Soulwoven: Exile

Interlude One

Interlude One

One hundred twenty-three days before the destruction of Emeth’il

The ghost wakes up with his feet in the river. His head hurts. His heart hurts worse.

I shouldn’t be alive.

Everything in front of him looks white. Blurry shapes try to manifest in the blankness, but he cannot make them into forms he can recognize. There’s snow on his face. He knows that. The whiteness isn’t real. He knows that as well. The world should be gray. Unless it’s covered in ice. But it can’t be covered in ice because his feet are in the water.

He’s wet and cold, and he feels as if he’s been trampled upon by a mountain.

He remembers letting go. He relives the sickening lurch of his stomach and the sight of the boy’s legs receding and the shocking, permeating relief that it’s finally over.

“Ha. I didn’t think I could do it.”

He sees a black shape. The whiteness resolves into shades of gray. More of them than he can count. Other shapes emerge. A rock. A cliff. A skyline dotted with the jagged teeth of rotting mountains. The black shape comes closer.

D’Orin? thinks the ghost, but it cannot be D’Orin. D’Orin is dead. The ghost cut his head off to end it.

Except that it did not end. Everything went wrong instead, and then the ghost made a choice to die.

A choice that someone has taken away from him.

The swimming shapes become clearer. The ghost moves his feet out of the water. It hurts him greatly to do so. His legs ache, deep in the marrow. They feel as if they have been pieced together from splinters.

Given what he can remember, he considers that that may have been the case.

“Leramis?” the ghost croaks. His lips feel dry and cracked.

The black shadow walks past him, grabs his collar, and drags him away from the river over a gritty bed of wet sand. He lets it. He feels too weak to fight. Too tired to fight. He looks up and spots blond hair and the unmistakably tall and skinny shape of a human. The shadow can’t be Leramis. Leramis doesn’t have blond hair.

“Guess again,” the shadow mutters. It leans the ghost’s back against something hard and cold and sits nearby. It’s breathing heavily.

The ghost’s vision clears. He recognizes the young man sitting next to him—the piercing blue eyes, the face pinched by arrogance. The young man’s eyes are sunken. His lips are thin and close to colorless. He holds a hand to his stomach, where his necromancer’s robe is stiff with what looks like dried blood.

“You are one of them,” the ghost rasps. He cannot remember which one, but he knows it nonetheless.

The necromancer snorts and shakes his head. “Not anymore.”

The ghost wets his lips. He’s beginning to feel cold, and he wonders whether he’ll survive the night. “Why didn’t you let me die?” he whispers.

The necromancer’s eyes narrow. There is hatred in them. A great deal of it. “They tried to kill you. That means they want you dead. And anything they want, I don’t want. When I’m standing in front of them, holding their guts in my hands, I’d like them to see you and know they failed even at such a small thing.” The necromancer spits. His eyes turn white with soulweaving. The rock he has dragged the ghost against begins to heat up.

The sun is setting over the mountains. The tall, gray, angry mountains that would not take the ghost’s life, even when he offered it freely in return for another’s.

“What makes you think,” the ghost chokes out, “I will help you accomplish that?”

This necromancer had a hand, perhaps, in corrupting his son. He ought to destroy him, if he can. He attempts to stand, but his body refuses to cooperate.

The necromancer laughs. An easy laugh. The laugh of a man who believes himself untouchable.

“What makes you think,” he says with a grin, “that I’ll give you any choice?”