A barrier of tree and vine stands before me, a hundred feet tall. There’s a certain beauty to it. I’ve lived in the city my whole life, a world of beige, tan, and dun. Hardly a beautiful or safe place, but they’re colors I know and dangers I’m used to. Dark and vibrant greens, shady browns, dashes of red, yellow, blue and purple dotting the ground… these are colors I associate with danger beyond my understanding. This is the forest. This is not a land for humans, but a violent and murderous land of monsters and death.
No wonder I’m so excited. Not even the weight of my self-loathing can still the hammering heart in my chest, the mouth-watering anticipation of an unrestrained, unrestricted feast. This horrible, alien place could be my grave.
But if it’s not, it will be my paradise.
Wide lines of toxins and stone stem the tide of green, separating the forest from the fields. Hunters are far from the first vanguard against humanity’s fight with the forest: workers, often prisoners or slaves, survey the area around the fields day and night. Biomancers concoct deadly herbicides in a constant arms race against the plants that consume the poison, die from it, and feed their ever-stronger children with the sacrifice. We have to grow food somewhere, but anywhere we want to plant grain or vegetables is somewhere the forest wants to control instead. The moment I step over our desperate defenses against the encroaching green, I am in enemy territory. I don’t have a biomancer with me. Even a single mistake could spell my death. I know this, yet I don’t hesitate for a moment.
As soon as I sense them, I make my way towards a small pack of small, shivering, silver-colored souls. Blade deceivers, I recognize them as. Six-legged beasts that only come up just above my ankle, they’re a common danger to newer hunter teams. When hiding or resting, they look just like simple stones, chunks of rock on the ground that often stay still long enough for plants to grow over and around them, sometimes covering them entirely. In less than a second, however, they can unfold into a brutal collection of limbs and spikes, jagged and fully capable of ripping through leather armor plus the skin underneath it. A colony of them can climb over and tear a human to shreds in moments, inflicting so many wounds so quickly that even a team with a biomancer has no hope of healing them in time.
Our team, of course, has never had a problem with them. Penelope can wipe them out at range with her talent, and even if it comes to a fight they have no chance of getting through Norah’s armor.
Not to mention that I can simply reap them like wheat. I walk directly towards the monsters, and once I’m close all eight of them burst directly at me. They die without ever making contact. It’s a wonderful, satisfying feeling.
Now, what to do with the souls? I could just eat them and leave, but even a monster as weak as these has a soul noticeably larger than the shard I’d use to raise them. I could eat the soul, then take out a shard from myself to turn the body into what Grig called a Dreg zombie, a lifetime ago. That way, I still have a net gain in personal power. Zombies created by nothing other than one of my shards are phenomenally stupid, though. I could instead use the soul and a shard to make a zombie, which would be a much stronger and more intelligent minion but a slight loss in terms of food. The process is identical to making a Revenant, but from what I remember of Grig’s undead-type lessons, these ones would technically be Risen, not Revenants. Blade deceivers are far too simple and stupid to share a name with Revenants; an intelligent, weapon- or magic-wielding human zombie with all the power it had in life is nowhere near the same category of threat as a monster that simply retains its instincts rather than being entirely mindless.
I turn two of the blade deceivers into Risen and the other six into Dregs, just to get a handle on the difference. It’s fairly obvious and immediate: the Dregs shamble along slowly, staggering about the forest floor with a slow, awkward gait. I order one to run and it just trips. The Risen, meanwhile, move just like they had in life, scuttling about with purpose and alacrity. Hmm… they’re actually kind of cute now that I can look at them without worrying about getting my tendons slit. Their spiny bodies twist and shift in dazzling patterns, fitting together like a seamless puzzle when they curl up into their rocky camouflage. Beady little eyes stare around hungrily from underneath their round bodies, glancing about with a simplistic yet still-present intelligence. I pick one up in a gloved hand, petting a less-sharp part of its body with a single finger. The Risen deceiver squeaks happily.
I grin, and set off to slaughter a hundred more.
My horde swells, though most of it is not composed of blade deceivers. Whenever I sense souls small enough for me to rip out without a struggle, I head towards them, carving a trail of death through the forest. At this point in my hunt, I’ve amassed eighty-seven Dregs of various creatures and forty-nine Risen. It’s not even that difficult to do. The only hard parts are remembering to be careful and knowing when to stop.
If I go too deep into the forest, I will die. It’s one thing to have finally found my conviction to push myself, it’s another thing entirely to be suicidal about it. Even fodder I can slay with a thought has a chance, no matter how small, of killing me horribly. Anywhere in the forest, I’m one poison dart or bad cut away from death. It almost happened, in fact, my armor barely saving me from the needle of a creature I didn’t realize could shoot me from outside my range. I retreated instantly, sending zombies to do the job for me, but it had been startlingly close. The deeper I go, the more likely deaths like that become. Even with an army, I’m scared to fight something like the queen burrow hound.
...Or one of the Hiverock monsters. I’d bet they can still heal from eating zombies. It’s meat and a soul, same as any living thing.
At the same time, however, I can’t just stick to the safer parts of the forest. If I stay too shallow, I can’t hide my undead horde from a threat just as big: humans. I’ll be too worried about running into travelers or other hunters if I stick close to Skyhope or the road.
Eventually, I make my decision by putting the decision off for later. I’m just going to slowly head deeper until something spooks me out of my comfort zone, reaping delicious monster souls all along the way. I don’t have any real strategy for turning them into Dregs or Risen or just food, and I don’t care. It’s just so freeing. I have no need to hold back, no need to pretend to grow at a steady pace. I am here to annihilate, consume, and conquer.
It’s funny; hunter teams often have to make the difficult choice between hovering around the bodies of the things they kill and moving on; leave too fast, the common wisdom goes, and you risk having your recently-killed foes rise as zombies behind you. It’s not common, but it happens. Stick around too long, however, and the meat can draw aggressive scavengers. Obviously, my team has never once had a problem with zombies, but we often stick around and waste time because I can’t just fucking tell them that the monster souls can’t create undead after being eaten.
Everything would be so much easier if not for the damn church. It’s so annoying.
Hours pass, but I’m still going strong. I intend to keep fighting and feasting through the night, in fact. It’s too soon to go back yet. I need to get stronger. I need to eat more. I need to. Each soul I consume restores my stamina, allowing me to keep fighting to the next one, and the next one, and the next and the next… it’s exhilarating. I feel like I belong here. My sensory range swells yard by yard. Even from just a single fucking afternoon my tendrils have grown a foot in length.
I laugh, a smile splitting my face as my soul effortlessly rips through a congregation of little disciples, the betentacled monsters that nearly killed my whole team back on my first mission. I twist the lot of them into Risen. Little disciples are so much better as Risen; the Dregs slap monsters ineffectually with floppy limbs and can barely walk. The Risen climb up beasts three times their size and bite their fucking throats out.
Now made my slaves, the deadly tentacle beasts climb up me and I don’t feel a drop of fear at their touch. The zombies preen and coo, their quickly-cooling bodies happily enjoying the scratches and pats I lavish them with as their reward for death. It’s such a funny sound, I can’t help it. I laugh some more.
...When was the last time I laughed? The question halts me for a moment, snapping my mind out of the high I’ve been drunk on for the past few hours. Why am I even laughing in the first place? I’m here because Angelien is dead. I’m here because I fucked up and I have to be strong enough to make it right. This isn’t the time to be having fun. I should be training. Working.
I sigh to myself, gripping my spear and twirling a light drill with it. Right, yeah. I’ve been having fun slaughtering the smaller stuff, but what I really need is some way to deal with high magic resistance and souls out of my weight class. Rowan’s words echo in my mind, way back from when I first started training. Technique is more important than raw power. I’ve been relying on brute force to face my problems, which is nice when it works, but generally a shitty plan in the long term. How I use my talent, how familiar I am with its workings, how creative I can be with its application… that’s a vital part of strength. It’s challenging to train that area of myself, however, since I’m always afraid of being detected. Out here, alone but for my pleasantly cuddly undead swarm, I’ll have no such issues.
Thankfully, I have no shortage of ideas on where to start. Developing a way to deal with stronger, more resistant foes is certainly a difficult challenge, but I’ve recently gotten an excellent push in the right direction: the Hiverock monsters. Normally, damaging a person’s physical body has no effect on their soul energy. Hiverock monster teeth shred bits of soul, however, cutting that energy which permeates around a person’s body and trapping it in the bitten-off sections of flesh as they swallow. Normally, if you cut off a person’s hand, the soul-energy in that hand just returns to the body almost instantly. If I can figure out how to trap and steal it in chunks like those monsters, however, I can start chipping away at my target’s magic resistance every time I stab them with my spear, eventually leaving them vulnerable to a soul-yoink even if my strikes aren’t otherwise deadly.
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But how do I make an object capable of scooping up bits of souls? Souls can touch souls, Hiverock monster teeth, me, and... nothing else that I know of. Hmm… making a spearhead out of a hiverock monster’s tooth might do the trick, but I don’t have any of those. But I have plenty of me, and plenty of souls. I can put souls in inanimate objects. What if I put one in my spear? Can it really be that simple?
...It turns out to not be that simple. Surrounded by undead bodyguards I work through the night, eating one of them whenever I get tired. I eventually conclude that my theory is right; putting one of my soul shards in my spearhead is the way to go. But there’s something wrong with the shard. When I put it in the spear, it tries to make a spear-zombie, extending tendrils through the shaft and finding a grand total of zero places it’s capable of moving. I just end up with a normal spear that the Mistwatcher will likely reach up a tendril to and try to eat if I keep it around too long. I need a different kind of soul shard, one that will pull energy out from a body rather than push energy through one. I have to take my shard, take its magic… and reverse it.
I have absolutely no idea how to do this. Reverse it? A deep sensory dive into the nature of my shard reveals something frighteningly complex, yet on some level I can feel my intuition sparking, helping me start to understand. This, my talent insists, is something I am meant to do. My shards are mine. Mine to command, to shape into what I need them for. I am a manipulator not of the souls of the living, but souls beyond it. I am the queen of the broken and the dead, and it is my sovereign right to wrench my subjects into the form best suited to me.
Slowly, as night turns to day and starts to turn to night again, I start to see how my shard must shift. Now I just have to shift it. My tentacles aren’t up to the task. They are thick and powerful, made for strength and murder. I need something smaller, more subtle. Something like Capita’s threads, though I get the impression that’s not the right track of thinking. I am not a being of subtlety. So as I hold my shard in my physical hand, I simply shove power through it. It flows into the shard, through its maze-like patterns and over its surface. It’s like water filling a sponge. Or, I think with amusement, like a Nawra flowing into a brain. I hug Penta’s soul lightly in one tendril, playing briefly with her inert soul-cilia before returning my full focus to the shard.
I flex my power, and it shifts. No longer a fragment of my capacity to create, it is now a shard of my skill at destruction. Good. I place it in my spear, feeling the shard grasp ravenously around the tip, eager to rip power out of flesh to add to its own. Perfect! Time to test it.
I stand up, noticing with a shock how horribly stiff my body is. I… guess I’ve been sitting here for over a day without moving. Whoops. My stomach burbles in protest as well, which settles it. After one test, I’m heading home. I need something too strong for me to simply soul-rip, but not so strong that I’ll fucking die while fighting it. I start walking around the forest, carefully scoping out my options, and after a couple hours I detect something that I think might just be a prime target.
The soul is a jittery vibration, strong and sharp. The monster—and geez, I’m getting so used to feeling out souls I’m starting to emotion-read monsters—is nervous to the point of paranoid, and my guess as to why is pretty clear. Underneath it are about a half-dozen tiny souls, solid black like a newborn baby’s. The monster is protecting its kids.
Common wisdom says that pissing off a monster mom is a one-way trip to meeting the Watcher, but holders of common wisdom generally don’t have a hundred zombies to back them up. The problem with zombies is that, ultimately, they’re not very strong; everything I’ve killed in the forest so far is weaker than I am. When I start hunting for things outside my weight class, there’s a solid chance I’ll encounter a monster that my zombies will struggle to hurt at all. The worst-case scenario is a monster that recognizes I’m the biggest threat and doesn’t get distracted by my minions as I try to stab them. A mom protecting her babies has no such luxury, however.
My strongest zombies are probably the Risen little disciples, thanks to their speed, intelligence, and the remains of the anticoagulant venom they had in life, though that last one will eventually run out and their dead bodies won’t be able to produce more. Everything else is weaker and significantly dumber, and even the little disciples can’t understand instructions more complicated than a couple words. I want my army to circle around the mother monster’s position before we move in, but I don’t have any way to order them to do so other than bringing my whole horde around the circle and manually and ordering specific zombies to stay put. I’m not even sure why my zombies respond to verbal commands at all, but it’s the only thing that seems to work. Something to look into later. For now, the monster has to know we’re here, but as I predicted, it can’t rush at us while protecting its nest.
Once I have my minions set up, I peek out of the brush behind it to look at its body for the first time. Given the power packed into the monster’s soul, I’m surprised to find that it’s not all that much larger than a normal human. Grey, gleaming chitin covers the creature’s entire body. Two thin, blade-like back limbs and three dangerously sharp forelimbs mark the creature as a pentapede, specifically an ironshell pentapede. ...No relation to Penta herself, of course. I recognize it because it’s one of the creatures we were taught to look out for; its chitin is absurdly tough, making it an exceptionally dangerous monster to fight… but also an exceptionally valuable one. I could get a nice chunk of money if I bring this back to Skyhope.
Unfortunately, I also have zero chance of damaging it unless I jab my spear into a joint or one of the thin, black bands running along the front of its body that act as eyes. The monster has no head at all, just a compact, single-segment body with a mouth facing the ground. Its middle front leg is a devastating weapon, capable of spearing through nearly anything. As such, I probably want to avoid going for an eyeshot and stick to attacking from behind.
Right then. Let’s see if this works.
“Attack,” I order my horde.
There’s no thought and no subtlety from my zombies; they move as one, gleefully swarming towards a life to snuff out. The pentapede shrieks, standing up on its long legs in an attempt to intimidate my minions, but they of course are entirely unaffected. To my surprise, I see a huge nest underneath where the monster was laying, with many more eggs than I was expecting. Only some of them have souls. Now’s not the time to wonder why, though.
The ironshell pentapede lashes out furiously, smashing one of my Risen to a pulp. The soul inside it shatters, scattering into hundreds of tiny pieces as the body is ripped apart beyond repair. That soul can never again make a Risen, and the body will never again house a workable zombie; they’re simply too far gone. I wrinkle my nose in frustration. I’d hoped to be able to eat my horde when I’m done with them, but I won’t get the chance if they die.
I suppose I’d better get out there and start attacking, then. I move slowly towards the monster, trying to convince it that I’m less of a threat than the swarm blindly jumping at it. The pentapede is forced to stay put, however, guarding its nest with its body where it would likely otherwise overwhelm my whole army with speed and strength. Carefully, ever so carefully, I double-check that the shard is in my spear, line up a jab, and strike.
My spearhead wedges into a crack in the monster’s armor, yet barely even draws blood as the force of my attack is nowhere near enough to push further. That’s not what I’m going for, however. The shard of soul in my spearhead reaches into the wound, drinking deep of my target’s spirit before I pull the spear out and jump away from the furious Pentapede as it nearly kicks my head off. I feel it. The monster’s core is just a little bit damaged, and the shard in my spear is just a tiny bit stronger. Yes!
Little by little, I strike from the giant bug’s blind spots and damage its soul further and further. The hours spent picking an ideal target for my test were not wasted, and eventually the mother pentapede is poked enough by my soul-drinking spear that I can reach in a tentacle and kill it for good. Even forced to stand over its nest to shield its eggs, the damn monster slaughtered about three dozen zombies before ultimately succumbing. I happily eat its deliciously massive soul, along with the shard I put in my spear.
Now then… what to do with all these eggs?
I don’t know if it’s possible to domesticate an ironshell pentapede, but I bet a lot of people would pay a lot of money to try. Why do only some of them have souls, though? Are they not all fertilized? ...Well, even if I can’t sell baby pentapedes, I bet pentapede eggs are delicious. I carefully pick up one of the soulless eggs, trying to decide how many of them I can reasonably carry along with the mother’s carcass, when I feel something on the inside of the egg shake. A tap, a kick. It startles me so much that I drop the egg, jumping backwards as it splatters open on the ground.
Inside is a baby pentapede. Without warning, against the very instincts in my body, it starts to move. To my mounting horror and revulsion, the tiny, vulnerable creature uncurls itself, making wobbly, confused steps. It inhales, it coughs. It is, in every discernable way, very clearly alive… except, of course, to the screaming sense in my mind that tells me it does not have a soul. Why does it not have a soul!? How can it be alive without—
A tendril far larger than any of my own can even dream of being enters my senses, upon me before I can even push the scream from my lungs. It’s one of the seemingly infinite strands of the Mistwatcher’s will that steal the souls of the dead, pulling them down into the god’s ravenous maw. As it wraps around me I am certain that somehow it will pluck my life away at that very moment. It curls and slides around my body, bringing back an infestation of nightmares upon my mind before ultimately letting go, ignoring me, and moving to the newborn five-legged beast.
It does not take a soul, for there are no free souls here to take. I have collected what I could of my fallen zombies, and returned the soul in my spear to my body. No, this tendril possesses the opposite purpose today. It reaches inside itself, snaps, and pulls.
The Mistwatcher creates a soul shard. Black, formless, it is nearly identical to the shards in the souled eggs, nearly identical to the shard in every unborn baby. The Church says the Mistwatcher grants souls to all creatures, and I witness now it is no overly zealous boast. Placing its shard inside the newborn pentapede, the creature twitches and spasms as its new soul pushes energy in and around its body, settling into place, entwining itself so intimately with the creature that removing it without causing death is impossible. As if by design. Soon, the twitching stops, the monster resumes its activities, and the horrible weight of the Mistwatcher’s spiritual presence retreats back down through the island, intangible to all things other than souls and myself.
The Mistwatcher gave it a soul, yet the monster had been moving, acting, thinking without one. That thing had been taking its first steps, breathing its first breaths, without ever having a soul in the first place. The truth I’d thought I’d known for certain was nothing but a baseless assumption: in reality, souls are not necessary for life.
So, I’m left to wonder… what the fuck are they?