A Living Transmutation

The first law of alchemy defines the chain of emanation. Through dreaming, matter begets essence; through alchemy, essence begets limina; through transmutation, limina begets matter. This is a chain and not a loop, as enforced by the second law of alchemy: It entails that alchemization and transmutation are governed by opposing fields whose energy values must have a product of zero at all points in space. Thus, the "transmutation of dreams" would be a phenomena as paradoxical as a machine perpetually in motion. Known to the ancients as "divine clay", limina is a mediator, able to be polarized alchemical or transmuted, and through limina both processes share a certain tendency to amalgamate, cohering into contiguous paraphyiscal structures. The most famous structure of this sort is the mortal soul, formed naturally around the wellspring of essence that is the willful mind. The natural soul is faint, disorganized, and patchwork; mortal essence alone lacks the mass or velocity to attain the nonlocal coherence of higher alchemical structure, and so throughout the body transmutation happens microscopically at random. Part of every alchemists' journey is a purification of the soul; by clearing way the transfigured detritus that arises through the course of one's life, pathways are wrought through which essence can circulate freely. This is a compleation of the great work. The self-interaction of essence has qualities of resonance or mechanism. Consider how objects placed in a cavity can baffle its acoustic qualities, or how a pebble lodged in cog disrupts the whole clockwork. For this reason, an alchemist is at their apex so long as the soul remains free of transmutation. But a properly functioning liminal body is able to achieve this unthinkingly; famously, if a warrior should try thrusting a transmuted blade into the skull of an alchemist caught unawares, the target's soul will deconstruct the blade even as it approaches. The atomic, transient nature of matter presents a mystery, though. Transmute a glass of water. If you drink it, if you let it condensate or turn to mist, what happens to its transmuted nature? Is each drop of water marked and cursed forever more? Will an alchemist become impure simply for breathing nearby air? No, transmutation evaporates and unravels just like water itself. Given long enough, the transmutation field relaxes toward zero. Nothing shall remain to show that this matter had special provenance. In fact, this is a chief concern of the art of alchemy. The layman assumes the challenge of alchemy is studying what can be done with this marvelous power of creation. No, the true challenge is studying how it is undone. The third law of alchemy holds that all transmutations can be dispelled: every working requires an equivalent unworking. Time's passage will always accomplish this much, but the spark of alchemization can accelerate this. The simplest form of dispelling results in total collapse. Transmute a pile of sand into a chair; when suddenly dispeled, it will explode into tiny shards. But if left alone, it may crumble bit by bit, cracks forming as if from the expansion-contraction of exposure to the elements, fragments slowly falling away --- but this is an ideal case. The tendency of limina to meld together means that the disruption often happens all together, self-catalyzing, once a critical threshold is met. For this reason, dispelling is almost synomous with "popping" a transfigured object. With careful alchemy, limina can be engineered for the stress of dispelling to be vented into outlets other than a violent explosion. But this is delicate work. You can see why the novice application of transmutation is as a rule, directed to the creation of temporary tools and structures. An amusing strain of proverb advises you to never let an alchemist prepare your food --- who would dare risk a sandwich that might burst inside you? Yet sometimes it is more than a matter of convenience: transmutation can be used to heal; however this is most effective on the laity, whose souls never accumulate the essential momentum that could easily dispel a transmutation. All this serves to illustrate why "self-transmutation" is so abhorrent to alchemists. To turn part of the body into an object of transmutation requires amputation and restructuring of the liminal body to circulate essence around it. This generally hinders an alchemists' power output, and the marginal gains of self-transmutation are seldom worth that. Transmuted flesh is dead flesh, starved of the animating soul. - - - All of this serves as the necessary background to appreciate the paradox that is the chrylurk. These monsters are famously called "living transmutations"; for centuries they were considered a great and terrible mystery, walking defiances of all three laws. Atop their exoskeleton, chrylurks have a layer of exoderm, a slimey secretion that can attain the qualities of wax or clay or silk at the bugs' design. Know this: Chrylurks do not have a soul. Through the circulation of high volume of essence, alchemists are able to project a field outward, and through this they attain extrasensory perception in a radius around them. Laymen register as faint signatures; transmutated matter confesses its true nature; and the cirulation of another alchemist becomes unmistakable. When aiming to hide among the populace, chrylurks are invisible to an alchemist's sensory field. This is chrylurk quiescence. The bugs do not generate essence and need not circulate it; and each can don whatever limina would serve to disguise themselves as a mortal soul. Once discovered or ready to attack, and thereby needing no illusions, their exoderm writhes to life. Any alchemist will recognize it at once as a transmutation. What maddens those who scry too closely is this is no single transmutation; the limina do not form a contingous body. No, a chrylurk's shell is coated in a kaleidescope of a myriad overlapping transmutations, like the shimmering scales forming a dragon's hide. Worse, should an alchemist try to dispel this transmutation, it will have nearly no effect. Like emptying the ocean with thimbles, the dispelling of a single transmutation is a minute diminishment at best. She sheds a single scale and another lay underneath. Make no mistake: Partitioning a transmutation so that the failure of one component does not bring down the whole is something any skilled alchemist could accomplish --- but this is subtler. Likewise, actively sustaining a transmutation, reinforcing it against dispelling, is a trick all could replicate. But if an alchemist were to coat themselves in transmuted chainmail (hardly a new idea), then their soul shall reflect that. If an attack can penetrate their armor, then it can disrupt the alchemization that sustains it, and the effect can be unraveled. Again, alchemists can project a field of extrasensory perception around themselves: so they can see that what stands before them is but an empty husk. No essential dynamo spins at the heart to bring this beast to life. The first law says emanation flows one way, and the second law says two cannot coexist. Yet here is limina: created, controlled, and cast at the same nexus. A living transmutation! Those brave and lucky enough to penetrate the mysteries of chrylurk exoderm have devised a theory. Essence comes in different forms. Alchemists augment the meager essence they naturally generate through conjunction with divine ambrosia. One part mortal, ten divine --- often more. But chrylurks infect and corrupt humans to produce a novel form of essence which they forcibly siphon. Divine ambrosia is elemental in its simplicity --- such is what gives alchemy its mathematical precision. Chrylurk essence, by contrast, is far more complex and organic in its structure. Thus, it enables a perverse geometry within the "scales" of the exoderm. Each is structured to isolate its alchemical component from the transmuted mass. Recall the image of the alchemist in transmuted armor. Now imagine a rank and file of them marching together. Each is an essence dynamo surrounded by an aegis of transmutation. Now imagine each as small as a grain of rice. The kaleidescopic hollow soul of the chrylurk arises from her at once performing a million micro-alchemies! This comes with its own drawbacks --- scaled exoderm can never mimick an alchemist's projected sensory field, nor capacity for action at a distance. But perhaps this point is moot when chrylurks can weave serivane, diaphanous strands of silk that pass ghostly through matter. Moreover, scaled exodern is simply incapable of the dynamo-circulation that grants alchemists all the power they boast. The workings of an adept alchemist can be cast with power a chrylurk physically cannot match. The same multiplicative effect that makes any impurity in a alchemists' soul a hindrance means that these millionfold micro-alchemy is simply deficient compared to that same mass circulating within a single uninterrupted field. But this also serves to explain another terrifying quality of chrylurks: their immunity to antiblight. Antiblight is a fungal disease that afflicts mortal and divine alike, and alchemists suffer its ravages so much more keenly. Antiblight can pass into an alchemical field without being dispeled, and twist the flow to the pathogen's own ends, draining energy to fuel growth. As soon as antiblight takes root in a body, its liminal spores have already circulated to every part of the soul. But chrylurks have no soul, not until they have need of one, and it ever remains finely partitioned. If infected by antiblight, the chrylurk can simply shed those scales. So what chrylurks lack in power, they gain in flexibility and security. But a comparison between alchemist and chrylurk will always be flawed, because what they do is fundamentally different. The building blocks are not the same, a