Alchemised

Overview

Plot Summary ⚠️ Spoilers

Characters

• Helena Marino
  The central protagonist, a foreign-born alchemist, healer, vivimancer, and animancer whose altered memories hide the truth of the war. Her captivity, wartime bargains, love for Kaine, loyalty to Luc and Lila, and struggle over bodily and moral autonomy drive the story.
• Kaine Ferron
  The High Reeve, an Undying former Institute student and Helena’s captor, lover, and wartime intelligence source. His service to Morrough is rooted in coercion, his mother’s torture, and phylactery control, and his arc moves from weaponized brutality toward mortal escape with Helena.
• Morrough
  The High Necromancer who rules New Paladia through the Undying, necrothralls, phylacteries, and terror. His failing immortality motivates the search for Helena’s memories, the breeding program, the targeting of Holdfast descendants, and the plan to inhabit Helena’s unborn child.
• Cetus
  A fragment or aspect of Morrough placed inside Lucien Holdfast after Luc’s capture. His possession reveals Morrough’s deeper design against the Holdfast line and forces Helena into the confrontation that ends Luc’s life.
• Lucien Holdfast
  The last Holdfast Principate, Helena’s beloved friend and the Resistance’s symbolic center. His faith, leadership, capture, possession, and death shape Helena’s promises to protect Lila and Pol.
• Lila Bayard
  Lucien’s paladin primary, Soren’s twin, a secret vivimancer, and the mother of Lucien’s son. Helena hides Lila’s pregnancy, later rescues her through Kaine, and Lila eventually returns to Paladia to kill Morrough and reshape the postwar Institute.
• Soren Bayard
  Lila’s twin and Lucien’s paladin secondary, who supports Helena during the war and later leads the unauthorized rescue of Lucien. His death and Helena’s reanimation of him become one of Helena’s most traumatic moral breaches.
• Ilva Holdfast
  Lucien’s steward and a Resistance leader who protects the Holdfast legacy through secrecy and manipulation. She gives Helena the Stone of the Heavens, uses Helena to bind Kaine, and later demands that Helena make Kaine submissive or kill him.
• Jan Crowther
  A Resistance strategist who turns Helena into an intelligence asset and pushes her into morally compromised work. He manages Kaine’s bargain, conceals atrocities, exploits Helena’s talents, and is later killed after Ivy betrays Headquarters.
• Doctor Stroud
  A vivimancer in Morrough’s service who examines, drugs, tortures, and exploits Helena. She oversees transference and the repopulation program, reverses Helena’s sterilisation, and later becomes an object of Kaine’s vengeance.
• Shiseo
  A Far Eastern metallurgist, Helena’s laboratory ally, and the designer connected to nullium and Helena’s suppressing manacles. He helps Helena build the West Port bombs and is meant to escort her south before he is killed in the train attack.
• Aurelia Ferron
  Kaine’s politically arranged wife, bred for iron resonance and trapped in a loveless marriage. Her jealousy of Helena culminates in violence, and she later dies when Atreus murders her at Spirefell.
• Atreus Ferron
  Kaine’s father, first seen through family history and later as a lich using stolen corpses. His obsession with Enid Ferron and his failures toward Kaine lead him to torture Helena, then finally sacrifice his soul to help free Kaine.
• Enid Ferron
  Kaine’s mother, whose torture, experiments, and death under Morrough’s regime define Kaine’s hatred and guilt. Her memory motivates both Kaine’s revenge and Atreus’s final decision to save his son.
• Enid Rose Ferron
  Helena and Kaine’s daughter, born in island exile with Kaine’s silver eyes. As a young adult she goes to Paladia under the name Enid Romano and confronts the false public history of her parents.
• Apollo "Pol" Holdfast
  Lila Bayard and Lucien Holdfast’s son, hidden in exile and raised near Helena, Kaine, and Enid for part of his childhood. He becomes Enid’s closest companion and later supports her when she sees how history has distorted Helena and Kaine.
• Matron Pace
  A senior Resistance hospital figure who protects, challenges, and cares for Helena. She recognizes the costs of Helena’s self-sacrifice, helps conceal Lila’s pregnancy, and is later captured during the fall of Headquarters.
• Falcon Matias
  A religious authority in the Resistance who opposes Helena’s vivimancy and necromancy proposals. His judgments, restrictions, and purity politics isolate Helena and help turn her censure into propaganda.
• Titus Bayard
  A former general whose body Helena saved after brain injury but whose mind remained unreachable. His condition becomes a measure of Helena’s developing animancy and of Lucien’s refusal to accept Helena’s compromised methods.
• Rhea Bayard
  Titus’s wife and the Bayard family matriarch figure who hopes Helena can restore Titus. She later suffers during the Undying victory spectacle, showing the regime’s cruelty toward captured Resistance families.
• Sebastian Bayard
  A Bayard relative and veteran who joins the rescue of Lucien and helps conceal Helena’s necromancy. He is later killed by Cetus and briefly reanimated by Helena as cover.
• Elain Boyle
  One of Helena’s healer trainees who becomes lead healer and Lucien’s personal healer. Her treatment of Lucien with sedatives and injections helps conceal the signs of his possession.
• Ivy Purnell
  A young vivimancer used by Crowther as a torturer, later revealed as the traitor who helped the Undying after being promised Sofia’s return. Her guilt leads her to help Helena and Kaine by stealing Morrough’s arm.
• Sofia Purnell
  Ivy’s sister and a hospital orderly involved in the unauthorized rescue route for Lucien. Her death drives Ivy’s betrayal, and her reanimated body later enables the theft of Morrough’s arm.
• Elsbeth Mandl
  A warden who preserves prisoners for Undying use and later hides Helena in conscious stasis after the fall of Headquarters. Her actions make Helena disappear from records and preserve the mystery that opens the book.
• Artemon Bennet
  A regime researcher whose experiments create chimaeras, suppression methods, and punishments such as Kaine’s transforming array. Helena’s bombing of West Port Lab destroys his work and is treated by Stroud as a personal grievance.
• Basilius Blackthorne
  An Undying commander transformed by Morrough’s phylactery torture after dissenting. He leads brutal attacks, kills Soren during Lucien’s rescue, and is finally killed by Kaine.
• Vanya Gettlich
  A Resistance scout who returns mortally wounded from West Port with evidence of metal-based alchemy suppression experiments. Her death and autopsy reveal a new strategic threat and intensify suspicion around Helena’s vivimancy.
• Erik Lancaster
  An Aspirant and Aurelia’s lover who stalks, assaults, and tries to abduct Helena at Spirefell. His public punishment by Kaine helps expose Kaine’s identity as the High Reeve.
• Grace
  A former hospital orderly who informs Helena about the Outpost, survivor abuse, and the terror of the postwar regime. Her early warnings establish the world Helena has awakened into.
• Penny Fabien
  A Resistance member connected to Lucien’s circle who survives the war with injury and later appears in Paladia’s public memory. She helps show both the wartime bonds around Helena and the distorted postwar remembrance.
• Alister
  A member of Lucien’s unit who joins the rescue mission and survives the flood-cathedral escape. His later displayed remains during the Undying victory mark the regime’s symbolic destruction of the Resistance.
• General Althorne
  A Resistance commander who manages battlefield crises and rescues survivors after Lucien’s extraction. He dies during the nullium disaster, and his corpse is later used by Atreus.
• Wagner
  A Hevgotian prisoner whose testimony explains how Morrough creates the Undying by binding sacrificed souls to living recipients through bone shards. His information clarifies Kaine’s condition and the regime’s power source.
• Davies
  Enid Ferron’s former maid and Kaine’s preserved necrothrall servant at Spirefell. She cares for Helena, represents Kaine’s inability to let the dead go, and dies when Helena’s ritual frees Kaine.
• Amaris
  Kaine’s winged chimaera, repaired and trusted by him rather than treated as a disposable monster. She carries Helena and Kaine during their escape and later finds them in island exile.
• Apollo Holdfast
  Lucien’s father and the former Principate whose assassination by Kaine helped trigger the war. His death is central to the regime’s origin story and to Kaine’s coerced service to Morrough.
• The Undying
  Morrough’s immortal ruling followers, each sustained through phylacteries and sacrificed souls. Their power, cruelty, fear of obsidian, and dependence on Morrough structure both New Paladia’s rule and its weakness.
• Necrothralls
  Reanimated corpses used as laborers, soldiers, servants, and instruments of punishment throughout the book. Their presence embodies the regime’s violation of the dead and becomes a tactical focus for Helena’s animancy and obsidian discoveries.
• Chimaeras
  Vivimantic creations used by the Undying as weapons, including prototypes released in the wetlands and battlefield attackers. Their suffering and construction reveal the cruelty of Bennet’s research and contrast with Kaine’s care for Amaris.

Themes