It was deep in the night when the horrors of men came out to play and horrific men donned their true faces, ready to play. About a stone’s throw away from a sleepy little town was a solitary hill atop which a dead tree stood, topped by five branches that bent and twisted in the moonlight like the fingers of a witch. Under the tree’s roots, hidden within a mist that never seemed to dissipate even on the hottest, driest days, was the mouth of a cave. It was said that only those that had been there could lead others into it.
The cavern veiled by the mist was dark, humid and smelt of damp moss, and the flickering orange light of dim candles upped the sinister vibe of the lonely place. The shadows cast by the candles seemed to claw into the craggy walls as if in an effort to escape the cavern’s depths. Yet, even their foreboding appearance could not beat the macabre picture of a gaunt, naked girl tied down onto an altar still slick with blood from the previous sacrifice.
Her name was Janet, and her desperate efforts to escape the roughly woven blood-soaked ropes that tied her down made the frantic shadows appear slovenly and unmotivated.
The girl turned her head frantically in all directions, with all her might trying to find a way to escape her fate. Her eyes were met by suspiciously sooty candles that smelled of burnt fat, a long, slanted slab of rock that served as the altar, and the wet blood that was stuck to its surface. There also were sharp-edged, cruel-looking runes etched upon the stone that lit up with a sinister glow whenever the candlelight struck them.
In every way she looked at it, this was a place of death. Janet couldn’t help the primal, fearful scream that tore out of her throat.
All around her, the cult danced, hollered and chanted as they anointed the faces of their cloaked forms in a red liquid whose consistency was reminiscent of congealed blood. To Janet, the scene just cemented the sense of her imminent doom in her mind. Exhausted from her futile attempt at escaping, she withdrew into the safety of her thoughts and contemplated how she’d come to be here, moments away from meeting her cruel, unfeeling maker.
To begin with, she was an orphan. She had either been abandoned at birth, or had become parentless by some other tragic happening early on in life, as neither her nor anyone she had dared ask about her parentage could do much but speculate. That wasn’t even the worst part. For some blasted reason, the magics of the world had seen fit to skip her as they apportioned their bounty. Every single person in the whole stinking world at least could rile up a breeze or spark a candle alight with their mana at age three. Janet couldn’t even create a ripple in a glass of water or disturb a granule of earth with her mana.
In all aspects of magic, elemental or otherwise, she was utterly talentless.
Her life had thus been an endless struggle to scrounge, steal and beg for every morsel of nourishment to keep herself alive. Magic and power were everything in her world, and she possessed very little of either.
When times were good, she had a job as a mistreated scullery maid in one of her town’s seediest inns, which was unfortunately where she had met Uncle Marius. He was a handsome, heavily-built man who had used his prowess with the element of shadow and its magics and capabilities to carve himself a tidy fortune. He had been kind to her. The same man was currently standing at the fore of the gathering of cultists brandishing a curved dagger that glinted ominously in the candlelight.
In streets that would trample upon a blameless kitten for meowing at the wrong pitch, Uncle Marius had offered Janet a serving of food for her growling stomach and a drink for her chapped lips after a long day of scrubbing and scuffing. He had then bought her a change of clothes, claiming that the ones she had on were too old and worn, and had even invited her to a party with an affable smile.
Janet’s paranoia towards strange men had been plied apart by Marius’ unheard-of display of kindness, and she had accepted.
Now, it appeared that her naivete had come back to bite her in her wobbly bits. There was no party. At least, not for Janet. She had been looking forward to the free food so touted to exist at parties, but it looked more and more like she would be the meal here.
As thoughts of Janet’s sorry fate clouded her already dark outlook, a lull came over the cavern as the writhing and gyrating bodies gathered into orderly concentric circles around the struggling girl. At the altar’s head, Uncle Marius still stood with the dagger in hand, his eyes carefully scrutinizing his prize. A few tense seconds of silence later, he nodded his head once in acceptance, which caused some cultists to let out a relieved breath.
Thus, the final part of the ceremony began. Uncle Marius chanted an incantation under his breath which lit up formerly invisible runes on the dagger’s blade and handle. His followers cheered in unison as without preamble, he plunged the instrument of death into the girl’s sternum with a terrible squelching sound that concluded with the resounding crack of ribs.
Then, there was silence. Everyone: Uncle Marius, Janet, every single cultist, even the muted murmur of the candles, ceased for an instant. The moment of truth had arrived – the sole purpose for the cult’s existence, the caverns, and perhaps even Janet herself.
Every single variable had been perfectly accounted for. Everything that could be controlled had been. With one glaring misalignment: Janet. She had been labelled a squib – the derogatory term for a magicless person – since her birth. Nobody knew exactly when that had been, but most associated her orphaned status with the assumption that her parents had chosen to rid themselves of the disappointment of raising a squib.
They all were dead wrong. Only Janet knew that she possessed a magic of her own. A terrible, dark and twisted magic that was perhaps the most powerful in the world, maybe even in the whole stinking universe itself. But the very fact that it was terrible, even to her naïve interpretations, had stayed her tongue from speaking out even as mocking words were slung her way.
She bore the insults with grace, accepted that she would starve when the harvests were lean and would work till her hands bled when they were lush, all because she feared the very thing that was about to happen would get discovered and jeopardize the safety from persecution that her anonymity afforded her.
The picture of a girl sputtering out her last breaths as her pallid skin lost all color did not happen. Instead, a thud reverberated through the silence. A cultist had fallen to their death, with no apparent cause whatsoever. And yet, the cultists still held their breaths in the anticipation that the girl would breathe her last at any moment, and their infernal ceremony would be a success.
That anticipation held until the sanguine glow of the dagger’s runes petered out, then the girl’s torn flesh began to knit itself, slowly pushing out the blade. Finally, with a wet, spattering cough that sprayed out the blood that had leaked into her lungs, Janet cried out tearfully, “Please let me go! I don’t… I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
The thick pall of silence over the cavern intensified. Cowled faces painted in caking blood shifted about in confusion as feet shuffled uneasily. Yet, it was the shining eyes of Marius that took the cake. His smile had transformed into a sneer of greed, and his elemental manifestation, the shadow, roiled with enthusiasm and anticipation.
“I won’t tell anyone you tried to eat me. I swear!” Janet tried to plead. “I’ll… I’ll even leave town.”
Lakewood, named for the jungle it bordered, was and had been Janet’s home since she gained knowledge of what home was. She loved it here. The going was tough, the people even tougher and meaner, but it was all she knew. And yet she would gladly give it all up just for another chance at anonymity. She knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that she would not survive the notoriety the truth about her would engender.
Uncle Marius ignored the desperate pleas. In fact, he made the point to lick the slickness off of the dagger before he plunged it once more into the girl’s heart, and once again the wound, the shattered bones, and the pierced skin repaired themselves at a speed visible to the naked eye. Then, undeterred, the cult leader stabbed the dagger into Janet’s heart a third time.
This time there were two thuds, both echoing throughout the cavern. The same acoustics that had harmonized the voices and moans of the cultists delivered the sound of the heavy falls straight into the hearts and minds of everyone present. The silence that followed them was deafening, particularly when combined with the uneasy glances between terrified cultists.
“I don’t want to kill any more people,” Janet cried out after the sound of the third cultist’s death.
More silence followed her words, to be broken after a brief instant by the frantic stampede of terrified cultists as they tried to escape. Most people could watch passively as untold horrors were visited unto others if there was zero chance of the same happening to them. When the tables were turned, however, and now faced with the threat of instant retribution in the form of actual death, even the most stalwart of hearts skipped a beat.
Every single cultist began a harried, frightened run towards the exits, hoping they would not be the next to fall. And Marius was having none of that.
Word around town was that Marius could command shadows as if they were an extension of his limbs. What happened next proved that to be an extreme understatement. The sound of feet pounding on rock in a frantic hurry suddenly ceased.
A blink of an eye later, the escaping cultists, one and all, were encased in a cocoon of shadow that anchored them to the ground. Only their heads had been left free to move as their torsos and limbs squirmed fruitlessly. There was no indication of a spell being cast, or even a scream or grunt from the cultist. Just the chilling whisper of velvety shadow encasing everyone in their own shroud.
“This one appears harder to kill than anticipated, but our mission still stands, my brothers and sisters. Another shall have to take her place tonight.”
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With that sinister announcement, one of the cocoons was dragged forward, its occupant squirming and whimpering for all he was worth. “Gerald, you were a virgin, were you not?”
“Uncle Marius, stop! Please don’t kill anyone else.”
The plea went unheeded as Janet’s bonds of rope were undone with a smooth gesture and she was wrapped neck-to-toe in slimy, liquid shadow that near cut off her air supply with how tight it fit around her abdomen. The material shadow squeezed he ribcage just tight enough that she could not fill her lungs to scream.
“Shut up! I’ll deal with you later,” Marius commanded.
A struggling bundle of cloth and shadow was then strapped onto the altar, taking the position Janet had occupied moments before. Rather than rely on the squirming cocoons that were his cult, Marius let loose with a solo chant that grated the ear and felt ominous to all other senses. As the final syllables were uttered, the dagger once more lit up with reddish runes, ready and set to pierce the virgin boy’s heart.
Janet just could not stand the sight. She closed her eyes and forcefully kept them shut.
While the pain of the stabbing dagger had been uncomfortable to experience, she was used to pain. Living on the streets of a town that bordered a jungle was a hardy game. And with no magic to her name, she had had to scrounge and tussle against beast and person for every bite of food to sustain her life. Broken ribs, shattered femurs, even a torn-off face, she had braved through more pain than most ever would in their lifetimes.
This, though… just standing by as one another person was murdered in her sight, and in her stead, was unimaginable and grated on her values and principles. She had never stood idle when hounds harassed her favorite stray cat that sometimes brought her dinner in the form of her surplus rats, or buried her head when unruly street children beat on the smaller kids. She would not stand idly by this time either.
Before she could conceive of a plan to rescue the sorry boy however, the blade descended unimpeded through the boy’s sternum. Unlike in her case, death was instantaneous after the heart was perforated. Gerald didn’t cough, or whimper, or groan in pain. He just stilled and went slack as death took him. The instantaneous nature of the death might just have been the most unnerving thing Janet had ever experienced.
She snarled with fury, fully giving in to the wrath and vengeance that had been simmering deep under her apathy and helplessness as her torture had carried on. She would not allow herself to meet a similar fate, and would try her damnedest to make sure nobody else ever would again.
She did choose to remain logical and calculating in her resolve, however, even as the runic dagger began glowing a deep purple and the other cultists reluctantly joined Marius in his chant, their voices joining into a throaty chorus of fell prayer and dreadful worship. As the cult continued with their profane ceremony, the gears in Janet’s mind turned as any and every option open to her was considered and discarded.
Janet needed a plan that would allow her to survive. She could easily kill Marius, but the other cultists would escape in the aftermath. After all, it was the cult leader’s magic that was keeping his followers from fleeing. On the other hand, she could surreptitiously kill the rest of the cultists, seeing as they were all immobilized and incapable of defending themselves, but that would leave her drained and almost certainly incapable of dispatching her main foe.
To underline the importance of every single person in that cavern dying that very night, now that the cultists were aware of her affliction, any one of them escaping would mean that the entire town would soon know of her magic, and the similarity of her abilities with those of the most feared person to have walked the world in recent memory – the Demon. Such news would certainly lead to a manhunt, and that would definitely lead to her death, just as it had led to the Demon’s.
The Demon had been powerful, could use a magic that annihilated souls, and was unimaginably skilled in spellcraft and other schools of magic besides. And yet, that potent of a force had been hunted to death. Janet, frail and feeble as she was, could not allow word of her capability to spread.
The plan she came up with was simple, yet as cruel as only a desperate person could ever come up with. The trigger for her life-sapping talent was the hunger that arose when she was injured, so all she had to do was marshal her hunger, and direct it towards Marius. Maybe if she succeeded, she could usurp his talent as the Demon – whom she suspected had been her father – had been rumored to do, and maybe use it to keep the cultists in check.
With a calm mind and controlled intention, all while hoping that the cult would keep at their prayers just a bit longer, Janet bit out her tongue in one forceful motion and inhaled it into her trachea, blocking off her airways with both blood and flesh. Suffocation never led to instantaneous death, and the pain almost blanked out her mind, but it was the gravest injury Janet could inflict upon herself while tied down. Unimaginable pain coursing through her body, she gritted her teeth and awaited the dreaded hunger.
As always, it began as a visceral dampening of all other emotions, other than unfettered, unstifled, uncontainable hunger. She had learned, when her pet rats kept dying each time she got a scrape, to direct her senses towards the object she desired to steal away life force from, be that a lonely tree or the occasional overfed rich idiot. Sometimes, they even survived relatively unscathed!
This time, though, she desired not to just steal some lifeforce to top herself off, but to usurp all of it. She wanted, just as the Demon had been storied to do, to steal Marius’ soul in its entirety, then hopefully devour it and subsume his magical [Talent] into herself. To accomplish that, she needed to control her own ability to the best of her capability, which meant she needed come as close to death as possible.
First, Janet lost awareness of her surroundings, her eyes slowly closing as her brain became starved of life-sustaining oxygen. The second bit was her life awareness, as she called it, coming awake. All around her were glowing balls of energy, from a quickly-dwindling one that had to be Gerald’s quickly dissipating soul, to a shadow-wrapped monstrosity beside it that had to be Marius’s dark soul. As always, a person’s magical alignment, their [Talent], was represented in how their soul manifested, with Marius being wrapped in bands of shadow. Had he been a skilled fire user, she was certain there would have been flames around the floating ball.
Now, how would one swallow an entire soul? She needed to digest it in its entirety to extract those all-so-useful shadow tentacles, but this was the first time ever Janet has consciously deployed her own [Talent]. Most times, all she had had to do was direct her ‘eyes’ while in this disembodied towards the ball of lifeforce she intended to steal from, and her magic took care of the rest.
The idea came to her in an epiphanic realization, like a divine revelation. All she had to do was swallow. And so, just as she had learned and had heard mentioned numerous times about magic being a matter of will and intent and very little to do with power, she willed herself to swallow the ball of shadows.
Unfortunately, her gullet was a mite too tiny.
All that happened was that she glopped her rather tiny, elastic band of a stretchy soul onto his humongous monstrosity. She had hoped to engulf it like an amoeba would a food particle, thus effectively swallowing it, but it seemed she was still too puny to manage such a feat. Swallowing Marius whole was all but impossible.
Yet, Janet did not despair. She was not even certain she could feel anything but voracious hunger and the all-devouring bottomless void that was her tiny soul. All she wanted to do was to consume, and she would find a way to do that, whatever it took.
The option that she went with was informed by her instinct. If a single, wholesome gulp was impossible, then she would take bite-sized chunks off of the cruel man, then digest them as fast as she could.
With a gusto reminiscent of a starved hound let upon a carcass, Janet pounced upon the shadow-draped ball of energy. First, she sunk metaphorical hooks at the point where she had draped herself, ensuring that she would remain attached to the giant ball of nourishment. Then, she took a bite.
To Janet’s utter surprise, there was no sensation of teeth sinking into crunchy matter. She did not know why, but her thinking had been that it would feel like biting into an apple, or a pear. Rather, it felt like she had pricked into a balloon filled with lifeforce.
All that was in the soul was formless energy, and all of it flowed from the tiny prick into her ready maw in an endless deluge, forcing Janet to direct most of her intent to ensuring swift digestion, so she wasn’t overwhelmed, or worse, ruptured by the massive amount of soul-stuff that was steadily funneling into her soul.
A second, more miniscule sliver of will went into ensuring her maw remained glued to Marius’ soul, so she could gobble up all of him, down to the last drop. She wanted to ensure that all that made him up was subsumed into herself, so she’d have a chance of replicating what his magic had been capable of. Not a shred of his soul would be granted an escape.
So, Janet held on with a stalwart will and steel-like steadfastness as she slurped up energies beyond reckoning.
In the waking world, the cult was utterly terrified when their leader began to howl like a stuck pig. His shadows unraveled and tore at the edges, then stutteringly reformed as he reasserted his control through the pain. Janet, of course, was insensate. All her attention was focused on devouring her torturer, leaving her body limp and unresponsive. She missed the opportunity to witness the effect of her magic on Marius, utterly oblivious that having one’s soul sucked out like water through a straw was maddeningly excruciating.
The cult could have escaped during all the commotion. The shadow could not hold them any longer. But since the light had disappeared from their sacrificial dagger at the same time that their leader began to howl, added onto the fact that the sacrifice had been substituted with one of their own after their collective failure to find a suitable offering, it was perfectly understandable that the superstitious bunch fell back to old habits, assuming their god to be angry at them.
In unison, as in the manner of unthinking, terrified creatures, they fell to their knees and held brow to rocky cavern floor, all hoping to be spared of their god’s wrath even as their captor’s strength flagged and his restraining shadows dissipated, his cries quieting down to a bare whimper, then utter silence.
Marius’ body fell with a thud onto the cold, hard ground as three before him had, splattering the blood that had just poured from the altar onto dozens of bent backs and the face of one slowly rousing naked girl.
In Janet’s case, the devouring had gone down flawlessly. Marius had been consumed whole, shadow bits and bright bits in one go. This was evidenced by the wounds from her self-injury having been healed by the donation of lifeforce from Marius. As if to announce her return to the world of the living, she began to cough. This helped push out the blood and bitten-off organ parts she had inhaled, freeing her airways.
As for the cultists, the other current occupants of the cavern, they all were trembling in fear, too afraid to even lift their heads. Janet was however not fooled by their meek act. Any moment now, one of them would break out of their reverie, once more beginning a stampede of harried footsteps as they escaped back into town to spread tell of her miraculous survival and of their leader’s death.
That just could not be allowed to happen.
Without hesitation, she tried flexing her magical muscles in an attempt to constrain them in cocoons of shadow just as Marius had done, so she could dispatch them one by one. It was in this attempt that she came upon the biggest snag in her plan. For one, her magic, if she could even call it that, entailed the consumption of souls. After eating Marius’ however, she was full, miles past the point of satiation. She could not eat another speck of soul even if she tried, meaning that she would have to kill the rest of the cultists through physical violence, a method in which she was less than adept.
The second snag… she had no idea how to manipulate shadow. Ostensibly, she now possessed Marius’s prowess with the element, or rather the potential to grow to his level of mastery after years upon years of dedicated practice.
In her current state, however, Janet did not have the first clue how someone could control the intangible absence of light into tendrils, or even more mind-bogglingly, how to dislodge a shadow from its place behind the light and object that cast it and move it with just the exertion of one’s will, while maintaining its form and qualities, magical and otherwise. All that escaped her, not to mention the added complexity of imbuing it with the capability to effect tangible, physical force upon matter.
Fuck! Was all she could articulate out of her muddled thoughts as the reality of her precarious situation dawned on her.