d stay beyond Year Five, who’d study more than just the principal foundations of alchemy. She’d ascend to the highest floors, make discoveries, and do the kind of work that would change the world. Her name remembered forever.

Why would his family want another guild student at their Institute when they could have someone like her?

Luc had always had a talent for making Helena feel like she was special rather than painfully out of place. She’d wanted to prove him right—that she was something, that she’d be worth believing in. His family wouldn’t be wrong about her.

She’d focused on her education and ignored the political hostilities around her.

Luc would mention things from time to time, how the guilds were convinced that his family was stifling alchemy’s scientific progress and preventing industrialisation, and then he’d wave towards the factories below the dam filling the sky with black clouds of smoke.

That his father was being accused of allowing the country to fall behind because of his derelict governance.

Or that the guilds had proposed that the Principate’s power be limited to religious affairs, and that they be the ones to run the country.

It had seemed that nothing Principate Apollo did was ever enough for the guilds; their complaints and demands were endless.

When Principate Apollo was murdered, the guilds didn’t see a tragedy at all, but an opportunity.

They used Luc’s age, only sixteen, as a pretext for declaring a reformation: No longer would religious elites and a warrior class rule Paladia.

The city-state would be governed by the newly formed Guild Assembly.

The guilds’ sedition would have been easy for the Order of the Eternal Flame to stop if it hadn’t been for Morrough.

He appeared amid the upheaval seemingly from nowhere, offering immortality.

Not an endless life of decay, but one impervious to age and injury, discovered not through any divine power but through science.

The guilds seized the opportunity, and the Undying began to appear.

A select few at first, revealing themselves to be not only immortal but also capable of advanced forms of alchemy.

Power and eternal life were suddenly within the grasp of anyone prepared to prove themselves loyal to Morrough.

Aspirants flocked to join them, aligning with the guilds.

The ideas of “New Paladia” being promised by the Guild Assembly spread through the population like a disease.

When the Eternal Flame moved to restore order, the Undying revealed another ability: necromancy.

On a scale never seen before. Rather than recruiting heavily from among the 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.

Luc, newly crowned as Principate, had been certain that the citizens of Paladia would be shocked into reason once they realised they were aligning themselves with necromancers. Necromancy had been a mortal crime throughout most of the continent for centuries. Not even the guilds would go so far.

He had been wrong.

“I F YOU WERE A HEALER, why aren’t you mentioned more in the hospital records?”

Stroud had returned in a state of high dudgeon, a stack of files with her.

Helena’s name was almost nowhere to be found.

Stroud had only managed to find her signature on inventories of medical supplies, an application for a base-level alchemy knife, and a few request forms for the chymistry and metallurgy departments for certain compounds.

The only interesting thing in the entire stack was a preliminary casualty list that had Helena listed among the presumed dead.

All told, in years of military files, Helena had scarcely existed at all. Stroud seemed personally affronted by it.

“Well?”

“Healing is a miracle; it’s not something you’re supposed to put your name on,” she said, reciting what she’d been told long ago. “There’s a symbol placed on medical records to indicate acts of—intercession.”

“Do you mean—” Stroud flipped through a file and turned it towards Helena. In the corner was a crescent shape with a slash across it. “This?”

Helena gave a short nod.

Stroud stared at it. “Then how on earth do you keep track of procedures?”

Tightness spread from her chest to her throat. “Healing’s not a procedure.”

Falcon Matias, the spiritual counsellor of the Eternal Flame’s Council and Helena’s direct superior, had been strict in his demands that the use of vivimancy not be documented in any ways which might glorify it.

The act of vivimancy, he said, could only be purified through intentions of selflessness.

Although healers were relatively common in the remote parts of Paladia, vivimancy was rare enough that there were all kinds of claims about what vivimancers were capable of—that they could enthral the living just as necromancers enthralled the dead, for instance, and perform unspeakable transmutations upon living flesh.

Helena used to think these views of vivimancers unreasonably harsh, but now as Stroud’s subject, she began to understand.

Stroud was not enthralling, but she was expert in paralysing and transmutationally manipulating Helena at the slightest provocation.

If Helena twitched too much, Stroud would fuse her bones together to keep her still.

She seemed to take delight in the technicality of it not being torture.

Sometimes she left Helena like that for hours.

It was a relief when Stroud finally seemed to lose interest, announcing that she had no more time to deal with Helena. Several times each day, two necrothralls would come to retrieve her and make her walk along the corridor that ran around the lift.

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.

The smell of chem ical preservatives and rot made Helena sick, but they wouldn’t let her stop walking until her legs gave out and they had to drag her back into the cell.

The walks blurred together along with the days. Helena didn’t know how long she’d been in Central; the lights never went out, and all the windows were covered and sealed.

“Is this her?” A man with a ghastly pale face and a sharp, needle-thin nose suddenly stepped out from a room and into Helena’s path as she was being shoved along the perpetual route.

Helena gave a gasp of shock. Standing before her, in elaborate embroidered clothes and jewellery, was Jan Crowther, one of the five members of the Eternal Flame’s Council.

“Crowth—”

A heavily ringed hand shot out, gripping her by the shoulder and dragging her close, peering at her.

“You knew him?” he asked, his fingers and rings digging into her skin.

She tried to pull free, but the necrothrall escorts held her in place as Crowther leaned in, closer and closer, drawing a deep breath, and a thick purple tongue flicked out as if he meant to lick her.

She recoiled, but he was close enough now that she could make out details. There was a slight yellowing in his sclera and faint patterns of dark veins beneath his vaguely clouded eyes. His skin was powdery, smelling strongly of lavender.

This wasn’t Crowther.

One of the Undying was wearing his corpse.

On the rare occasions when they couldn’t regenerate anymore, so grievously wounded in battle that their immortal bodies could no longer heal, the Undying could move themselves into their necrothralls instead. It was why the Resistance had called them liches.

It was an imperfect solution; even when maintained, the bodies rotted slowly around them and lacked the regenerative qualities of the near-impervious originals.

Helena suspected this was why Morrough was so interested in transference—the method had the potential to allow the Undying to move into living bodies instead.

The lich using Crowther’s body drew back. He looked at her again, a strange expression sweeping across his face.

“I know you,” he said softly.