Soulkeeper Read online

  “Jacaranda. She’s been shot.”

  Adria had meant since she’d been submerged within the blue liquid, but now she understood her brother’s sudden urgency. The terrible sorrow on his face added to her growing clarity.

  “Take me to her.”

  He offered her his arm and she accepted it gladly. Her body felt strangely foreign to her, and she needed his firm presence to keep herself balanced as she set her bare feet upon the floor. Devin guided her to the living room. She did her best not to stare as she walked. That light in his eyes, leaking from his lips, shimmering within his skull… it was almost blinding.

  Jacaranda’s body lay on the couch. A trail of blood led from the door to the center cushion, and a pool of it grew underneath her, sticky and dark. Adria knew the moment she laid eyes upon her that Jacaranda’s life was spent.

  “Devin, I’m sorry,” she said. “She’s already dead.”

  Devin refused to listen. He was stammering and punctuating his every word with weird tics and hand motions.

  “Your prayers,” he insisted. “Your miracles, they… they can help her. Try, Adria, please. I’m begging you.”

  Her resistance withered under his red-eyed pleading. She’d suspected Jacaranda had become important to her brother, but now she saw just how much. Adria separated from Devin and walked on wobbly legs to the couch. She knelt and put a hand on the open wound in Jacaranda’s chest. Her eyes closed.

  “Lyra of the beloved sun,” she whispered. “Hear my prayer.”

  The rest of the 36th Devotion came to her, but she did not voice it. The words echoed in her heart, and she saw with her eyes the power they wielded. The devotion sent reverberations across a supernatural world bound together by physical constraints. It wouldn’t be enough, though, she knew that. Jacaranda’s soul had already begun the extraction process upon her body’s death. Curing the flesh, even if she could, would not save her from the reaping hour.

  But perhaps there was another way…

  “The man who shot her,” she asked. “Is that his body outside?”

  Devin glanced at the half-open door to the home, baffled. He’d not told her of the man’s presence. She hoped the urgency of the situation would keep him from asking how she knew.

  “It is,” Devin said. “Why?”

  “Bring him to me.”

  Her brother looked reluctant to leave Jacaranda’s side, and only her deadly serious glare finally hurried him out the door. He returned moments later with the dead man slung over his shoulder. Copious amounts of blood stained his coat and trousers.

  “Where do you want him?” he asked.

  “On the floor.”

  Devin set him down near the door. Panic licked the edges of every action her brother took. Adria knew he was struggling to keep himself together. His desperate hope that she might heal Jacaranda was the only thing keeping him from breaking apart completely.

  Adria knelt beside the mercenary’s body and put her hand on his smooth forehead. Her skin burned as if she touched fire. Her nervousness intensified her twisting stomach and pounding heart. She closed her eyes, and even then she was not granted complete darkness. Stars blazed across her vision.

  “Devin, I know what Janus did to me,” she said.

  Her brother seemed to sense the gathering power. His voice dropped to a low, cautious volume.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What did he do?”

  In answer, Adria curled her fingers, raised her arm, and pulled the soul free of the dead man’s forehead. Its light lit the room, now in a physical sense beyond the mystical. Adria stared deep into its center, and it felt like falling. This man (Tye, she knew instantly) lay bare before her, all his memories and emotions wrapping about her like a warm sweater. She could feel the polished wood and cold steel of his rifle as he sighted for one of a hundred kills. She could feel the sting of sweat in her eyes, feel the burn in her muscles from his days of training, experience his selfish elation whenever he took a woman to bed.

  That soul, that singular universe of thoughts, sensations, ideas, and emotions, was now hers to command. The spiritual collection burned with power. Adria pointed to Jacaranda with her free hand. The words of the prayers… they mattered, but only as guidance. They focused the wild storm of energy. They gave substance to desire. Adria knew this with absolute certainty, like a great mystery had been pulled from her mind, a thick curtain of ignorance given way to bare truth.

  “Precious Lyra,” she said. “Heal this woman.”

  Devin would not see it, but she did with sight granted by the strange machinery hidden beneath Londheim. Thin tendrils of Tye’s soul streaked out like cast-off ropes. They mended flesh with a touch. They reset the pierced organs and replaced the lost blood. Tye’s soul faded the tiniest sliver as it expended its power. Pieces of memories jumbled or blurred. Adria gritted her teeth, frightened by how easy this all was. She walked to Jacaranda’s body, carrying Tye’s soul with her. The flesh was mending, but there was still one key act remaining. Jacaranda’s soul looked like a jittery firefly trapped within a jar. She gripped it with her other hand, soothing it, calming it. Power flowed from Tye’s soul into her, and she redirected it into Jacaranda’s.

  Little tendrils so thin they looked like spiderwebs spread throughout Jacaranda’s body, giving it life and light. They took hold, anchoring her soul, making the connections to permanently absorb the emotions and memories that the mind would forget with time. It was like witnessing a flower blooming in spring, and it conveyed the same immense satisfaction. This anchoring was what had been missing when she prayed over poor Arleen in the marketplace, but back then she’d been blind to the process. Now she saw. Now she commanded. A single, unseen jolt swirled through Jacaranda’s physical form. She gasped in a deep breath of air as she lurched to a sit. Devin clutched her immediately, holding her against his chest as he sobbed with relief.

  “Thank you, Sisters,” he said as his tears bathed Jacaranda’s neck. “Thank you, thank you.”

  For her part, Jacaranda looked only tired and confused. She slumped in Devin’s arms, accepting his embrace as she closed her eyes and relaxed. Adria turned her attention to the soul hovering just above her palm. She fell back into its center. Tye’s memories folded, shifted, and reopened to her slightest whim.

  Show me your kills, she thought.

  One by one they flashed over her eyes, her mind living them as if they were her own memories, her own actions, even her own emotions at the time she pulled the trigger. Adria watched men, women, and children fall dead from perfectly aimed shots to their chests and foreheads. She watched skulls cave in. She watched sprays of blood cover walls, streets, and grass. Tye’s satisfaction swelled in her belly. His enjoyment at the kill put bile in her throat. This man. This monster. He viewed life like such a cheap, inconsequential thing. She saw Jacaranda fall. She felt Tye’s elation at fulfilling his promise. She felt his smug amusement at witnessing Devin’s suffering.

  Adria pulled free. She stared at the soul in front of her, this embodiment of existence, this white fire. An intense rage threatened to overwhelm her judgment. What good was this man? For what reason should he entertain an audience before the Sisters? Her fingers shook. She wanted to smash the soul to pieces. She wanted to rip into its core and send those hateful memories and emotions scattering to the void. Let her, not Anwyn, play the role of the reaper.

  The rage passed. She was too exhausted to maintain it for long.

  “Be gone,” she whispered to it. “Find your judgment at the hands of the Sisters.”

  No shimmering blue light. No need for runes and rituals or waiting for the reaping hour. A simple flick of her wrist and the soul shot through the ceiling to the heavens, to become part of whatever mysteries lay at the end of their earthly days.

  With the soul’s departure her mind steadily cooled like a sword pulled from a furnace and thrust into water. A thundering wave of fear replaced it. This power, this startling vision of the spiritual world—for what
purpose was it given? She noticed Devin watching her. She could not read his physical expression, but that no longer limited her. The light of his soul swam over him, and she needed only to brush it with her mind to see the fear and confusion swirling through her brother with equal intensity.

  “Not yet,” she said, sensing his many questions. There was one last thing she must do. Adria put her hand to her chest. The almost imperceptible soul-threads throughout her body latched to her hand, and it took only the tiniest shred of strength, like a drop of water drawn from a lake, to send light rolling off her fingertips in waves. Tye’s body burst into white flames, burning so hot even his bones turned to ash. Adria watched this empty shell void of light be consumed, and given the horrid sins of its soul, she could not imagine a more appropriate fate. No pyre. No burial. Just ash.

  “Adria?” She turned. Devin stared at her with calm, controlled horror. She noticed that Puffy had poked its head up from the fireplace, those beady black eyes vibrating with worry. Tesmarie also stirred from her little pillowed perch, and she held her blanket to her chin as she stared. All of them, so terrified for her, for what she’d become. She didn’t blame them.

  “What did Janus do to you?” her older brother asked.

  The answer seemed so simple compared to the implications.

  “The reaping hour and its rituals,” Adria said. “I have become them. I am the prayers. I am the burial mask.”

  She clenched her fist, her sheer will scattering the gray pile of ash that had been Tye the White.

  “I am the pyre.”

  EPILOGUE

  Janus stood before the mouth of the crawling mountain as it split open with the roar of an earthquake. From afar the change would be imperceptible, the gap a mere ten feet or so, but from so close Janus could see the vast cavernous darkness within. Starlight reflected off clear quartz teeth the size of buildings. Black water rolled between the teeth and fell to the grass like an encroaching fog.

  Minutes later a star-filled shadow exited between the teeth and floated to the ground.

  “They’ve begun stealing your power again,” Janus grumbled to the demigod.

  “It is no theft when the power is granted freely,” Viciss said. “We are embodiments, not jailers.”

  “Perhaps you should reconsider your roles, then. A Soulkeeper somehow harnessed Aethos’s power into his pistol. Nearly took my damn head off.”

  Viciss glanced behind him. The titanic jaws closed with another earth-shaking rumble.

  “We’ve returned for mere weeks and already humanity shows its ingenuity. Our imprisonment led to their stagnation. The Sisters’ decisions are not the best for even their own children, as we have always known. Such a pity they had to endure these centuries, their race’s evolution locked in stasis until we broke from the prison the Sisters locked us within.”

  Despite re-creating the destroyed flesh and bone, an ache lingered inside Janus’s chest and shoulder. Magical wounds were always significantly harder for him to recover from, and the pain combined with the frustration of losing the fight added to the bite of his words.

  “Yes, let us pity them and not we who were imprisoned for centuries. Truly they are the ones who suffered the worst.”

  “Suffering is not a competition,” the demigod said. “Tame your tongue or I shall render it useless.”

  Janus bowed low, quick to apologize after Viciss’s earlier threats at the Hive-Tree.

  “Forgive my frustrations. I have come to inform you that the process completed as you desired, though the damage to the chamber afterward will require time to repair before it can be used again.”

  It seemed the swirling galaxies that made up Viciss’s form shone just a little bit brighter as he gestured to Janus.

  “Then follow me, child. There are others who must know.”

  The mind of the dragon walked west. Janus fell into step behind him and silently followed. They slowly circumvented the mountainous physical representation of the dragon, which had steadily sunk into the soft earth with each passing day. Janus marveled at its intricate construction. The outer skin was gray rock weathered by the ages, but the interior was a mixture of flesh, metal, and stone. Otherworldly magic pulsed like blood in tunnel-veins. Cascades of muscles stronger than the hardest steel flexed and shifted for hundreds of feet whenever the dragon wished to move one of its legs.

  Such a shame Viciss did not desire Londheim’s destruction. Watching the crawling mountain smash through its walls and lay waste to its buildings would be a spectacle grander than anything the Cradle had witnessed in all its history.

  Hours passed. Sometimes they followed the man-made road, sometimes they skirted the edge of the miles-long crevice that marked the dragon’s progress as it had crawled from its prison within Alma’s Crown to the edge of Londheim. The two traveled in silence. There was a strange mystery to the air. The world was holding its breath. Enormous owls passed overhead, on their way for another nightly hunt upon Londheim’s streets. Other times fog elementals danced runes across the stars, conveying messages of praise and glory to the demigod who passed underneath.

  Several families of foxkin had built their homes in the tremendous crevice miles out from Londheim, and they wordlessly hurried out of their mud-and-stick huts to climb up to the grass. They pushed their red-furred faces to the ground and lifted their arms above their heads in praise. All two dozen or so howled in the same deep tone. Janus had not been among foxkin often, but he had heard that growl before, and it was their deepest offering of love and obedience, usually reserved between mates in their private quarters.

  Viciss stopped for only a single step so he might bow his head their way in appreciation. The gesture put a worm of ill content inside Janus’s stomach. Not once in his existence had the demigod shown him that modicum of adoration. Created to destroy, yet hated for the destruction. If only Viciss had denied him sentience. If he had been as indifferent as a meteor or a hurricane perhaps then he’d be spared the deep-seated resentment for the damage he caused.

  The land became rolling hills as another hour passed, and though nothing appeared to mark this one hill as different from the others, Viciss shifted their path and led them toward its top. The demigod ascended, but Janus could not bring himself to follow. He dropped to his knees halfway there upon seeing who awaited their arrival. His heart thundered in his chest. His breath caught in his throat. With trembling arms, he raised his open palms high above his head and bowed in supplication to the five Dragons of Creation.

  Human eyes would see them likewise as human, but Janus perceived their deeper truth. Viciss, a shifting darkness of ever-flowing black water. Chyron, a silver scar of light surrounded by an orange whirlwind of ethereal sand that winked in and out of existence. Gloam, composed of one hundred fluttering fireflies, little streaks of electricity arcing between them as they blinked in and out of view. Aethos, a black cloud filled with a maelstrom of pure energy that somehow manifested as ice, lightning, and fire simultaneously. Nihil was a humanoid distortion, as if all light and noise about him were pulled inside and warped in strange, unknowable ways. The grass at his feet slid upward and streaked amid his legs like liquid. The night wind became tangible strings that weaved through Nihil’s chest and exited as the sound of falling rain.

  All of Janus’s bitterness and resentment disintegrated. Such a meeting between all five dragons was rare even in the earliest days of creation. To bear witness here, now, was a tremendous gift. Tears fell from his eyes. He felt blessed to bask in their presence. He felt privileged to witness a gathering that would shape the course of history.

  “Greetings, brethren,” Viciss said. The other four nodded deeply.

  “Is it done?” Aethos asked.

  Viciss lifted his arms to the heavens. His voice echoed for miles in all directions, his message not just for the dragons but for all their children. When the Keeping Church collapsed, and a new religion was built upon the ruins, it would be these words that began its holy text.
/>   “It is done,” Viciss decreed. “The Chainbreaker lives.”

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  So here we are, perhaps for the first time for some of you, and yet again for a whole lot of you. I make no promises that the following ramble will be interesting, but it’s fun to finally sit back and unwind at the very end of a project and just… talk about it. I wrote the first chapter all the way back in September 2016, so it’s been a lengthy journey here.

  So this entire novel came from a rather odd spot of inspiration. I was taking a walk while listening to music (generally my preferred way to brainstorm) and a song by the band Clutch was playing, “The Swollen Goat.” The chorus line in particular struck me with its imagery:

  Bury your treasure, burn your crops,

  Black water rising and it ain’t gonna stop.

  Now, the song is about pirates, but when I first heard it I imagined it quite literally: people hiding their valuables, burning their fields, and fleeing a rising tide of black water. But why burn the fields, I wondered. Well, the black water must do something horrible to them, something worse than becoming mere ash.

  And that’s where the very first inspiration for this massive book came from. The idea that somewhere, in some small town, a sudden flood of black water arrives, destroying even the grass itself and turning it into a dangerous corruption. If it corrupted the grass, what then must it do to buildings? Humans? The dead? Side note, there’s also a bit about swollen goats in the song, and sadly I ended up cutting the encounter where Devin fought a bunch of mutated zombie goats with swollen stomachs. Odds are pretty high I’ll be bringing them into book two, though. They were too fun and disgusting to abandon entirely.

  Now as fun as the initial idea is, I was missing a rather key part of the story, that is, everything else. The biggest, though, was what caused the black water? I tossed around ideas until I settled on something I’d been itching to do for a while: dragons. Not mere drakes that humans could ride. Not even big ancient ones like Smaug. No, I wanted huge dragons. Impossibly sized dragons. Years ago on a walk (seriously, music plus lots of time doing nothing are so important to writing) I saw a cloud that stretched across the horizon shaped, I thought, like a dragon. It looked like it floated there, the size of a city and visible for hundreds of miles, awesome and incredible. Perhaps this novel could be my chance to do something remotely resembling it in terms of scale.