Soulwoven: Exile

Interlude Two

Interlude Two

Eighty-eight days before the destruction of Emeth’il

 

The ghost shivers.

He has come a long way at the side of the necromancer named Soren. They have walked alongside the river that brought him into the mountains to die. They have walked through a forest in which anyone they meet would happily kill them. They are following things that Soren can sense in the River of Souls and that the ghost cannot catch even the slightest hint of.

He has never been so passive.

Or has he?

There has been a lot of time to think, during all the walking and sitting and standing and sleeping. More time to think than there was when he was journeying the other direction, surrounded by human children for whom he cared more than he should have.

“So,” Soren begins. He is seated across a campfire from the ghost, picking the remains of a wood pigeon out of his teeth. “Why’d you do it?”

The ghost raises one of his eyebrows, and Soren sweeps his hand northward, encompassing the shadows of the forest and everything that lies behind them.

“Sacrifice yourself, I mean. For them.”

The dark cone of a volcano rises out of the forest like a broken thumb behind him, so tall that the ghost expects it will take more than a full day of climbing to reach its top. Its silhouette is riddled with horns and crevices and mysteries.

“For him, I think you mean,” the ghost replies.

Soren smiles his oily smile. “For him, then.”

The ghost shrugs. “It seemed a shame for both of us to die when one of us could live.” He has already told the story of his death to Soren. He finds he enjoys talking to the man more than he ought to.

“His life was more valuable than yours?”

The ghost frowns. “That is not what I said.”

“But it’s what you decided, isn’t it? You could have climbed up his body. Taken his place. Risked his life to save your own. But you didn’t. Why not?”

“Are you my wife now, to ask me these questions?”

The necromancer laughs. “I spent three months being chased by you and your little band of wish-they-were-heroes. I am now very much enjoying pointing out your shortcomings. Is that what your wife did?”

It was one thing he relied upon her for, but he does not need to tell Soren that.

“Come to think of it,” the necromancer continues, “what about your wife? What about your son and daughter? Did they come into it at all? Did you think about your family when you decided to die?”

The ghost’s hands, old and scarred, tighten on the ruined leather of his trousers. “I thought of one of them,” he says, quietly.

“D’Orin.”

“Yes.”

“And not the three who were living?”

“No.”

“Why?”

The question hangs between them over the campfire, turning in the light and the heat like the joint of a lamb. The ghost has no answer for it.

“You ask me,” Soren says, flicking the shard of bone he has been using for a toothpick into the woods, “if you were going to sacrifice yourself for anyone, it should have been for them.”