Soulkeeper Read online

  All right. So a dragon wakes up, so big that people mistake it for a mountain. It’s pissed, and it unleashes the black water. Nice. Got it. I can work with this. But… why is it pissed? Why was it asleep? How does it command the black water? Is it its breath weapon? If so, what does the dragon represent?

  Hopefully this gives you a glimpse, at least for this writer, of the thought process for building a story and a world. It starts as neat little ideas or themes, which result in questions, whose answers lead to more possibilities and even more questions. When people ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” this is basically it. There’s no sudden individual Eureka! moment where the entire story emerges fully formed within my brain. I’m building everything out of Lego blocks, and the Legos come from movies I see, books I read, and games I play.

  As for this story, it was very close to being drastically different. When I first was plotting everything out, and then pitched it to the wonderful people at Orbit, I originally planned for there to be a two-to-three-year gap between Viciss arriving at Londheim and the rest of the book. Just… try to imagine that for a moment. At the time, I’d only written the first five chapters, so my editor responded with what basically boiled down to “We love this beginning, but um, what’s with the time skip? It’s dumb. We’re going to miss all the fun stuff.”

  Dear reader, you have no idea how happy I am I had only written the first five chapters and not the entire bloody novel following my original outline, because she was so very right. I’m often in a hurry to get to the fun stuff, but what the hell was I thinking building a storyline on the sudden reappearance of magical spells and creatures only to instantly leap ahead in time to where people have (mostly) acclimated to it all? This is why you need a good editor/reader you trust. When your head’s been lost in an entire world for over a year, it’s hard to remember how the story looks to someone exposed to it for the very first time.

  Before I write the traditional thanks, I’m going to do something a little different, and that’s talk about the dedication. For five years my brother and I operated a game store focused on card games, board games, Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and stuff like that. One of our first customers was a kid named Devin. We befriended his whole family, who became regulars at our board game nights where we insulted one another over rounds of Spyfall, Drawful, and Sheriff of Nottingham. Four years later, Devin passed away from a rare medical condition. He’d just started his first year of college.

  We were devastated. Perhaps this is too personal, but this is my book, and my little section dedicated to rambling at the back of it, so screw it. His family doesn’t know it yet, but this book is dedicated to him, and the main character is named after him. In fact, his family is likely finding out by reading this note. I know I’m not offering much, but I hope this put a smile on your faces.

  Okay. Where was I? Thanks so much to my editor, Brit Hvide, who endured long, long phone calls where I rambled ideas and scattershot thoughts much like I rambled here in this note. Without her, this book isn’t anywhere near as good. Thanks to my agent, Michael Carr, who keeps me sane. Thanks to the awesome art department at Orbit, who gave me yet another cover to be jealous of. Thanks to my new little critique group (Kat, Fiona, and Elaine in particular). Also thanks to my lovely wife, who helped immensely with developing Jacaranda into the fully fledged character that she is. The same goes to my friend Ryan, my real-life inspiration for the wonderful goofball that is Tommy.

  Last, but certainly not least, thank you, dear reader. It’s your continued support that allows me to live this dream, and so long as you’re willing to stick with me, I hope I give you characters you love and stories that entertain for many years to come. I’ll see you at the end of Ravencaller.

  DAVID DALGLISH

  June 21, 2018

  The story continues in…

  RAVENCALLER

  Keep reading for a sneak peek!

  extras

  meet the author

  Photo Credit: Myrtle Beach Photography

  DAVID DALGLISH currently lives in Myrtle Beach with his wife Samantha and his daughters Morgan, Katherine, and Alyssa. He graduated from Missouri Southern State University in 2006 with a degree in mathematics and currently spends his free time helping his oldest on her runs of Darkest Dungeon.

  if you enjoyed

  SOULKEEPER

  look out for

  RAVENCALLER

  by

  David Dalglish

  PROLOGUE

  Dierk knelt on the cold floor of his family’s cellar, the Book of Ravens in one hand and a dagger in the other, and stared at the man he’d killed. There wasn’t much to him, just sore-kissed skin and an old pair of clothes long past their prime. The blood trickling from his punctured neck somehow seemed clean compared to the rest of him. The ropes Dierk had bound around his wrists and ankles likely cost more than anything the ragged man once possessed. A single lantern hung from a hook in the center of the cellar, its soft smoke forming a minuscule cloud against the stone ceiling.

  “Oh fuck,” Dierk said before turning to the side and vomiting up his breakfast. It didn’t help him any, only left the muscles of his scrawny abdomen tight and his throat burning raw. All his well-crafted plans collapsed into disordered panic. He’d layered towels underneath the body but the blood was already so much. The smell of it mixed with feces. Sisters be damned, the man had shit himself upon dying. Was that normal? Or had he done it to spite Dierk just before the dagger pierced his throat?

  “This was a mistake,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t have, oh damn it all to the void, what have I done?”

  When he was ten he’d trapped a cat in the cellar and come back a week later armed with a knife he’d stolen from the kitchen. He’d spent hours cutting into that dead tabby, flaying off the fur, untwining muscles, and sliding guts out in long, thin loops. It wasn’t quite pleasure he’d felt, but something to the left of it. A satisfaction he’d unknowingly craved, each new cut or tear like a scratch upon an itch in his brain. The third cat he’d killed himself instead of leaving it to starve, but then…

  Well, then his father found out, and Dierk had learned to be much more careful over the following six years. Dogs, cats, squirrels, and rats, he easily disposed of in some gutter alley of Londheim’s many disgusting districts. All manner of creatures he’d bled, cut, and skinned, but never a human. Never before today.

  The ground shook, and a bottle of wine rolled off one of the racks and shattered upon the floor. Dierk screamed in surprise. That was the third quake this morning, as if the world itself were angry with his arrogance. Or maybe he overlooked the obvious. For years he’d dabbled in practices considered heretical to the tyrannical Sisters. Perhaps they had turned their eye upon him at last, and they were not pleased.

  Dierk glared at his copy of the Book of Ravens as if it were solely responsible for his current predicament. One of his father’s guards, Three-Fingers, had given it to him as a secret present on his fourteenth birthday.

  “I know about your more ugly habits,” the heavily scarred man had whispered, his breath heavy with the scent of alcohol. “This’ll give them purpose. Make it mean something.”

  It was the greatest gift Dierk had ever received, and it awakened a part of his mind he’d never realized was closed. What had been random cuts became runes and symbols. What had been sweaty silence became whispered prayers to the void. He’d cupped the severed head of a dog and pressed his lips to its forehead as he breathed in its essence during the reaping hour. Each time he felt the tantalizing call of something greater. Fleeting ephemeral lives of animals could not compare to the eternal memories of the soul.

  He was licking dew off leaves when, just outside his reach, there awaited a river.

  Three-Fingers had brought him the homeless man. He’d given him the knife. He’d looked upon him with respect and admiration Dierk had never experienced from his father.

  “When you kill him doesn’t matter,�
�� Three-Fingers had said. “The reaping hour is the true magic. That’s when you’ll finally be a true Ravencaller.”

  A true Ravencaller. The sound of it tickled his senses. He cherished the idea of his needs and impulses, always strange and discordant with society, leading him to something meaningful. A title and a purpose to remove the aching loneliness he felt when watching others his age grow their wild interlocking relationships of love, loyalty, and respect.

  But all that would come at the reaping hour, whereas right now he felt ready to lose his shit. Someone would find out, a servant most likely. This wasn’t something he could hide like a dead cat. Would he be banished from his home? All of Londheim? Or might he even be hung from the city gates and denied the dignity of a pyre?

  “Stop it, Dierk, stop it, stop it, stop it,” he cried, accompanying each request with a vicious punch to his leg. He had to get himself under control. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. Such a disgrace. Who ever heard of a Ravencaller bawling over some dead homeless man? Dierk curled his knees to his chest and rocked back and forth in the dark. The body was still bleeding despite there being an enormous pool beneath it making a mockery of the four towels he’d prepared.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late. He could come clean to his father. If he blamed the whole thing on Three-Fingers then he might have a chance. He could show him the Book of Ravens and claim it was thrust into his hands unwillingly. If… if he removed the ropes, maybe he could say the homeless man attacked him. Self-defense, you could kill in self-defense and no one would blame you, right?

  Again the ground shook. The Cradle was laughing at him.

  Cradle never laughs. Cradle is angry. Cradle is meant to be a garden, not a prison.

  Every single muscle in Dierk’s body locked up. That voice, it wasn’t his, yet it smoothly slid through his mind as familiar as his own skin. It was as peaceful as a winter morning, and just as cold.

  “Who’s there?” he asked the dark cellar.

  Suddenly the cellar was dark no more. A light manifested in the air before him, taking the slender shape of a long-bodied reptile with tiny catlike paws. Instead of scales its body rippled with soft fur akin to a rabbit’s. Though its face resembled that of a child, it bore only smooth divots where its eyes should be. From nose to tail it was barely longer than his hand.

  Human is crying, spoke this hovering being of cold light with a voice that echoed inside his skull. Human is afraid. I come. I choose. Human gives doubt to choice. I choose wrong?

  “What?” Dierk asked. He quickly wiped at his face, trying to clear away the snot and tears. “No, I’m not afraid.”

  Human is a liar.

  Its mouth didn’t move but Dierk knew it spoke. It had no eyes but he felt certain it watched him closely.

  “And who are you to call me a liar?” he asked, trying to salvage some semblance of pride.

  I am nisse.

  “Nisse?” Dierk said. “What… what are you, Nisse?”

  I am nisse as Dierk is human. I am many names. I, Vaesalaum.

  Nisse? Vaesalaum? Dierk had never heard anything of the sort. A wriggling fear in the back of his mind insisted he’d gone insane. This little creature did not hover and bob in the air in front of him. The murder had broken him. Surely this was his brain’s feeble attempt to re-create order.

  “How do you know my name?” he asked.

  Human mind is a book. I read pages.

  The creature, Vaesalaum, floated over to the cooling corpse, traversing through the air with an S-like motion with its snakelike body. Dierk’s curiosity pulled him out of his shock.

  “Why are you here, Vaesalaum?” he asked. The name clunked awkwardly off his tongue.

  I seek an answer. I seek a promise. I seek a disciple. I offer much for all three.

  “A disciple?” he wondered aloud. “And you’re to be my teacher?”

  The nisse sank lower to the ground. Its bluish light shone across the corpse, granting an unwelcome clarity to the stiffening limbs, lifeless eyes, and drying blood. The otherworldly being turned its body into a circle and settled atop the dead man’s forehead.

  Teacher. Partner. Master.

  “And why would I accept?” he asked, trying to hide the fear growing in his chest. More and more he was convinced this wasn’t some cracked creation of his mind but an actual being that existed. It shouldn’t. Monsters, faeries, and dragons weren’t real. They were stories, fables, and entertaining myths. Humanity had wisely disregarded them and moved on, except for the Sisters, which they still clung to in their naïveté. But who was he to challenge his senses? How could he deny the voice whispering in his head?

  Dierk desires what Vaesalaum offers. Dierk desired since childhood.

  A glowing symbol appeared upon the man’s forehead, carved from the touch of an invisible knife. Dierk recognized it at once. It was the inverse of the symbol of the Sisters, a circle enclosing a small, upward-turned triangle. Even wearing it as a charm or necklace could earn you a week of hard labor, for that was the symbol of the Ravencallers, and the Keeping Church had done everything in its power to banish it into oblivion.

  Come closer, Vaesalaum ordered. Do not fear.

  Light shimmered across the symbol. Dierk’s breath caught in his throat. No, it couldn’t be. It was only midday, and far from the reaping hour. That was not the light of the man’s soul shimmering into the air. That wasn’t his eternal memories and emotions licking the dark cellar air in thin weblike threads.

  Power in purpose, that cold voice spoke. Life amid death. Come breathe.

  Dierk’s feet moved of their own accord. The symbol of the Ravencallers blazed hotter and hotter into the corpse’s forehead. Silvery threads waved an inch above the charred flesh, and they were growing longer. Dierk dropped to his knees. His eyes watered. The Book of Ravens had talked much of this moment, of the sacredness of the reaping hour and the separation of the body from mortal flesh. The Soulkeepers carefully guarded humanity from that power. They buried it in rituals and masks and forced separation and distance from the weeping and the mourned.

  Dierk lowered his face to the circle formed by the nisse’s body, put his lips to the blasphemous symbol, and obeyed. Lips parting, tongue trembling, he breathed.

  The cellar turned black. The body vanished, the nisse with it. He heard no sound, and he felt no sensations, not the cool stone against his knees, not the chill, musty air. Dierk knew he should be afraid of such sudden emptiness, just as he knew it was dangerous to put his hand to a fire, but he was not. The void encapsulating him brought sudden relief from a pressure banding around his head. It was the removal of a dozen nails secretly lodged into his hands and feet. Dierk felt he belonged, this void a more welcoming presence than his pale, skinny physical body.

  The darkness parted before a sudden light. It hovered in the air, at first nothing more than a faint blue spark, but it steadily grew like well-oiled fire. Human features distinguished themselves amid the burning haze, though they never lost the cold blue shade. At last a grown man stood before Dierk, and it took him a moment to realize who it was: the homeless man he’d murdered. Unlike his previous form, his clothes were neat and prim, and his skin and hair immaculately clean.

  “Where am I?” this ghostly man asked.

  Dierk swallowed down a sharp stone in his throat. The void’s comfort threatened to break. He didn’t want to talk to this man. He sought the power of his soul. And whoever he was, how would he react if he realized who Dierk was, and remembered?

  “I don’t know,” Dierk said. “It is new to me as well.”

  The ghostly image didn’t seem too upset with the answer. He looked around, mildly curious about his apparent lack of surroundings. Before Dierk could say more, Vaesalaum shimmered into existence, the strange creature circling above the homeless man’s head like a floating crown.

  All human is, behold. I control the pages. Dierk read the words.

  A shudder ran through the man, and then he split in two, his front half cl
eaved off like a split log. The man shrieked even as his mouth elongated into an inhuman shape. Flesh peeled like smoke, and he screamed, still alive, still sentient, every piece of his essence swirling toward Dierk, and Dierk was screaming, too, screaming just as loud, just as horrified.

  A bright forest replaced the void. Dierk leaned against a tree, his arms crossed over his chest and a smile upon his face. His name was Erik. A young woman swayed in a plain brown dress before him, shaking and tapping a tambourine as she sang. The sunlight seemed to touch her blond hair in such a perfect way to make it shine like spun threads of gold. Dierk felt happiness eager to burst from his chest like an alien thing. He thought he knew what it meant to be happy, but this showed him how wrong he was. At best he understood contentedness. This was better. So much better.

  The forest shimmered, and now he made love to that same woman. His hands massaged her breasts as he kissed the woman’s pale neck, purposefully marking it with a bruise to playfully point out later. Dierk had never seen a woman naked before that wasn’t drawn in a book or painting, and the idea of having himself inside another person seemed grotesque in a way he could never verbalize… but while inhabiting Erik it felt so fucking good. Dierk wanted to push harder with his hips, he wanted to bite down until the skin broke beneath his teeth, but he was not in charge of this existence, Erik was, and Erik kept his movements slow and steady as his/their cock stiffened, harder and harder until it felt ready to burst. And then it did, and the waves of pleasure left Dierk exhausted and overwhelmed.