Chapter 1 #2
“Good. You can go,” I said with a wave of my hand.
I listened as he marched away, down into the cavern.
I paused, silently mourning for those people who would become lost, without showing it on my countenance.
It seemed to me that I should have been able to have some sort of balance.
I had to keep my emotions hidden deep within myself where no one would be the wiser about the feelings I was battling.
That was, until they read my soul. I would have to worry about that later.
I was with the soulless quite often—surrounded by them on a daily basis, and none of them were a threat.
They would be the perfect humans to be around as I navigated the recent development in my evolution: what it was like to have a soul.
Just another thing added to the lengthy list of to-dos that seemed ever growing—but I was saving the realms, right?
There would be a hundred thousand things to do.
I would have to go, myself, in a week or two to check on the other soulless.
I started a new list in my mind of what I needed to do.
I placed checking on the soulless somewhere in the middle of that list; it was important, but not the most important.
There were always dozens of things that I needed to get done.
I took one more look around the room before leaving it forever, never to return.
With a smile on my face and my brother's—no, my—soul in my pocket, I left the caves and was greeted by sunlight.
My soulless servants set up camp without complaint as I sat under the stars, counting them and charting them in my book.
The wind blew my hair over my eyes so I couldn't see my drawing.
I smiled as I moved it out of my view, looking up at the trees, which moved in the slight breeze.
I had never felt any breeze, before my time on Earth, though, not that I could recall, before my escape from the prison where I had lived for most of my life.
That wind felt like an invisible hand, caressing my skin every time it wafted, telling me that all would be well—that the Ancients were on my side.
Even that world knew that I had to do what I was doing—I had a calling.
The lady who had sent me to earth from within the Dungeons of the Mist had told me so herself.
I lay out on top of my bedroll at around three in the morning, fully dressed, dagger at the ready, after I had finished charting the last of the visible constellations in my notebook.
As I tried in vain to sleep, however, I awoke to Emma’s voice floating around me.
Her thoughts were streaming above me, as if I had opened my eyes, I would have been able to see them there, written out across the tent ceiling.
I reached for the necklace, listening to her train of thought. She was trying to calm herself down.
I can do this. The words came out, pure and clear, as if she had been standing beside me.
I could feel the emotion rising up from the words inside of her soul.
She thought that she could endure Shad’s soulless state, that she could handle the changes within him, and that she could still be with him. I couldn’t help my wondering reply.
But can you? She pushed that negative thought away immediately after it popped into her head, telling herself that it was her own doubt.
I smiled, not at the subject of our conversation, but at her own inability to control her soul.
That knowledge was useful because I had come to realize that we could communicate with each other, and that she could not keep me out.
I stared at the crystal, the melody still pulsating through it, yet radiating through me as if I were a conduit for its electricity—for the power it held.
I had touched it very little since I had stripped my brother's soul from him and placed it in that crystal, but the melody seemed to understand that it belonged to me.
If that wasn't proof that it was mine—well, I didn't know what would be proof for anyone.
I closed my eyes and lay my head back down.
I tried to sleep but was met with my brother's pleading, horror-filled eyes, along with his screams that could only come from a man in utter and complete agony—agony which I had caused. No—not me. I sat up in shock—my breaths coming out ragged, my skin glazed over with sweat. I had always thought myself so much different from Shadrict and that what my father and Tarick, the men who had caused me most of my life's sorrows, what they had done to me—made it impossible for Shadrict to even fathom who I was, and yet it was evident—there was actual tangible proof within my recovered melody that I was not the only one to know the wrath and hatred of a father—our father. I counted the beatings—the strikes from our father from Shadrict’s memory within my soul. Shadrict collapsed to the floor with the thirty-first blow. I realized, then, as Shadrict’s face lifted off the floor and a man’s face came into view, that not only were we more alike than I had ever known—but that face?
That man? I gulped, clutching my chest—knowing the intense feelings of betrayal and confusion flooding me from Shadrict’s own feelings from that memory.
We were alike, yes, only with one stark contrast—I had never received even a single beating at the hands of my own father—but he had, and it didn't seem like it was the first, or the only, time it had happened.