Page 172 of Alchemised
She was replaceable. Ferron wasn’t.
She’d never had much resonance for gold, but she tried to use it to bend down the golden rays on the amulet. Kaine would never agree to wear the Holdfast crest, but if it looked a bit more ordinary—
The setting bent, and the sunstone slipped, plummeting to the floor.
It hit the ground and shattered.
Helena stared in horror as red shards scattered everywhere, and on the ground all that remained was something silvery white.
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.
