Page 77 of Alchemised
The resonance that struck Helena was blistering in its power. It jolted through her like a live wire, charring her from the inside. Her body spasmed, jerking violently.
She screamed through her teeth as it ravaged its way through her skull.
Morrough’s examination of her memories wasn’t some disorienting state of reliving; it was like having her consciousness flayed. Morrough peeled her mind apart, ripping her memories from wherever he found them.
While he’d said he wanted to see the lost memories, he seemed in no hurry to find them, instead focusing his attention on her imprisonment at Spirefell. The claustrophobic monotony, the endless isolation, punctuated only by Ferron’s occasional appearance to check her memories or perform transference.
Morrough seemed particularly interested in the transference sessions and the nightmares and fevers that followed. He found her fears amusing and the agony of transference a novelty, replaying it over and over, Ferron crushing and consuming her until there was no end or beginning of either of them.
It was only when she’d stopped screaming and gone limp, no longer struggling at all, that he finally turned to the glimmers of memory, but even those he distorted.
Luc on the roof, but stripped of all the details that had made the memory beautiful: the white fire, the light in his eyes, the gilding of the city at sunset, each disappeared until all that remained was the distance between them, the way Luc recoiled from her, the reproach in his voice, and the drug washing him away.
Morrough watched the memory of Lila asking about the trainees several times with a sort of idle curiosity, but it was her memory of Lila scarred and crying that he took the greatest interest in.
When he tired of it, she hoped he was done, but he was not. He went back to the last transference session.
Whatever power she’d briefly possessed to push Ferron from her mind failed her now. Morrough stretched the memory, drawing out every excruciating moment of Ferron’s mental violation, the backlash from her attempted resistance, until she didn’t even realise when he finally stopped.
Her mind was awash in so much pain that it blotted out everything else until she grew aware of her lungs seizing. Her eyes unable to focus. She had no sense of where she was until she felt her pulse fluttering against the pressure of Ferron’s fingers, his knee pressed against her spine.
“So …” Morrough’s voice came from somewhere in the dark. “The Eternal Flame’s animancer is not dead after all.”
“You believe Boyle is still alive?” Ferron sounded startled.
“Who?”
Ferron loosened his grip on Helena, and she slumped against him in the suffocating darkness. “Stroud mentioned her. Based on the Resistance records of Elain Boyle, it was presumed that she—”
“Boyle was no one. Haven’t you noticed that the transference was different with the others?”
Helena’s eyebrows furrowed. Others?
“I was told that the transmutations in her mind would cause difficulty,” Ferron said.
“Those difficulties are because she is resisting, because she can resist. This—she is the animancer.”
There was a pause punctuated only by the heaving rhythm of necrothralls. Ferron seemed frozen with surprise.
“You did not notice, or even suspect?” Morrough sounded so enraged, he had to pause to catch his breath. “I had wondered at your progress, the reported intensity of the brain fevers in her, unlike our test subjects. How could so much be concealed if the mere penetration of her mind is so difficult?”
Morrough spoke so slowly that dread seemed to build with his every word. Ferron remained silent.
“There is only one answer: She is the animancer. Even now, with her resonance all but gone, she is still resisting. She erased her memory of what she is in an attempt to escape me.”
The pressure growing in Helena’s head was so intense, her vision disappeared.
“Surely not.” Ferron’s voice broke through. “Stroud said it was impossible for any person to erase their own—”
“What does Stroud know of anything? She cannot imagine talent beyond her own abilities. This is the animancer. I could feel her attempts to resist me.” The corpses oozed Morrough towards Helena again, his eye sockets looming, his resonance a sharp hum in her bones.
“I beg your forgiveness for my failure,” Ferron said, his voice sounding hoarse with shock. “I never considered it.”
Morrough was silent for a long time, his skeletal face bloated and rippling in her vision.
“Your father was recently here, begging for an audience as you now beg for forgiveness. He claims he tried to tell you what he remembered, but you did not listen.”
Ferron’s grip on Helena tightened again. “His memory is hardly reliable, Your Eminence. It seemed imprudent to indulge his fits of paranoia. I did not realise he would disturb you with his claims. However … I did quietly begin a reinvestigation due to his comments.”
