I was kneeling in front of the statue of Death again, back in the Turyn Temple. I was not still covered in horrible disgusting clothes. I had taken the time to change and make myself as presentable as I ever was, using the window for entrance and exit to avoid conversations about my appearance. Other than that brief stop, however, I had come straight here after discovering the bodies and telling Ehud my new theory.

The normal Peacekeeper guard force was working on getting all of the bodies out of the swamp. Ennis had been there by the time I had returned; word spread fast, and though he hadn’t known the details, he had known something was happening. He’d been grim but accepting when I told him the news. Considering how long it had been, he hadn’t expected to find his man alive.

Ehud had confirmed that some corpses had been found in the swamp and that apparently it was just a general place to find the dead. Not all the bodies in the swamp appeared to necessarily be from our targets– some of them had been dumped there after muggings or similar crimes. The burned ones, though, I felt like we could say those belonged to the kidnapping scheme in certainty.

I’d left before they had been finished, considering this was likely to be a job lasting several days, but my gut told me we had drastically underestimated the amount of disappearances there had actually been, something I probably should have counted on from the beginning. After all, it was the slums; if this many were being reported, there were probably twice as many in actuality.

So many dead. Some of them were children.

I briefly put my head in my hands, leaning forward slightly as though I were going to pitch over onto the statue’s pedestal. “Let them find comfort in your halls,” I said softly. “And help me find whoever is taking these before their time.”

Is it Dahl?

The question had been chasing me no matter how hard I tried to focus on other things. Obviously, it wasn’t the man personally. He had probably been in Isaria for the majority of them. But had he been the one behind it? Was that smug, self-righteous face calling the shots and ordering the abductions and murders of over a dozen people?

Ehud had a good question on the motive. There was no explanation as to why. But I couldn’t shake the instinct, the feeling that had been pushing me in this direction the whole time, now that I was listening to it. I could see it being something as incoherent and zealotrous as the Chantry deciding that, as the dregs of society, they should simply be exterminated. It didn’t explain the kidnappings, but a reason like that was the reason of a madman.

But there was the hangup, even in my own mind, even though I would have liked to believe it could be something so abhorrent. No matter how much I hated him, Dahl was not a madman. He had common sense, reason– he was clever, even– and he wasn’t enough of a zealot to deny me a chance to repent and recant. Someone willing to offer a Turyn a second chance wasn’t going to be the kind of person who saw the poor as purely disposable.

That would add up with the kidnappings then– he wanted them to be useful, he was going to use them for something, that was the logical course of action. But for what? It wasn’t logical if there wasn’t a goal, and Ehud was right. They already had everything.

And someday they will die and lose it all.

I jolted, so surprised I nearly bolted directly to my feet, which probably would have drawn some strange looks from the other Turyn. That wasn’t Teris’ voice, wasn’t coming from a link with something outside of myself– this voice was originating from another part of my mind, a part that stayed walled off most of the time, to give us both our privacy.

What good is the world if you lose it all in the end, your soul condemned to oblivion?

It was a paraphrasing of an old proverb of sort, but he had a point.

How does murdering homeless people give Dahl immortality?

Good question.

I scoffed quietly, keeping my head down and my voice low so that no one noticed I was apparently scoffing during prayer. You mentioned earlier that I might not be the only one with a bargain. Does Dahl have a pact?

How would I know that?

You were the one who said it! I paused, mentally glaring at him.

He gave me the distinct impression of an aloof feline, casually grooming itself without paying me any mind.

I sighed. Is there anything you can tell me? That’s helpful?

The voice actually paused, as though considering its next words very carefully. I am not present, so it is difficult for me to say anything about these actors with any certainty. I see them through your eyes and Teris’ eyes, not my own. He paused again. However, I do get the distinct impression that something is not right with Dahl.

Not right?

The same thing you noticed at the negotiation. He is unstable, but it’s more than that. He is broken.

Broken how? In what way? I tried to restrain my frustration; I hadn’t gotten this much help from my generally silent companion in years.

I don’t know. Your eyes don’t perceive that kind of thing, and Teris hasn’t gotten close enough. But he’s fractured. In a similar way to– if I were to look at your soul, it would look grafted to another. When I look at him, it looks broken. I’m afraid you’ll have to figure the rest our yourself; I have things to do.

Frankly, I’m surprised you had this much of a conversation with me.

I don’t like this, he admitted openly, speaking of the situation. I check in every so often, and when I look at him…. I don’t like it. Watch yourself. You may not be able to die, but he may be able to do to you what he’s done to himself, and I don’t imagine it would be pleasant for either of us.

And without another word, I felt the connection simply drop, as it were, and he went back behind his wall, closing the door firmly.

The ability to fracture one’s soul? I wasn’t even entirely certain what that meant.

I shook my head slightly and stood, contemplating that, when Priest came over.

“You still look troubled.”

“Have you heard anything about the disappearances in the slums?” It was a bit of a non sequitur. I knew Priest never left the temple, but I thought perhaps some of the other Turyn may have mentioned it.

“In passing. I believe Toroch lost his girlfriend a couple of months ago, near the beginning. He left the city shortly afterwards.” Priest looked quite unhappy at the memory, not that I blamed him.

“I think the Chantry is involved,” I said bluntly.

Priest swayed back slightly and then looked down and away. He thought for a long moment before looking back at me. “That is… a serious accusation. Do you have evidence?”

“It’s all circumstantial,” I admitted. “And I don’t have anything that even resembles a motive. But the facts are very strange and it’s the only thing that adds up.”

“To you.”

“To me.”

Priest thought again for a while. “I…. I do not think that saying I would be happy that the Church was doing such a thing would be accurate, but I will not deny that a part of me would be a strange and twisted kind of pleased if they should fall by their own wicked devices and justice should finally catch up to them. Still,” he was quiet for yet a moment longer. “Are you certain that your instincts are not leading you astray for your own satisfaction?”

“No. But I tried to ignore them for that very reason, and now two more people are dead and another four are missing. I don’t know that there is anything I could possibly have done to stop it, but I do know what I saw in the eyes of those who killed themselves rather than risk capture. It was devotion. And I can’t think of another to whom people around here pledge their loyalty like that. Aside from the Sisters, obviously.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Priest nodded slowly. “Despite the base pleasure it gives me, I do not like the idea of the Chantry being involved in this. Their influence is far-reaching, a horrible blight upon us as the Turyn as we have struggled to avoid them and survive. I would not and do not wish such a plight upon the rest of the world. If they have begun targeting the weak and vulnerable, if their lust for power has grown so strong and blinded them to even the fleeting remembrance of their espoused principles, that is a dark world.”

I considered that for a moment before nodding slowly. “I do not think it is the Chantry as a whole, even if I already find them to be corrupt beyond measure and worthy of dismantling.”

“A few rogue agents, then? But you seem to think the entire Ildanach Church is corrupted.”

“I think the leadership at the Ildanach Church is corrupted. I think the Bishop whom Dahl came to promote has been the leader of this enterprise.” I thought about who else may have been involved, thought about Sryes and her allowing me to read the books because I had been enjoying them. “It’s not everyone. It might not even be those Dahl came with to the city.” Although the other one, Keric, he was almost certainly involved, now that I thought about it. He wasn’t even part of the Church though.

“It sounds quite complicated,” Priest said, and the older man walked over to one of the stone ledges that we had used as benches previously, sitting.

I followed behind as he moved, noticing how difficult the actions seemed to be for him. He was getting quite old, I realized. He was aging gracefully and with hardly a complaint, but his age was indeed beginning to show. It bothered me, though I wasn’t quite sure why, watching the passage of time affect him so.

“How will you proceed, if you do not have evidence?” he asked me once he was seated.

I thought about joining him, but I was too restless, too shifty. “I’m not sure yet,” I admitted. “Carefully.” We both remained silent for a moment, and then I thought some more about the new information I had been told. “Priest...” I began slowly, “what do you know of souls?”

Priest paused, looking at me oddly. “You may need to be a bit more specific than that, son.”

I conceded that point with a slight nod. “Say that I had it on good authority that someone could… see the nature of souls, as it were,” Priest arched an eyebrow, but I just kept going, “and that person told me that someone’s soul appeared to be broken or fractured. What would you think that meant?”

“This is quite the hypothetical you’re having me go along with,” Priest said mildly. “Gods see souls, Leon.”

“Gods. Demons.” I shrugged. “Just bear with me?”

Priest sighed and thought for a moment. “I would think it meant that they had been through a great trauma. Something horrible. Something that would break a person.”

I considered that answer and tried not to scowl. “And say that that kind of thing is most definitely not the sort of information my source was trying to convey?”

Priest scowled at me. “I feel like you’re looking for me to confirm a specific answer.”

“I’m really not,” I was quick to assure. “I just know that that isn’t the answer. Remind me what the Turyn Code says about deals with demons and the such?”

“You are starting to concern me with this line of questioning.”

“I know. But remind me anyway?”

Priest sighed again, looking at me suspiciously from under his bushy eyebrows.

I smiled as innocently as I could manage.

Priest scoffed. “Very little. Death obviously does not condone being cheated of her prize. Men ought to die when they ought to die, and no later. Other than that, the subject is left fairly ambiguous.”

I frowned slightly.

“But since you are so persistent,” Priest continued, and I immediately looked up, “I will just say this now. There are legends of splitting one’s soul. Not from Turyn sources, not really even from Chantry sources. Just legends– old fables of how gods themselves came to be. Some such legends say that men divided their own souls into such tiny fragments that each death only robbed them of one piece, giving them effective immortality.”

“Did those legends mention how a soul could be split in such a way?”

“No. And I think it best that no such legend ever do say such a thing. Men are hungry fools, Leon.”

“I know, Priest,” I said quietly. “And I assure you that I have no interest in such a thing. But I think Dahl might.”

“And I think you are chasing fables and rumors,” Priest said. “Stick with the material realm, as much as possible. Aren’t the existence of Rifts enough of a foray into the beyond for you?”

I thought about the Rifts for a moment, about their swirling, burning colors of violet and black, a fire that burned flesh in an instant and went further to burning a person’s soul, according to legend. “Do you think Riftlings could have something to do with that process?”

Priest gave me another look, and I shrugged with a roguish grin.

“I’m incorrigible. This is really just curiosity though.”

“You have curiosity about unpleasant things,” Priest grumbled, shifting slightly to make himself more comfortable. “It is not well known what exactly the Rifts do to create the monsters that roam our world. Men who fall into the darkness disappear forever, bodies occasionally discovered on the edges of the cracks in the world, bones burned to pure blackness, crumbling and being blown away in the wind. Animals, somehow, seem less affected, becoming the beasts we all fear, as you are well aware. If those portals to the void have any impact whatsoever on souls, I would imagine it would be in destruction, not fracturing.”

I thought about his words and, again, what I knew. Creatures who lived near Rifts became infected by them, growing black carapaces, natural armor woven through with the crackling Rift energy itself, as though implanted with the strongest riftslivers we had ever made. They always stayed near the Rifts that made them, as though bound to them by a tether. As Rifts were fortunately immobile, this did at least grant villages some sense of security so long as they stayed far enough away and did not wander into Riftling Territory at night.

But men did not survive. And I knew what happened when they did. The answer was not the fracturing of a soul.

“What about riftslivers?”

“What about them?”

It was a fair rejoinder, and I realized I didn’t really have a more specific question. What about their impact on humans? There didn’t seem to be any; they were contained within their black rock housings, and no one had yet been stabbed with one to my knowledge. It was somewhat concerning that there was apparently a network of Rifts under the Shattered Mountains that had corrupted the stone to create them in the first place, but it was also fortunate in a way; after all, there weren’t many animals down there to become corrupted.

“Good point.”

Priest sighed, giving me a somewhat longsuffering look. “I really think it’s best you keep your nose out of this sort of thing, Leon. Nothing good can come of it.”

“I know. I’ll endeavor to do so as much as I can,” I promised. We sat for a moment longer. “Is there anything I can do for the Temple? I’ve been quite slack in–”

I cut myself off abruptly and looked at Priest.

He looked back at me, similarly alarmed.

There was a faint sound, right on the edge of our perception, seeming so far away, though I knew it wasn’t so very far. It was the sound of ringing.

I started running.

The bells were ringing. It was such a distant sound out here, muffled by trees and walls where I was within the Temple, but I had recognized the sound nevertheless. The bells in the Ildanach watchtowers were ringing, signaling alarm, some kind of attack.

I knew Priest had heard them too, and I didn’t have to explain as I simply fled.

What could it mean? Why were the bells ringing? Had there somehow been a direct assault on the Highcity? Was Ava okay? Was my team fighting without me? Was Hector?

I ran with the sort of panic and fear that had only spurred me on a few times in my life previously. The gates were closed when I reached them, somewhat expectedly, but there weren’t any guards with crossbows on the archways. I frowned at the lack of defenses. If the guards weren’t here, then the problem had to be further inside. Still, it worked to my advantage– I ran back into the forest to the side of the wall and started scaling one of the trees I knew was climbable there. I’d found it not long after moving into the City, it and several others, charting out the best escape routes and entry points from nearly every corner of the city.

It paid to be prepared.

I hit the top of the wall with a jolt from a slightly longer fall than was probably good for my knees and then started running again, across the top of the wall, down the stairs, and then I was back in the city, racing through the streets.

The middle ring was barren, shops closed and windows barred. Everyone was locked inside their homes. Dread continued to pool in my stomach, and I kept running.

The gate to the inner court was sealed as well, but this one was manned, and he opened it for me without my even having to ask.

“Captain,” he greeted, voice grim.

I realized the sound of the bells had faded; they weren’t being rung anymore. I had missed the crisis, whatever it had been.

I thought about asking the guard, but I saw Hector standing among some other troops out of the corner of my eye, near unto General Anders, so I headed over to them instead.

“Leon,” Hector said, sounding surprised to see me. “You weren’t inside?”

I blinked a few times at him. “No. I wasn’t even in the city. What happened?”

Hector’s expression fell, and he just looked at me for a moment.

“What happened?” I repeated sharply, looking from him to Garret.

Garret had a similarly dour expression on his face. “Assassins. We’re not sure where they came from. They’re dead now, but….” He paused, and I nearly shouted at him, only barely maintaining my composure.

Someone was dead, clearly. But who? More than one? Rufais? Ennis?

Finally, Garret spoke again, “Prince Callian Ildanach is dead.”