Page 24 of Alchemised
Aurelia paused and looked back at Helena, lifting one hand. Her wrist swished dramatically, and the alchemy rings decorating her fingers transformed, lengthening into knives that made her fingers look spider-like.
Helena watched the transmutation with trained interest. Natural iron resonance was considered somewhat rare among alchemists—though not as unusual as gold resonance or pyromancy. Raw iron was naturally intractable, to the point of being considered generally inert. Most alchemists couldn’t transmute iron without having it repeatedly exposed to lumithium emanations in an Athanor Furnace, and even then they fared better with steel than iron alone.
Aurelia’s transmutational work was quick and flashy. In class, she would have been docked for excess movement and imperfect iron distribution, but the ease with which she’d transformed her rings meant she had an extremely high degree of iron resonance, and if the house was iron, that meant Aurelia could wield it like a weapon, too.
Helena looked down, noticing then the wrought iron running through the floor and decorating the walls.
“We don’t use this wing,” Aurelia said, continuing down the hall. Her rings were pretty bands around her fingers once more. “I don’t want you seen, particularly when I have guests. Stay out of the way unless you’re sent for. The thralls all have instructions to keep an eye on you, so we’ll know if you cause problems.”
Aurelia stopped, setting the short staff on one of the iron bars in the floor and giving it a little twist. The iron shifted with a groan, and a door, heavily decorated with more iron, swung open.
It was a large room with two long windows and a canopied bed between them. There was a single wing-backed chair next to one window and an ornate table beside it. A large wardrobe sat against the far wall, a heavy rug covering most of the floor.
There was nothing on the walls except a clock too high to reach, but it was all clean and smelled freshly aired out.
Helena stepped into the room, taking it in carefully.
“Meals will be sent,” Aurelia said, and the door closed behind her.
It was only when she was alone that it struck Helena as odd that Aurelia had escorted her.
Perhaps the Ferrons weren’t as wealthy as their home would make them seem.
The house did appear understaffed. Their butler was a corpse—perhaps all the servants were. If they were desperate for money, that would explain why they had no choice but to keep Helena, and why Ferron spent his time hunting down Resistance fighters rather than managing his family’s guild and factories.
She remembered the Ferrons being among the wealthiest families in Paladia. They’d invented industrial steel manufacturing, allowing them to monopolise more than just Paladia’s steel industry. Most neighbouring countries had sourced from the Ferrons, too.
Clearly their fortunes must have turned if their house was in a condition like this.
She went to the nearest window. There was a radiator bolted beneath it, and the window was latticed with wrought iron and locked tight. No jumping, then.
She touched the iron with a fingertip and felt nothing. No connection to the cold metal, just that dead, empty feeling emanating through her wrist.
She pressed the length of her hand against it, bitterly missing her resonance. The world she’d known was always full of energy, humming with power that she’d been attuned to since birth.
Now everything was still. The constant sense of inertia was disorienting.
Peering through the paned glass, she saw wilderness and mountains.
She reconsidered her plans. If the necrothralls were there to watch her, they’d likely been commanded to keep her from killing herself.
She drummed her fingers on the windowsill, ignoring the little shocks of pain it sent up her arm.
Ferron, unfortunately, was not the stupid, deluded patriarch she’d hoped for.
His resonance was like Morrough’s, beyond anything she’d known was possible, but what worried her most was the way he’d gone through her memory. Morrough had done something similar, but that mental violation had been brutal and haphazard; Ferron had been surgical.
She’d assumed his quick kills were a sign of impulsiveness, but there’d be no need to keep prisoners if he could look inside their minds and take the answers.
How could she outwit someone like that? Could he see memories alone or her thoughts, too?
She turned from the window, surveying the room, wondering if his strange appearance was an effect of his abilities.
The Undying didn’t change after their ascendance. It was a part of the “gift.” Unless their bodies were so destroyed that they became liches, they were immutable. They could lose entire limbs and grow them back.
What would make Ferron look like that?
He seemed—distilled. As though he’d been taken and sublimated until all that was left was an essence—something deathly cold and gleaming. The High Reeve.
