Chapter 38: Deus ex Anima
Chapter 38: Deus ex Anima
Every human I have ever felt has a core to their soul. While I have the vague insight that souls are more than their apparent shapes, the space in which a human’s soul resides is always more or less a sphere. Their soul’s energy may permeate around the inside of their body, but the soul itself, the part they will leave once they die, is a sphere.
Mine used to be, but now it is more. Its false shell shattered, my soul twitches and stretches, tendrils of power reaching out from its core of blue. A long black strip, tapered at the top and bottom, splits down through its center like a cat’s pupil. An eye, eternally unblinking. The tentacles extruding from the center writhe and whip as they expand to their full length, passing through and in and out of my body as they please.
No… as I please. They are me. I am me. My body is mine, my soul is also mine, and I move them independently from each other however I choose. With my new eye, my true eye, I see far more clearly. Still looking down, it witnesses a second Mistwatcher, one of seemingly infinite tendrils and mouths, which interposes itself on the first. Invisible to everyone else, it gnashes and swallows as thousands, millions, billions of hungry tendrils reach up into the countless islands, greedily stealing the fruits of a hard-fought life and pulling them down into its untold maws.
It’s beautiful.
Gladra grabs the collar of my gambeson and yanks me backwards, pulling me away from both the ledge and my thoughts.
“Woah now, you almost fell off there,” she says. “That’s why you never look down on your own, all right? We lose some good people to that every year.”
My soul roils, the inner eye twisting to glare at her before I come to my senses. Had I been about to fall…? Yes, I had. I didn’t even notice. My body, under Penta’s guidance, was moving to crawl off the ledge.
“S-sorry,” Penta stammers, both to Gladra and myself. “I-I don’t k-know what came over me, there.”
“Yeah, that’s how it is, isn’t it?” Gladra agrees. “I know it’s hard, but never stare at the Mistwatcher for too long, okay? It’s dangerous. Besides, we wouldn’t want it to stare back.”
I snap my head her way, reasserting control from Penta. Oh no, did I do something bad?
“That’s a joke, kid,” Gladra clarifies, grinning. “The Mistwatcher doesn’t look at mere mortals like us.”
“Um, but… it did,” I tell her, still stunned from the event.
Gladra’s aura, which had been calm until this point, flares to life, her inner flames clawing at my being.
“Are you sure?” she demands, a seriousness to her voice I have never heard before.
“Y-yes,” I squeak. There’s nothing I have ever been more sure of. It saw me. It knew me.
Gladra swallows, turning towards the edge, her hands moving in a blur. She leans over, looking out over the drop.
“Run,” she orders.
“W-what?” I sputter.
“I fucking said—!” an unseen hand grips me, hurling me with extreme force back towards the wagon. Gladra lifts off the ground, flying after.
“RUN!” she roars at the Templars. “Inland! NOW! Someone grab the biomancer!”
I sail past the wagon and land hard on the ground, rolling to avoid damage as best I can. Something crunches on impact anyway, but I have no time to worry about it. The Templars are already sprinting my way, Dasil leaping into the back of a wagon and tossing a startled Penelope over his shoulder before abandoning it entirely. At first I think they’re all coming to get me, but none of them have their weapons drawn. They are not charging at something. They are running away.
Gladra, still flying, picks up and hurls any stragglers forward. I don’t want to go on the kineticist express again, and apparently neither does Penta. She seizes control of my legs and sends me sprinting in the same direction. We rush off the road, fleeing towards the forest, of all places. Whatever’s coming must be even worse.
As Penta races away, I twist my soul around, a blue eye of my own matching the red promise of death which beheld me from below. I watch behind as Penta and my body keep their eyes forward, the movement of souls and their glorious energies echoing off of every living thing.
“INCOMING!” Gladra roars, turning around mid-flight.
Despite my soul-sight, I see and feel nothing until an explosion knocks me off my feet, pain screaming through my body as everything suddenly goes silent. Stone shrapnel tears through my armor as for the second time in less than a minute I find myself tumbling through the air, trying to land with some semblance of either dignity or intact limbs. Penta immediately tries to get up and run again, but everything feels wrong; we only stumble and fall once more. Glancing behind us, I see something from much closer than I ever want to see it again.
A fully corporeal tendril of the Mistwatcher, fifty yards thick, has reached up and torn through the side of the island up to where I had been staring less than thirty seconds ago. That whole section of land, including our wagon and a good part of the road, are completely obliterated. Chunks of rock from the tentacle’s impact are still falling, and even now the monstrous appendage flails around its impact point, blindly grabbing for something. It feels as though the whole island shakes whenever it scrapes more stone away from the land like it’s butter on bread.
Gladra stands in front of us, a shimmering mirage-like barrier emitting from her hands. Wayward earth that hits the barrier briefly glows red and seems to disintegrate into a rising smoke. I try to say something, but no noise escapes my mouth. From the blood I feel running out my ears, perhaps I’m simply deaf.
For a few more seconds, the tendril’s rage continues. Then, back down it goes, returning to the mists and leaving our island just a little bit lighter. The dust settles soon after, and Penelope rushes around fixing up the Templars. I absentmindedly note that two of them are dead.
I start to laugh. Which is kind of funny, so I start to laugh even harder. I’m terrified, of course, and in horrible pain. A piece of rock has torn right through my gambeson and taken a chunk out of my arm. If it had been just a few inches in another direction, I would have been one of the dead. Other than that, though? I feel fucking amazing.
I’ve literally been trying to move while bound and see while blindfolded. Everything is so much clearer now, I can sense from so far away! I whip my tendrils around, though they pass through everything but souls and my own body… unless I want them to pass through my body. I find Penta huddling in terror inside my neck. I giggle some more, wrapping her up and cuddling her soul. It’s okay, Penta! She’s so bubbly and squishy, yet now I see she has tiny, tiny soul tendrils of her own starting to grow! How cute!
I reach more tendrils out towards the two delicious, dead Templar souls. One, red and springy, tasting like sugarcane. The other soft like fur, smelling of a warm fire on a windy day. I bet I could pick them up without having to go physically grab them! So much easier, although my tendrils are only a few feet long as of right now. I can’t quite reach! Oh well. I will keep growing. I’ll go grab my prizes soon. For now, I’m just so happy to be free!
I lie spread-eagle on the ground, twisting my tendrils every which-way as I stare up at the sky. Penelope eventually makes her way to me, putting her hands around my ears and sending magic into my body. My hearing soon returns. I just laugh some more and continue playing with Penta’s adorable little soul-cilia, twiddling and flicking them as her body shivers.
“S-stop it,” she chokes desperately.
“Stop healing you?” Penelope asks, raising an eyebrow.
I snap out of it, pulling my tendrils away.
“N-no! Sorry, I was just… sorry,” I answer. “Thank you, Penelope.”
“Mmm-hmm. Let me see your arm.”
I do just that, struggling a bit with moving my physical body and spirit tendrils without mixing the two. It’s so odd, yet it feels so right. Penelope grabs my arm and goes about repairing it. None of the Templars argue with her or bother her when she walks right past the person next to me and heals someone else. They may not be able to sense the dead like I can, but they know what that means.
Ahh, I can move, I can move! How have I never known? An ache that I’ve felt my whole life is finally over! I feel so much lighter! I—
“Hey,” Fredrik growls. “What the fuck are you grinning about, kid?”
Grinning…? Oh, I guess I’ve gone back to smiling, huh? A lot of Templars are glaring at me. Dasil, Gladra, the others whose names I don’t know… they’ve just lost two of their friends. We’ve also lost our cart, a good chunk of the road, part of the island itself, and more of us would have died if Penelope hadn’t been there to patch up as many of the mortally wounded as she no doubt has. We’re in the aftermath of a complete disaster, and I’m… grinning. I force my smile to drop. This is not the time.
“Sorry,” I murmur quickly. “Just… adrenaline. I didn’t mean to—”
Like a cat’s claw swiping at an errant insect, an intangible tendril whips through the two spiritual morsels I left behind, the appendage perceived only by my now-hatched soul. As it passes through the first of its two targets, the soul shatters, chunks of once-person scattering around as only the largest piece is heeded by the eldritch tongue. It takes that bit, and the second soul in full, and drags them back down to nothing…
I no longer have to force the look of terror on my face.
“…Sorry,” I repeat again, more quietly.
I glance towards the shattered soul shards. I didn’t expect the Mistwatcher to just… break someone like that. Is there no afterlife at all? Is it really just eating them? What does that mean for me? What do I do with the shards now? Does the Mistwatcher eventually collect them, even though it missed the shard the first time? It sure ate my shard out of Rosco, the bastard. Not that it was in question before, but I think I’ve decided I pretty firmly don’t like God.
To my surprise, the shards start to float ever so slowly back towards their body. Huh. I watch them sink down little by little, wondering if they were just falling under the island on their own… right up until they start growing little strands.
Oh boy. That’s about to become a zombie. I get up and stagger ever so slightly towards the body, reaching out with my tendrils to snatch those soul shards right up. The least I can do here is stop the Templars from having to suffer through attacking their own recently-killed friends.
“Hannes. Artemis. May you rest peacefully in the Watcher’s clutches.”
Templar Dasil murmurs these words softly as he grabs the bodies, dragging them to the side.
“Gladra, could you…?”
“Of course I can,” she snaps, her shimmering barrier dissipating. With a few flicks of her fingers, she incinerates the corpses, leaving nothing but ash in seconds. “Only two, huh?”
“Yes. Lady Vesuvius managed to save everyone else,” Dasil confirms. “High Templar, do you know what caused this…?”
I see him shaking. The normally calm pool of his soul is trembling with fury. All the living Templars grieve their fallen comrades. I didn’t know them, really, so I struggle to do the same. People die.
“You know what, I think I do,” Gladra answers icily, and I suddenly feel that unseen hand yank my neck, pulling me off the ground and into her gauntleted grasp. Startled, I struggle, my legs kicking at the air as her soul threatens to burn me alive. My tendrils twist and my soul shrieks in pain and fear.
“God doesn’t seem to like this one,” she hisses.