Page 54 of Alchemised
“You were supposed to be gone by now.” His eyes flicked towards the window. “Seems I’ll be keeping you through the winter.”
There was no emotion in Ferron’s voice or face as he said it. It was one of the things that Helena realised was most strange about him: how little his body and tone communicated at times.
Etras had an animated culture and language, using expressions and hand gestures. It had been one of the many things that had made Helena a clear outsider. She’d learned to lace her fingers tightly together under the desk when speaking in class or else risk the room rippling with laughter as her hands started gesticulating.
Paladians valued stillness. Expert alchemists would only move their fingers for precise and controlled use of their resonance. It was culturally ingrained. Expressions were also valued most when they were subtle; insults often came in the form of sarcastic flattery that didn’t translate easily for a newcomer.
Helena had learned to be still and watch for subtle tells. To understand that when the pupils got small, and the eyes skipped over her face, and the feet pointed away, that the smiling and nice-sounding words didn’t mean that she was liked or her presence wanted.
Ferron was more difficult to read than most Paladians, not because his mouth said one thing and his body another, but because his body sometimes didn’t say anything at all.
He stood there, body still, expression flat, hands concealed. Helena couldn’t work out his mood.
“There are a few things scheduled to arrive tomorrow, to spare myself any additional inconvenience from all this. Please”—he placed overt emphasis on the word—“do not mistake it for a sign of affection.”
A PAPER PACKAGE WAS LEFT at her door along with the breakfast tray the next morning. Inside was a pair of boots.
She pulled them out, running her fingers over the details.
They were beautiful, gleaming leather, with sturdy soles and a row of buttons to fasten them up. She could see the craftsmanship in all the details.
When Ferron had referred to something sparing himself “additional inconvenience,” she had not expected shoes, although the slippers were in tatters from the wet gravel.
She slipped her feet into them, already looking forward to walking the halls without the ice-cold iron in the floors seeping through her feet.
It was then she realised there was more in the package. A pair of shearling gloves made with an odd design, very long in the wrist. Not formal length, but strangely proportioned, rather like a hawking glove.
She pulled one on curiously and realised the shape and length was to cover the manacles, preventing the metal from growing frigid and burning her skin.
When she went out for her walk, it was the first time her hands and feet didn’t begin immediately aching from the cold.
Still she refused to feel any gratitude towards Ferron. It would only get colder after the solstice passed. If she was there all winter, she’d probably develop nerve damage or frostbite from going outside. It was in his best interest to keep her healthy.
She was not so foolish as to mistake calculation for kindness.
CHAPTER 10
HELENA SAT BY THE WINDOW IN HER room, trying and failing to make out any sense of resonance in her fingers. If she focused very intensely, sometimes she thought there was still a glimmer of it.
She stood and went to the window. The days were short and terribly dark, sunsets at midday.
She closed her hand into a fist, eyes shut, concentrating, and then flexed her fingers, pressing them against the window’s icy iron lattice, straining until her eyes blurred.
Nothing.
She fidgeted with the manacle around her wrist until the spike between her wrist bones twinged in warning.
Despite centuries of alchemical study, there was still much unknown about resonance.
Prior to the Faith, there had been a cult of alchemy devoted to a masculine version of Lumithia.
The cult claimed that mankind itself was the first product of the alchemy, created by Sol at the beginning of time and scattered across the earth. However, the human beings created were lowly and corruptible, much like the most ignoble of metals, and Sol for all his power could not make them better. Then came Lumen, whose alchemical processes were much harsher. Lumen joined together the other four elements of fire, earth, water, and air, using the entire earth as an alembic, with the creatures of earth as the prima materia. The Great Disaster, two millennia past, which nearly shattered both earth and humanity, had been the processes of alchemisation itself.
First the fires that rained upon the earth: the calcination. The rising tides that swallowed the great cities were the dissolution. The earthquakes that shattered even the mountains were the separation. The aftermath as the survivors emerged from the destruction: the conjunction. The plagues and sickness and starvation that followed: the fermentation. The death toll, so immense that humanity nearly blinked from existence: the distillation. And finally in culmination, the result of Lumen’s great experiment, mankind itself manifesting alchemical resonance was the coagulation.
This process was the method of alchemisation that Cetus’s early writings referred to.
The Faith and the Institute both rejected the cult almost entirely, although they did accept Lumen as Lumithia, and acknowledge her as one of the elemental deities in the Quintessence. However, the Faith held a strict view that resonance was not a reflection of spiritual purity but merely an expression of it. All humans were flawed, alchemist or not, and therefore all humans must strive towards purification. A step which Cetus conveniently left out of his alchemical process.
