18 - BRUISES

“Hands up in the air,” the Terarch captain said, striding forward. “And then I want the both of you on the ground.”

Justinia didn’t move. “What for?”

“For slandering the name of the Autarch, who is greater than even the gods of old.”

A terrible smile slowly crawled across Justinia’s face. She stood and then, emphasizing every syllable, injecting as much venom into her voice as possible, she said, “Fuck. The. Autarch.”

The captain lunged for her.

I was still seated, heart racing, unsure what I should do. I didn’t know how to fight, but that didn’t mean I was going to just sit there and let Justinia take on four opponents on her own. I pushed out my chair, readying to stand.

Before I could, Justinia had stepped forward to meet the captain. She twisted her body and threw a violent kick aimed at his knee, her shin buckling his leg and sending him sprawling. The other three immediately charged. Motion from the other side of the bar caught my eye; Gavriel leaping over the counter, a wooden club held in both hands.

Chaos.

Shouts, grunts, limbs flying. The other patrons had all shot to their feet and now were trying to run for the door while simultaneously keeping as much distance between them and the Terarch Guard as possible. Their fear was evident—and it wasn’t that they were scared of the violence. No. They were afraid of being blamed, or being perceived as against the Guard. They were trying to avoid attention.

I could hardly blame them.

Justinia was laughing, I didn’t know why. She bent at the knees, grabbed a female Guard, and lifted her into the air. It was shocking how easy she made it look. Just how strong was she? She spun on the spot, a full revolution, and then threw the woman with enough force that, when the woman crashed on top of a nearby table, the resulting thud was sickening.

A crack as Gavriel’s club made impact with a limb. One of the guards howled as their arm was snapped. Justinia ducked beneath a punch and put all of her weight behind an uppercut that rocked her victim’s head so dramatically I worried their neck had snapped.

By the time I’d stood up and was in the midst of the chaos, two of the Guard were already down. The other two rushed Gavriel at the same time. One drew her short sword, went to stab him through the guts in an extreme escalation of force, but Gavriel caught her wrist, knocked it aside, and slammed a knee into her armored torso. For a man his age and with his wear and tear, I was surprised by his speed.

But he’d left himself open, and the other Guard, the largest of the four, was a brute of a man, tall and strong. He hit Gavriel with a left hook. Gavriel staggered, eyes rolling back into his head. The Guard roared and made to follow up on his attack, but then Justinia was behind him. She shot in for a takedown, sliding on a knee, catching the man behind his knees and wrestling him to the floor.

The scramble that followed was incomprehensible to me, but in the end, Justinia ended up on the man’s back, legs wrapped around his waist, an arm beneath his chin, squeezing the life out of his neck. He writhed, turned, tried to pry her hands away, but she’d hidden them behind him, a perfectly tranquil expression on her face.

It only took a few moments for the man to go out.

At which point Justinia worked her way up to her feet and stomped on his head.

Once. Twice. She raised her boot a third time—

“Justinia,” I said, dazed. “Wait—”

And it came down again, crushing the man’s skull.

Silence in the bar.

Justinia wiped a bead of sweat from her brow, caught my eye, and said, “What?”

“I…” I frowned down at the dead guard. Was his brain leaking out of his ears? Whatever I was going to say next was interrupted by the first of the Terarch Guard, the woman who’d been thrown into the table, as she staggered her way up and tried to run for the door.

Calmly, as though it were the most normal, casual thing in the world, Justinia bent down, scooped up Gavriel’s heavy, wooden club, and threw it.

It spun, end over end, and bounced off of the woman’s skull.

She dropped like a sack of rocks, convulsing on the ground.

Justinia stalked toward her latest victims. I swallowed hard, went across to Gavriel, who was leaning against the wall for support lest he fall over. I placed a hand on his shoulder, steadying him.

“You alright?”

“Fine, fine,” he wiped at his bloody nose, offered me a weak grin. “Did you know, young man, that there was a time when I ate shots like that for breakfast. People used to say I was impossible to put out. Honestly embarrassing that this motherfucker—” and he lurched forward to slam a boot into the body of the one who’d hit him, “managed to stagger me like that.”

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Which was about the moment I realized that I’d surrounded myself with crazy people.

This realization was further confirmed when Justinia knelt down next to the convulsing woman, produced a small punch-dagger from out of nowhere, and buried it in the guard’s throat. She twisted it around a few times for good measure, then stepped back as hot blood gushed out.

“Hey, Aurion,” she called. “I got a couple of souls for you, if you’re hungry.”

How was I even supposed to react to that?

The blood and death did not perturb me. As I’ve already said, my upbringing involved the dissection of corpses, the study of the biological workings of the human body; I was comfortable with such things.

It was the sudden violence that shocked me.

Laughing over ale one second, killing people the next.

Justinia was moving to the next guard. She repeated herself, kneeling next to him, stabbing him in the neck.

“Fucking shit,” Gavriel hissed, “it’ll take me forever to mop up all of this blood.”

“Sorry,” Justinia said. She went to a third Guard, paused, then said, “Hey, this one is already dead. Good for you.”

It wasn’t as though they were innocents. It wasn’t as though they hadn’t started it. Those are the things I told myself as I stood there, attempting to process the scene. The Terarch Guard were to blame. Worse, they were the villains, thugs and brutes who worked to enforce the oppressive laws of the state.

And yet I was forced to wonder who they’d been beneath their armor. They surely had lives outside of their positions in the Terarch Guard. Families. Friends. Wants, hopes, desires. Dreams.

All of which had come to an abrupt, bloody end, here in this bar.

And now that they were dead, there was only one logical thing for me to do.

Eat their souls.

It was my destiny. It was what I’d been born for. There was no other way to beat the Autarch, no other way to become powerful enough to stand a chance. These men and women, I told myself, were already dead, and I had not killed them. By sucking up their souls, I was at least ensuring that their deaths counted toward something. I was providing them with a purpose from beyond the grave. This adhered to the Philosophy of Death, by which all members of our Order lived our lives.

Slowly, I crossed the bar, then knelt beside the first woman Justinia had killed. Her eyes were still open, glassy orbs fixed sightlessly ahead. I touched her face. Still warm. If I hadn’t known better, I could’ve fooled myself into thinking that she was still alive.

I closed her eyes, murmured, “Go forth into the void, my child, and be at peace.”

Behind me, Gavriel and Justinia were arguing about something—how to dispose of the bodies, I think. Gavriel was worried that the patrons who had slipped out of the bar earlier might go straight to a Terarch officer and report the incident. He was urging us all to run. Justinia, however, seemed unconcerned. I attempted to block them out. What I had to do next required all of my concentration.

I focused on my breathing, silencing the rest of the world. My vision flickered, changed, reality warping until all of existence was detailed in shades of blue and gray. The dead woman was gray—or at least her body was. Trapped inside of her was opal fire, the raging flame of her soul-essence, still bright, still full of energy and potential, even without the body to provide it with a safe home.

The beauty of the soul caught me off guard.

Here, I must explain one thing about souls, which I had been taught as an acolyte amongst the Withered Isles but which, until that moment, I had not seen real evidence of in person.

All souls look—and feel—different.

For most souls, the differences are subtle; small variations in the color and intensity of the flames, a certain odour, a feel in the air around them, sometimes like static, other times reminiscent of the moments before rain. Sometimes, upon approaching the flames, one is struck with what we in the order call ghost memories, which are leftover fragments of the deceased’s consciousness.

There are other factors, other differences, but often they are so unique, so individual to the specific soul, that I could not describe them to you except on a case by case basis.

This woman’s soul was radiant.

It hurt my eyes to stare at—yet I didn’t want to look away. In the writhing of the soul’s flames, instants of the woman’s life, pieces of memory, were caught in the tendrils of flame, as though they were mirrors and now the Terarch Guard’s inner existence was being reflected back at me.

I saw her, eleven years old, playing with her older brother outside of their small, family house.

I saw her, at sixteen, sharing a first kiss with a boy who lived next door—who, only a year later, would be conscripted into the Autarch’s army and sent to die on some distant battlefield.

And I saw her, nineteen, smiling and proud as the sigil of the Terarch Guard was pinned to her chest, formally marking her a fully-fledged member of the Autarch’s own police force.

I saw her sprawled across the wooden floorboards of the bar in a pool of her own blood, still and lifeless.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

And then I ate her soul.

The tendrils of opal fire spasmed, extended, and rose toward me.

I expanded my own aura, a shudder running through me as it made contact with the soul. My own soul pulsated deep inside of me, as did those others that already existed at my centre.

Join us, they seemed to whisper. Come and join us.

Piece by piece, I sucked up her soul-essence, and I cannot lie to you: it was the greatest feeling in the world. A sense of bliss passed over me. I felt strong. Strong and fast and…alive. More alive than ever before.

Sikara. That had been the Guard’s name.

Dead and gone forever.

And yet, at the same time…

Forever a part of me.

Once a soul-eater consumed a soul, that was it—they were merged.

I saw the edges of my own aura expanding, growing in size, and subtly changing in color and texture, becoming brighter, harder, more clearly defined. My necromantic powers itched to be used.

But I could not use them, not now.

After all, there were still three more souls in the bar for me to eat.