“I vowed never to let you have them.”
The air around the intruder crackles with restless, impatient energy. It’s warm and heady, like fingers drumming against my senses.
“Where are they?” she demands.
The old lady rises to her feet, her pincers extended like a weapon. “I know what you’ve got planned,” she says. “I’ll never tell you where they are, even if you kill me.”
“As you wish…”
The vision shifts. It’s pressing down on me, crushing my ribs. The old lady keeps shaking her head and saying,NO.NO. NO.
Then suddenly, all I can taste is an overwhelming sourness … and bitterness rushing up my throat. The intruder’s fingers curl around the old lady’s neck. She begins to cough, and I grab at my heart.
It’s a sharp sensation, like a blade gutting the old lady from the inside out. I can feel the air being pulled from her lungs, see darkness clouding her mind, her senses dulling to nothingness. A quiet, terrifying surrender as her soul is pulled from her body, leaving behind only cold silence. In a flicker, as if extinguishing a candle, the vision splinters.
The Soul Wraith, now cleansed through my absorbing its negative energy, dissolves, and I sit up, gasping for air.
This doesn’t make sense. The vision indicates that the old lady was strangled. Any basic tome on Emotergy would confirm that a Soul Wraith erupting in blue liquid signals death by poison. It’s one of the fundamentals – redembers for death by fire, soapy foam for suffocation or drowning, black shards for bloodshed, black mist for accidental death, and white mist for death by illness. Each dispersal is a reflection of how the victim’s soul was corrupted; a twisted echo of their final moments. I must be missing something.
My heart is in my throat, gagging me. It’s not often I’m shaken, especially during a job, but that encounter was far more intense than I bargained for.
Something wicked happened to that old lady. It was cruel and cold and inhumane. I can still taste it in my mouth. I push my hair behind my ears, and my hand comes away sticky with sweat and slime. I’m about to get up and leave when a force – something icy and relentless, stronger than any Soul Wraith – grips me. It tugs at my core, pulling me towards the floor until I’m on my hands and knees.
I blink, confused.Lingering effects from the vision, perhaps?
I’m searching for the bundle of sage when I sense it. A flicker of energy. Something on the floor, or, more accurately, under it.
I lower myself closer to the floor, peeling back the rug that covers half of the floorboard in question. It’s slightly raised at the edges, like it’s hiding a secret. My fingers slip easily under the upturned corner, and I give a gentle tug.
The floorboard resists, but only for a moment. It pops suddenly, nearly tossing me back, and there it is, in the recess beneath – a small embellished chest, like a jewellery box, covered with dust. I reach in and lift it out. A thicklayer of dust comes away on my finger, and I grimace. It must’ve been years, perhaps decades, since someone stashed it under here.
The old lady. Her husband – who must have been the killer’s brother, murdered by bandits. Are these the family heirlooms from the vision? The items the old lady refused to give up? They must be priceless if someone is willing to kill for them.
I bite my bottom lip as an all-too-familiar battle churns within me.It would be so easy… No one even knows this is here…
A part of me knows that stealing from Alaric’s clientele could be a one-way ticket to losing the only job I’ve ever been good at.
But on the flip side, I’m not being paid well for my services. Elara and I need the money. Plus, if nobody is aware that something’s been taken, can it even be called stealing? I hold my breath, caught in a tug of war with my conscience.
Eventually, the pull of temptation proves too much to ignore. I open the box. Purse my lips. I’m almost disappointed. I was expecting it to be filled to the brim with jewels, but all I see are three golden rings. Still, any one of these is probably worth more Sol than I could make in a year, if not two. And there’s something about them, an energy that makes my skin prickle.
I reach into the box. A gnawing, invasive power emanates from the first ring I touch, an eerie whisperechoing in the shadowy recesses of my mind. I recognize what I’m sensing, and my stomach rolls.
These rings are Necroseals. A Soulreaper’s relics. Soulreapers are elementals with the ability to manipulate the forces of mortality.
At school, we were taught that a Soulreaper’s reaping is more than just separating life from death. It’s a violent extraction of essence. Their power corrupts and twists, consuming one’s very being.
It makes sense now, why the Soul Wraith spewed blue liquid despite the old lady not being poisoned. And I was wrong. She hadn’t been strangled either. The old lady had been made rotten from the inside out before her life force was sucked dry. It must have been the work of a Soulreaper.
I’ve never met one. They’re rare among elementals. Most were either executed or subdued and heavily monitored after the Great Unrest several centuries ago.
The Great Unrest was a brutal civil war that ravaged the three now-united principalities, Astraloria, Wrisha and Solara, ignited by the desire to control resources. Some Soulreapers were deployed to raise armies of the dead for battle, and others to infiltrate enemy lines and drain the souls of rival soldiers while they slept. Their talents were unpredictable and volatile.
After the war, the newly formed High Council passed the Soulreaper’s Decree to oversee and regulate the practice of necromancy. Young Soulreapers are schooled and monitored at the Necronova Academy in south-westernWrisha, and any Soulreaper found to be practising their talents without sanction is banished for good.
I can’t believe the Principal Guard could have let this crime go unnoticed. Perhaps the Soulreaper responsible has already been apprehended – or they’re far craftier than anyone gives them credit for. I must remember to ask Alaric. Maybe the old couple’s family mentioned something to him.
I look back at the rings. If these really are Necroseals, they’re worth even more than I thought. My fingers plunge into the box. I help myself to two rings, one adorned with a ruby and the other a delicate light-blue moon diamond.
