Alchemy

The deliberate bending of one's own essence into a shape it was never meant to take. Anyone can learn it, and it is always the weaker answer.

The rule

Stated in text at ch. 257, by Instructor Vance, in the first lecture of Alchemy Foundations. She says she will repeat it every lecture that term.

VNC: Your soul ability is what your soul already is. Effortless. Given. Alchemy is not that. Alchemy is the deliberate bending of your own soul essence into a shape it was never meant to hold. It will always cost you more than your natural gift would. It will always produce something rougher than what a soul ability could manage on its own. If you came here expecting an easy second gift, I encourage you to leave this lecture hall immediately and save us both the disappointment.

And the reason it exists anyway:

VNC: I am not joking. Alchemy is difficult, and costly, and most of you will find your first attempts humbling in ways your soul ability never was. But it is also the one door in this entire academy that opens for absolutely anyone, regardless of what you were or were not born with.

The chapter has her eyes pause on Arthur a fraction longer than on anyone else while she says it.

This is what stops Alchemy being a free power source in a world otherwise built on inherited gifts.

The cost

Essence, spent from the practitioner's own supply, plus the years of study.

It is the democratic system in the saga. Birthright decides a soul ability. Discipline decides an Alchemist.

What a multi-discipline Alchemist looks like

Yseult Marchant, ch. 290, across three matches, uses five: fire, earth, air, an adhesive she invented herself, and controlled crystallization.

Instructor Vance notes that most third-year Alchemists have committed to one or two by that stage, and that the essence cost of maintaining five must be substantial.

Yseult's stated trade-offs, which are the clearest statement of the disciplines' relative properties in the saga:

YSE: Fire's decisive but limited. Air's flexible but requires precision to make it matter. Earth's solid but slow to shape properly. Used together, each one covers what the others lack.

And a specific interaction:

YSE: Too much fire and you're right, it simply fuels [a wall of hardened air]. Get the proportion correct, and the heat differential tears the structure apart from the inside instead.

New techniques can be invented. Her adhesive "isn't taught", built by "adapting principles from three separate branches of standard theory into something none of them cover individually", and has no formal academic name.

Branches

Physical transformation, elemental and energy manipulation, and enchantment, meaning the imbuing of objects with lasting effects.

Yseult Marchant lifts and holds an arch of water eleven times over in ch. 325, and produces about two hours of light in ch. 326, burning most of it forcing the glow to reach past 150 feet in ch. 327. Light has a budget, and the budget is a plot constraint rather than a flourish.

Where it is taught

Formally at Solmere Academy, alongside soul ability theory, with its own instructors and examinations. See ../locations/solmere.md.

Who is good at it

Monsterkind skew toward Alchemy and humans toward soulcraft, because a less dense soul bends more easily. Tendency, not law: Yseult is human and exceptional at it. See species-asymmetry.md.

Open questions

• Whether a person with no innate ability is better or worse at Alchemy than anyone else. Arthur does not default to it, and the author's notes say his essence is not what his power draws on at all.
• What enchantment costs, given that a lasting effect implies essence left behind in an object.