The Peculiar Alchemist

58 || Fickle Friend

Resentment filled her as she lowered the book Vincent had given her.

She had just finished reading the pages Vincent told her to read, and those pages were the main reason he told her to come and see him. The discovery she made was certainly a big one, but not necessarily one she was very happy about. All her hard work, all the pain she went through, and the risks that she took.

All of this to achieve her dream of becoming the most powerful necromancer the world had ever known, to replace the Abbotts and make them a thing of the past.

All of it had been impossible, out of reach.

It turns out that she never really was a necromancer. Not even Vincent whose knowledge and experience exceeded her own. This whole time they had only been fools who fractured their soul just to have a taste of the real power true necromancers held. Briar didn't know whether to feel jealous or depressed at how easily they controlled the dead while she had to go through the painstaking arduous process of conducting a ritual.

Not only does she have to memorize the shape and the runes the ritual required, she'd also need to find herself a sacrifice and ingest gross things before uttering the incantation. The risk of the ritual failing and backfiring will always be there, and people like her would have to go through all these steps and risks in order to do something a necromancer can do with a wave of his hand.

Briar's resentment only grew the more she thought about it.

"All this time we've been fools." She told Vincent as she closed the book, and she sat in her chair looking very concerned about it all. There was so much she didn't know. "If necromancers cannot die, and they don't have a soul, how are we supposed to control them?"

"You always think of souls and control, don't you?" Vincent remarked, sounding a little bit too relaxed considering what they had just learned.

Briar didn't like any of this, she didn't like feeling so helpless.

"If what the book says is true, shouldn't we find a way to deal with these creatures? We don't even know what they look like, or how to identify them."

"Believe it or not, I met one." Vincent told her with a smile, and her eyes widened at what he had just told her as she listened eagerly to what he had to say. "There was a sense of unease when I first met him, as if something was somehow wrong, unnatural. I cannot explain it."

That made Briar frown. "This doesn't seem very helpful. Anyone can make you feel uneasy under the right circumstances."

"You'll understand once you meet him. He truly cannot die." Vincent expected such a response from her, she just didn't understand because she never experienced that unease. Even when he was temporarily a spirit, he had felt it the first time he had been near Toby. Vincent couldn't imagine how lucky he was for gaining Toby's trust, and for having someone like Kellen help him. "I've made another interesting friend, too."

"A friend?"

"He was the one who brought the book to me." Vincent informed her, gesturing at the book she was holding. It made her look down at it hatefully because of what she learned from it, almost wishing she remained ignorant of it all. "Unfortunately, the ritual didn't work on him. He remains without a mark, but he is incredibly useful. Stole that book you're holding straight from the Abbott's library."

The problem with people sometimes is that they often trust what they are told, and they accept the obvious facts as they are. Unbeknownst to Vincent, this was something Kellen often relied on to mislead.

Briar was prone to trust Vincent's words with him being more experienced than her and all, and he truly believes that Toby is a necromancer because he saw it with his own eyes, Toby cannot die. That main thing he focused on, something that was virtually impossible was happening right in front of him, it was hard to ignore. Nobody can do that, and resurrections were known to fail whenever they happened.