Before his name was whispered like a curse in the halls of London’s Alchemical Academy, Cedric was known as a prodigy. The eldest son of a scholar, he showed early promise for the study of transformation, the art of turning mundane herbs and alchemical minerals into something much more fascinating. His future looked promising to all his tutors, who placated his talents with praise. His true obsession with alchemy, however, had begun not in the laboratory, but at a deathbed.
Cedric’s younger brother, Elias, had been everything he was not. Bright-eyed, witty, full of laughter. The two were inseparable, and when a wasting sickness took Elias to the grave prior his fourteenth year of life, Cedric’s world collapsed. Cedric threw himself tirelessly into his studies.
Utilising the contemporary knowledge he absorbed and ingrained, citing every medical herb he had ever been taught; Mint, Garlic and Lavender and untold other would-be cures. Everything any market had to offer. When that too failed to remedy Elias' sickness, it failed to remedy his heart, too. As Cedric strained and ground down herbs, concocted potions to save his ward, his brother had sewn new designs for each failure, each thread a whisper of thanks despite each failure
Elias stayed positive, even when he could not, sewing the visage of Cedric’s passion into his older brother's clothes for his older brother. Relentless as Cedric’s drive was, they both knew what was coming.
Cedric did not cry when the body was lowered into the dirt; he simply stared as though memorizing every detail of the ritual, taking in his brother’s memory for the very last time. Many came to give their apologies, but none could apologise for the cruel reaper that took his brother.
Where others prayed, Cedric did not. He took liberties.
In the months that followed, grief hollowed him out, replacing warmth with purpose. If alchemy was truly the science of recreation; if it could transmute base metals into gold, filth into purity then surely it could turn death into life. The ultimate panacea. He devoted himself to study, refusing sleep, refusing companionship.
Cedric sought answers about his brother's death. Answers that could not in sanctioned texts but in banned volumes whispered to exist in the vaults beneath The London Academy of Transmutational Alchemy. Far from the eyes of all but those long since dead.
Until now…
It was there, beneath the marble lecture halls and the grand banners of the Order, Cedric discovered ‘The Corpus Aeternum’. A tome of forbidden theory said to have been penned by an alchemist who had attempted to recreate powers only divinity had been said to claim: Life. The text spoke of the “Four Laws of Return”, an alchemical principle long denounced as heresy:
1. The body may be repaired.
2. The mind may be recalled.
3. The soul must consent.
4. That which returns is never the same.
Cedric ignored the last law. He began his experiments in secret.
What began as the study of tissue recreation; the reanimation of dead flora, insects, then animals very soon grew darker.
The young Cedric noted the behavior of revived matter, learning how alchemical solutions could substitute the missing spark of a living soul. In his journals, he wrote of “the false breath,” an imitation of life made through the precise alchemical arrangement of ingredients, a little Hellebore here, some distilled alcohol there, a few grams of silver and untold more minerals and ingredients.
Yet, none of it was enough. None of it brought his brother back.
Months turned to years as Cedric learned and practiced. The students' whispers turned rumours that were all dismissed as impossibility until the strange odors from Cedric’s chambers became more pronounced and missing cadavers from the anatomy vault became more numerous. One night, the screams from the lower hall drew the professors themselves and they found him there within the remnants of a ritual circle scorched into the floor. At its center lay a thing that had once been Elias. Its mouth moved, but the voice that came from it was not his brother’s.
Cedric was expelled before dawn.
The London Council of Alchemists declared his research an abomination, a breach of the Sanctum Laws of Equivalence which forbade alchemists from tampering with death. His notes were seized, Cedric’s name struck from the Academy records. To the Order, he was no longer a student of the Academy, but a ‘Defiler’ of sacred law. Cedric was now the man who had tried to usurp the very fundamentals of nature.
Yet in Cedric’s mind, there was no crime. Only cruel failure.
Rejection did not humble him, but hardened him. He retreated from society, travelling the fringe outskirts of London where the old alchemical guilds once practiced in secret. There, within the stained ruins of laboratories hidden within the forgotten depths of a forest as old as the first people who stood there slept an alchemical hut he rented with the money he had earned from simple solutions he sold, Cedric continued his work.
He developed his own ‘Death Alchemy’, a branch of the art he dedicated his life to that focused not on creation, but on reconstruction and reordering of dead ingredients into new forms, mockeries of life powered by the faint echoes of departed souls. These constructs were not people, but fragments. voices of memory woven into matter. He called them “Homunculi of Mourning.”
In the depths of his solitude, Cedric’s obsession consumed him.
He stopped seeing the world as others did. Every life became a formula; every death, a potential solution. His mind, once brilliant and optimistic, began to corrode under the endless cycle of creation and failure.
Yet within the madness there flickered something achingly human: hope. Hope that he could still make right what death had taken.
When whispers reached him of a noble-born alchemist named Hypatia from Gaia, recently exiled from her own academy for attempting to transmute gold for the poor, Cedric’s curiosity was piqued. After hearing how this famed alchemist of Gaia almost bankrupted the entire economy of her city, Cedric travelled to a forgotten Alchemical Tower hidden on the outskirts of a rural forest which lay its bones just outside of the unsuspecting district of Dagenham, London. A tall, monolithic sentry of brick and stone, forgotten to most and hidden within a blanket of treetops so tall they covertly overshadowed even the foreboding stone sanctuary.
This place was perfect.
Known only to the few scholars who knew their alchemical history, it was where the remnants of both their worlds converged. A nexus of alchemical energy that he could feel, surely here Cedric could achieve his goals unbothered.
It was half laboratory, half fortress, overlooking a city that had since grown hostile to their kind over the years since his expulsion. Their crimes against the laws of the universe and religion alike had not been spared unsuspecting eyes.
There he met her as though fate itself had cast him a coincidental bone. Hypatia was everything Cedric was not: unbroken, alive with laughter, carrying a warmth no other had since his Brother.
To Cedric, she seemed… naïve, her idealism almost offensive. Yet beneath his cold exterior, he envied her. Her belief that alchemy could heal the world felt like a memory from another life — before death and guilt had rewritten him.
Despite their differences, they formed an uneasy alliance. Cedric needed her mastery of Life Alchemy, the ability to utilize vitality into inert matter to complete his own research.
Hypatia, in turn, saw potential in Cedric’s unmatched theoretical knowledge and his tragic, broken drive. Together, they studied the great mystery of alchemic myth: the Philosopher’s Stone, the ultimate convergence of life and death, capable of both giving and taking the divine breath of life.
But while they worked and learned, the city around them began to stir.
The Council of Alchemists in London had enacted a desperate ritual, one meant to purify and remove the taint they foresaw, to purge the influence of rogue alchemists from London.
It didn’t go to plan.
It was an act of mass transmutation, binding the city’s very air and water and everything in between to a single alchemical law: ‘that which defies natural order shall be destroyed.’
The ritual twisted into horrible magic..
The citizens who once utilised the production of alchemy in potions and wonders instead became its victims, their minds now clouded with hatred for the alchemists who had doomed them. Produce that was supposed to heal now tainted and enraged and caused unshakable wrath.
Cedric and Hypatia took refuge within the hidden Tower, surrounded by wards, ingredients that embodied both life and death now reacted uniquely to them. Ingredients that embodied death whispered to Cedric.
To the villagers below, they were necromancers and heretics, Death and Life entwined in unforgivable sin. Cedric, staring out at the burning streets on the horizon, the sky blistered orange from a great fire, yet he felt only further vindication. Seeing the hoards of villagers from the nearby district of Dagenham; armed first with hatred, and seconded by weaponry as they marched through the trees towards the lonely tower.
Yet somewhere behind his cold composure, a flicker of doubt grew.
Perhaps Hypatia’s optimism wasn’t naivety after all. Perhaps it was strength; the one thing he had long ago lost when his brother’s heart stopped beating.
He would never admit it aloud when Hypatia spoke of rebuilding the world, but Cedric listened. For all his mastery over death, he still longed for life or at least, for a reason to keep chasing it. After all, that is why they had come here. To learn. To challenge fate. To change their distinguished worlds one way or another.
And that was exactly what they were going to do....