Collected
Chapter 5
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Kamali was in two worlds. One, set upon a small rock formation in a sea of violet, in a foggy mist of violet, sitting beside her one companion in her fallen world. The other, a beautiful hilly meadow under a watching moon, a slight breeze tickling a body she had no ownership of. An illusion, at least at this time.
“I fear our initial meeting went all too sourly,” the Collector said, and Kamali had the phantom sensation of lips shifting with his words. “The result of our conditions at the time, the circumstances of Virala Town, and a series of other mishaps. Never mind my own mistakes. I hope to correct that.”
Kamali turned to Dahlia, and the stout red spirit gently took one of her hands. “His summons cannot be ignored,” she said. “Engage him for now, but stay wary. The Collector has his own desires, and we spirits cannot read him like we read each other.”
“You wound me, Dahlia,” Kamali heard the Collector say aloud, through his ears. “Why must my Manipulator Role make others oh so cautious of my tongue?”
Dahlia glared. So did Kamali, a glare that pierced through the illusions and past the Collector’s mask. It only humored him.
“No, no, you’ve every right to be guarded. I won’t begrudge that.” The Collector waved an arm, as if tossing away the matter. “It is custom for me to do this — Kamali, you call yourself? — that I introduce you to my mad court of souls, and explain the nature of your new life.”
“Okay?” Kamali was already questioning the whole point of this talk. “And I need to hear this from you specifically?”
“A different perspective helps to better inform others and let them rise above their biases. As you know, I am the infamous Collector, he who reaps souls to sate his own hunger, and to empower himself with the strength of many. A fairytale monster you may have heard of in your education, or from rumors. They are not wrong, of course, about my need to absorb souls — I cannot survive otherwise.”
“You didn’t take the Fervent Indulgent’s souls.”
As I said, they would sully us. Do you realize all my souls leave a collective imprint on me, that they would leave me unstable with their addition? I took what little I could leech from them, nothing more.”
The Collector’s souls could affect his state of mind. Something to remember.
“And since you’ll likely ask,” the Collector went on, “I do need to absorb souls in whole, not simply lap up their energies as I did with those of the Fervent Indulgent. You’ve not noticed, but right now I am siphoning a sliver of your soul’s energy to fuel me.”
Kamali gave Dahlia a wide-eyed stare. “Used to be worse,” groused the woman.
“Much worse, when there were only a few souls in store. The draining was torturous — too many Broken made that way.”
Try as she might, Kamali wasn’t feeling any drainage. Maybe a little prick here and there? Dahlia, she noticed, didn’t seem to hold any real ill-will toward the Collector despite her recollections. As if she didn’t blame him for being drained of so much of her lifeforce? That she only hated the fact that it happened at all?
“The more souls I hold, the more full I become, and the less I need to find new souls to absorb. The more I can passively drink, and the more stable I become,” the Collector stated. His legs folded over one another, head laid against tree bark in a rather lazy posture. “Once, I was always ravenous, always hunting for spirits, but now I only feel peckish on occasion. Past a certain point, I believe I won’t need to consume souls, and be self-sufficient without causing harm to my spirits.”
“Without harming your spirits.”
“Child, I have rules.”
Kamali suppressed the urge to joke about how the Collector obviously had Rules, same as everyone else. “Really?” she instead questioned. “The soul-eating murderer has a moral code?”
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“Must I repeat myself so much?” the Collector shot back. “I do not kill innocents—”
“Do you?” The stories of the Collector’s misdeeds sprung up in Kamali’s mind. “There’s a body count—”
“I know those tales,” came the deflection. “Those were the Collector’s earliest days, when he was a madman. No longer.”
“You let Beastmaster walk away!”
“I do not think I could defeat him.”
The madness of such a statement floored Kamali, leaving her speechless. A chorus of confused noises came from a plethora of the Collector’s souls, sane and Broken alike.
The Collector stared out into the meadows, appearing worn out just from the words he’d uttered. “Despite my large bag of tricks, child, I am but a creature of ambush. I could perhaps overwhelm Beastmaster with spirits, but I sense he is more dangerous than he lets on, and possibly prepared for such ploys. Frankly, I am too fond of life to risk my neck against an elite of the Fervent Indulgent.”
Earl himself had looked askance at the Collector, disbelieving that his strength could not compare with Beastmaster’s. A shake of his master’s head, however, and he backed down. Kamali turned to Dahlia, and she shrugged, uncertain of what the outcome would be in such a battle.
“But.” Kamali returned to the Collector, who had shut his eyes. “I do not have qualms for picking away at his underlings — convenient sources of food, even if I can only nibble at their departing souls. I worried the Beastmaster catching wind of me would ruin this, but on the contrary, it seems the sadist’s given me free rein to continue doing so.”
There was something swaying about his words. Something that made Kamali want to take his words at face-value, if not for Dahlia’s warnings making her extra cautious. Even if the Collector was crippling the Fervent Indulgent, how meaningful was it? Surely he could do more—
“But I do not do more, because I am too fond of life,” the Collector cut in, reading her thoughts. “The region fears me, but they know me as but a fairytale monster, and I am content with the peace it gives me. I do not wish to attract attention, nor to be a martyr, whom the Fervent Indulgent would chase to the ends of the earth because I killed and possibly stole the soul of Beastmaster. Never mind the other Four Horsemen, or other Calamity Walkers, or the nations of the region, all who’d seek to either use me or else eliminate me from the board.”
A part of Kamali wanted to call out the Collector as a coward. The other, begrudgingly, understood his want. The cockroach part of her, the part that hated to die. That had seen the destruction of a whole town — twice now — and refused to be amongst the casualties.
Well, she was dead, sure, but not dead. Though whether that was a good thing was another matter entirely. “So if I’m getting this straight,” Kamali said, “you don’t kill, but you let bad people kill. Then you take their leftover souls and eat them, trapping them without their consent.”
“Now we’re just going in circles,” asked the Collector, shaking his head. “Yet again, apologies mean nothing. For goodness’s sake, I know full well I am a monster, I know full well being bound to me for what may be eternity is a miserable alternative to death, but I’m trying to fix all that.”
“Are you?”
“Not enough for you, clearly, but you’ve only been here for a scant few hours. Shall we change the discussion? I’ve been meaning to speak about what I intend to do with you—”
“No,” Kamali immediately said.
“May I finish?”
“Nuh-uh. Not helping you.” In a sudden mood to spite the Collector, Kamali let herself feel her Spirit Empathy, calling upon the Rule. Then felt the presence of the Collector, swirling all around her. Considering his form and abilities, would he count—?
She tried. And raised a brow as it worked, taking in a feedback of emotions. A desire for reconciliation, for one, and a want for mutual understanding. Frustration, seemingly directed more at himself than at her. Flaying patience that was being chipped away at.
That patience waned further as she felt the emotions, pierced by a sensation of being ticked off, and Kamali couldn’t help but smirk. “Oh, what gall,” the Collector deadpanned. “Using abilities you’ve not used in oh so long just to bother me. Is this the part where I threaten you? Put you in solitary confinement, or maybe just refuse to let you leave my personal realm of souls no matter how much you beg to spend some time in the sunshine?”
Leaving the Collector’s prison wasn’t something his spirits could normally do, as far as Kamali sensed, not without his allowance. But it made Kamali think. She looked at herself briefly, a purple spirit devoid of flesh, then let herself take in her Spirit Call Rule, meant to bring forth spirits from their plane of existence. And she wondered.
The targeting would be rather simple. But it wouldn’t work, surely. And yet, when Kamali tried, she found two viable options close to her. Dahlia, and herself.
Oh.
Dahlia was contorting her lips beside her. “You needn’t needle him further, you know,” she said, before backing up as Kamali glowed, activating her Rule. “Dear, what—”
A summoner’s light infused itself with her, purple as she was. And another light layered itself on top. The light of the summoned. Something shifted, the world twisting around her—
A shove and Kamali hurtled out of the mist, out of the prison realm. She yelped as she burst out of the Collector’s body, her captor scrambling as she toppled right beside him. Some ridiculous instinct made her face phase through the tall grass blades, but her nose softly impacted the earth, thankfully.
The illusion had become real. Kamali raised her head, and it was like she had some kind of mirror-vision, her eyes making contact with the Collector’s eyes that she saw through. Earl had been quick to draw his blades, nicking Kamali’s neck. No pain, but Kamali didn’t want to risk learning if Earl did have ways to inflict actual harm on her or not.
The realization of what she’d done, the murmurs of the Collector’s many souls, the blade on her neck — it left Kamali mute, her face as stiff as the mask worn by the Collector. “Well,” he said, pulling himself upright. “First time a soul’s gotten out on her own. Now that is truly annoying.”