Published: September 23, 2025
Publisher: Del Rey
Series: N/A
Genre: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 1029 (Kindle)
My Rating: 5 Stars
Synopsis:
In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.
“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”
Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.
In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.
According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?
To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.
As someone who has never gotten into fanfiction, I was nonetheless intrigued by the spate of Dramione fanfics released in 2025. Alchemised intrigued me most of all because it was supposed to be this dark, yet somehow romantic revision of the Manacled fanfic. SenLinYu and Manacled were such big names that even I had heard of them in my fic-less life! It was also intimidating, coming in at over 1000 pages. I bought a copy yet continued to put it off due to the inevitable time commitment, besides what if I didn’t enjoy it and it felt like a slog? Well, finally I was brave enough to pick it up and found myself consumed by this book that only resembles Harry Potter in the faintest echoes.
Alchemised follows Helena Marino, a healer and alchemist captured and imprisoned by the faction of Necromancers led by Morrough and his Undying. She is prisoner to the worst of the worst – the High Reeve, Kaine Ferron – who has been tasked with unlocking the secrets she holds in her altered mind. Kaine is second in command and is known for his brutality, routinely executing anyone he’s told to or anyone who inconveniences him. Inexplicably, Helena finds herself drawn to him, feeling he’s the safest of the enemies surrounding her. Though Kaine is cold and by turns both cruel and unusually protective toward Helena, you soon realize he’s nearly as tortured by this situation as Helena herself. During her imprisonment, Kaine uses his necromantic abilities to try and untangle the web of Helena’s mind and therefore any secrets she may hold about remaining sympathizers to the Holdfasts who once ruled Paladia. Slowly, and with much effort and illness, Helena’s past unlocks. At long last, we learn of Helena’s true role in the Paladian civil war and what secrets she possesses.
This book is set in a world where most of those who possess magic are alchemists with affinities to different metals. There are those with alignments to darker, forbidden things like life and death. It seems that every generation or so a necromancer rises to power who must be defeated and this time it’s the grotesque Morrough. The Holdfast family, founders of the alchemy institute and the ones who sponsor Helena’s scholarship, must beat back this encroaching evil just as every Holdfast before has done. Helena and Luc Holdfast are close friends, though it seems that everyone surrounding Luc is doing their best to remind Helena that despite her skill with alchemy, she is also a vivimancer. She should be atoning for the sin of the power she was born with, despite it saving their soldiers over and over again.Though the Holdfasts are the ‘good’ guys, they sure were a bunch of privileged, holier than thou shitbags toward her. They demanded things of her that they could no one else because she seemed to think she could earn penance for existing if only she burned herself out healing and put herself in danger over and over for the cause. The necromancers might have been monstrous, but at least they didn’t sugar coat what they were all about.
For the first 20% or so of Alchemised I couldn’t quite figure out how this was going to be romantic – perhaps just Stockholm syndrome? It started off dark and kept getting darker. Fortunately, as Helena’s memories return to her, puzzle pieces start to fit together and things start making sense. I would recommend this book with my entire being, but only if you’re in a good place mentally because Alchemised is 1000 pages of war crimes and gut wrenching emotion. The list of trigger warnings is extensive and for very good reason. Despite all of this, it’s absolutely going to be one of my favorite books of the year. I loved it, though I won’t go into more details about the plot because the reveals are so essential to the whole experience. Just don’t expect a flimsy reskin of Harry Potter because I found there to be little of it left in the reading experience. Admittedly, this does have me wanting to read the original fic, Manacled, to see how it compares.
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