Vigil's Valor: 40 - Lost Souls

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I channeled a steady stream of Arcana into the urn. Pins and needles raced up and down my arms and legs as a chilly numbness invaded my body and the world faded, all the color draining away, leaving behind a dull, monochromatic landscape.

“Here, let me help you up,” Cal said, extending a hand.

I blinked and regarded the offered limb.

It was far more solid than it ever looked in the waking world. It was also inhuman. His skin was an ashen gray and long black talons extended from each one of his fingers. I slapped his hand aside and rocketed to my feet. I stumbled back, passing through the chair and partially through the door. I had a terrible moment of déjà vu when I looked down and saw my slumped form in the chair, chin resting against my chest, my fingers dipped into the open top of the urn. The last time I’d had an out of body experience like this, I’d been floating through the cosmos, staring down on my bloody corpse.

I quickly pushed away how weird all this was and returned my eyes to Cal. The monster in front of me somehow had Cal’s face, but everything else was wrong. Curling horns jutted from his head and wispy blue wings of energy floated from his back. A long lashing tail with a stinger on it trailed down from his waist. His left arm was pale gray and waxy, though otherwise human, and his right arm looked like it had come off a dead gorilla.

“What the hell are you? Where’s Cal?” I growled, reaching for my Soul Bound weapon. A glimmering golden version of my axe appeared in my outstretched hand, but it wasn’t the weapon as I knew it. Instead, it was made of pure light with a thin tendril of energy connecting to my chest.

“Sorry, you can’t summon your actual weapons here, dude. Not while you’re in the spirit, anyway. Soul Bound items have a material component—the weapon skin—and the spiritual component. Right here, right now you’re all spirit. But you can shape your spirit into different forms which is pretty badass, amiright?”

“Don’t try to distract me, dicknoddle,” I said, brandishing the axe as I sidestepped right. “Where’s Cal?”

The creature in front of me sighed. “I am Cal. When I materialized on the other side of the veil, I can choose to look however I want. So I choose to look the same way I did before I died. But this is what I really look like and, for the record, this shit is mostly your fault. I’m a being of pure Essence so feeding me all those Affinity Scales and Transformation Tokens takes a toll. They’ve made me way stronger, but they’ve also changed my nature.

“Spirits are like a cup of clean water. Clear, pure, pristine.” He lifted a hand and a glass filled with water appeared. “Feeding me scales and tokens is like taking a dirty paint brush and sticking it in the cup.” A brush, soaked with red paint appeared in his other hand. He jammed it into the cup and gave it a swirl. Brilliant crimson streaks coated the glass and twirled in the liquid. “All that foreign energy leaves a residual stain behind. This is the stain.”

He dismissed the cup and brush and gestured at his body.

“Thanks to you, I’m no longer technically classified as a human. I’m a chimera. If it’ll make you feel better, though, I can put on the ol’ meat suit.” His skin bubbled, stretched, then pulled in on itself. The Cal I knew now stood in front of me. “As much as I’d love to bullshit about Etheric Realm, we have to get moving. The longer you stay here, the greater toll it’ll take on your physical body. Right now, you’re fueling this little excursion with Arcana, but if you stay disconnected from your body for too long, it’ll start to drain your Stamina. Once that’s tapped out, it’ll suck up your life Essence until there’s nothing left.”

In front of me, a glimmering trail of dust snaked away from me and dead-ended at the far wall. “I’m guessing that’s what we’re supposed to follow?”

“Give Sherlock Holmes a gold star!” Cal said.

I flipped him the bird in reply and followed the twisting beam of dust motes to the wall then took a deep breath and stuck my head right through the side of the room. I felt the slightest tug of resistance as I passed through, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Below were the lifeless cobblestone streets of the Baker’s District. The world was gray, white, and oddly washed out. Except every once in a while, there was a glimmer of color.

A flash of purple or blue.

A sliver of green, which disappeared around a corner.

A brilliant crimson starburst in the distance, gone as quickly as it came.

A thin layer of silver mist crawled along the ground and eddied in the alleys.

Something shoved me hard from behind and I stumbled the rest of the way through the wall, arms pinwheeling to regain my balance. But I didn’t fall. I just hung there in the air, completely unsupported.

Cal emerged from the side of the building, laughing as he grabbed his sides.

“You should’ve seen your face.”

“Dick,” I said, still scanning the streets below. “It’s so empty.”

“Nope,” he shook his head. “Trust me, it only looks empty. There are all kinds of nasty turdbags hanging out down there, watching us. Stay out of the deep shadow. Avoid the mist whenever you can—lots of things like to use it for cover—and stick close to me. A couple of other things.”

He pointed toward the silvery trail snaking away into the night.

“That leads to the kid.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me back toward the building. A vibrant golden trail ran from my chest and vanished into the wall. “That goes to your body, so you shouldn’t get lost. But make sure to pay attention to your tether. It’ll start to fade over time and when it begins to look like the ghost trail we’re following, that means you’re boned and need to get back to your body ASAP. Now, without further ado, off we go!”

He wrapped one arm around my shoulders and suddenly we were flying, rushing above the city. Except, it didn’t really feel like we were flying. There was no wind whipping at my face. No scent in the air. No sense of motion at all, other than the ground zipping by below us. If anything, it felt like we were motionless and the world itself was rotating beneath us. In seconds Wildespell vanished and we were cruising over the placid harbor, peering down on huge shipping boats and high-masted schooners moored in the docks.

In the lifeless depths of the harbor waters something enormous rippled and flashed in the corner of my eye. When I tried to get a good look at whatever was down there, it was already gone.

Halfway across the harbor a silver wall, composed entirely of mist, cut the sea cleanly in half and rose into the sky, slicing through a fluffy cluster of pale white clouds.

“What is that?” I asked, studying the barrier.

“Boundary Fold,” Cal replied nonchalantly, still flying straight toward it like a cruise missile coming in hot. “The Etheric Realm isn’t like the Material Realm. Everything here is sorta disjointed. Distance and space aren’t linear. The Material Ream is like a blanket that’s all stretched out and flat. You want to move from one corner to another, you have to go across the entire blanket.

“The Etheric Realm is like if you took that same blanket and scrunched it up into a giant, messy ball. Things connect and touch in ways that don’t always make sense. That wall is a fold in the cosmic blanket and it connects one zone with another. No telling what’s on the other side until we go through. Could be the Fae Wylds. Could be Denjinn Territory. Hell it could even be a different continent.” He shrugged. “The Etheric Realm is funny like that.”

We hit the wall head on.

I fully expected to pass the same way I’d phased through the wall of brothel. Nope. It felt like having every inch of my skin flayed from my body while simultaneously being squeezed through the birth canal of a chipmunk. Even worse, when I emerged, I was coated in a layer of putrid clear slime that smelled like dog farts.

“What the shit!” I yelled, pulling away from Cal. I noticed he didn’t have any of the goo on him. He had undergone some other superficial changes. His skin was now blister red and he had cloven hooves like a goat-legged demon. The horns sticking up from his head were now made of gnarled tree branches and course white fur covered his back and shoulders. The change only lasted a second, then Cal was back, human as ever.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said. He didn’t sound even remotely sorry. “There are proper Boundary Crossings, but we didn’t have time for that. Fording your way through a fold sucks a wrinkly nut sack, which is why I didn’t say anything. ’Cause I figured you be a crybaby Sally about it. The important thing is we’re here.”

“Where the hell is here?” I asked, glancing at the utterly alien landscape stretching off into the distance.

The ground was desolate, cracked yellow hardpan. Jagged purple rocks, like the teeth of a colossal sleeping dragon jutted out of the dirt. Floating islands, defying all the known laws of gravity, dotted the sky. A sprawl of lush purple, blue, and red vegetation covered the air bound islands, transforming each into an otherworldly jungle. Unseen things and vague, shadowy shapes moved within the foliage. The sky was dark and cloudless, and a crescent thumbnail of a moon spilled weak silvery light on the earth.

“Beats the shit outta me,” Cal replied with a shrug. “I’ve never been here. Could be the Savage Expanse, maybe.” He turned, apparently confused. “But this all looks wrong. I’m getting bad feelings about this, man. And look at your tether.”

I glanced back. The cord trailing away from my back was still golden, but it looked thinnerthan it had before. Like a colored shirt sent through the wash one too many times. We couldn’t turn back now. We were close. The spell trail twisted down and into a spikey cluster of rocks not but a couple of hundred feet off. We had more than enough time to finish this.

“Who’s being the crybaby Sally now?” I asked. “Come on, we need answers and maybe that kid can tell us something we don’t already know.”

Cal grumbled for a moment before finally nodding. “Fine, but I’m telling you this is gonna blow up in our faces. Just to wait and see.”

We descended onto the dusty, hardpacked earth. Eerie green light seeped up from the deep cracks zigzagging their way across the surface. We followed the spell trail into a claustrophobic box canyon, walled in on either side by sheer rock faces. The narrow cut eventually dumped us out into a circular dead end, surrounding on all sides by more cliffs. The ghostly silver shape of a young boy sat in the middle, his knees pulled in tight, his face buried against his thighs. It was the same pose I’d seen Terrwyn use back in her room.

Even at a distance, the similarity between her and the ghostly figure was uncanny.

“Dude,” Cal whispered urgently, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me up short. “All jokes aside, I’m telling you, something is off about this. I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong, but something definitely is. This reminds me of that time outside of Ramadi. Remember? With the little girl and the goat?”

As if I could I ever forget the little girl and the goat.

That’s where we’d lost Sergeant Martin.

Our convoy had been passing through Ramadi on our way to TQ, when we came across a little girl in a black hijab with a white veil wrapped around her hair. I could see her so clearly in my mind. She’d been maybe eight or nine, her face smudged with dirt, her eyes wide with fear at the thunderous approach of our trucks and Humvees. She’d had a rope in one hand and on the other end was an ornery goat that seemed hell bent on staying in the road. I’d been manning the machine gun turret on the second truck and had a perfect view of the scene.

She’d been tugging frantically at the frayed rope, pleading with the goat to come.

He was indifferent to her pleas because he was a goat and goats are universally assholes.

Our convoy crawled to a stop, the trucks peeled off in a typical herringbone formation, .240s and .50 Cals pointing outbound. Staff Sergeant Martin was the assistant convoy commander. He dismounted from the lead truck and approached the girl slowly, hands raised to show he didn’t mean her any harm.

The insurgent shitheads hiding in the hills hadn’t been so well-intentioned.

The second Martin was in the open, an enemy sniper shot him right in the throat. The deafening crack of the gun startled the goat, who bolted into the brush. The girl followed suit. As soon as she was off the road, a remote detonated IED exploded, taking out the middle truck in our convoy. A secondary IED triggered when one of our Corpsmen, Santos, tried to retrieve Martin’s body.

We lost five Marines and a Doc that day outside Ramadi.

Cal was right. This felt the same. Sure, there was no overt sign of an ambush, but there never was if the enemy was half-competent.

“Yeah, okay,” I replied. I took a step back, away from the little boy crying silently in the moon light. My foot crunched against the dirt and immediately the boy’s head popped up, his silvery eyes fixing on me like a laser beam. He hadn’t looked up once until now.

“Where are you going, mister?” the boy asked softly. His voice buzzed like the droning of some giant bee.

I froze then licked my lips. “Is your name Brand?” I asked. As the words left my mouth, I immediately regretted them. It felt like something had just taken a giant chomp out of my soul.

“No magic, Boyd,” Cal hissed. I glanced back at tether and saw it was a faint yellow now. “You’re here in the spirit, dude. Don’t burn any Arcana. You might as well just set yourself on fire.”

Check. No magic.

“Brand,” the ghost replied as though tasting the name. “Is that who I am? Everything is so hazy in my head, mister. Maybe you can help me remember?” He unfolded his legs and stood. He had a passing resemblance with the boy from the sketch, but his body was off—the arms and legs too long to be natural. “Help me remember.” This time it wasn’t a question. It was a demand. He inched forward and the ground trembled minutely. I didn’t know what was going on here, but I knew bad news when I saw it.

“Don’t take another step, you gangly crotch goblin,” I growled while edging back toward the canyon.

“No, you can’t leave me,” the kid said, this time taking several unsteady steps toward me. A huge tremor ran through the ground and up into my legs. “I’m so hungry.”

Instead of running at me, the spectral child lurched straight up into the air as the hardpan erupted in a spray of dirt and rock. Something as big as a school bus that looked like the unholy love child of a giant toad and a deep-sea anglerfish crawled out from a smoking crater on huge, webbed feet. A hundred milky white eyes regarded me from above a cavernous mouth studded with fangs longer than my K-Bar. Protruding from above the creature’s head was a large, nearly translucent antenna and suspended from the end like bait on a fishing line was the kid.

Or rather, a glowing lump of flesh that resembled a kid.

I’d never seen one of these things before, but Renholm had told me about them while investigating the Ettersiren murders in Eastmouth. These giant frog-faced monsters were called Wil-O-Wisps, though they sure as shit weren’t the cute balls of mischievous light I’d heard about back home. These things could swallow a cow whole and had giant fleshy lures, which they could mold into deceased friends and loved ones. Then, when its unsuspecting prey wondered too close, the Wil-O-Wisp would emerge from its burrow in the earth and chow down on anything unlucky enough to be in range.

Wil-O-Wisps were grade-A nightmare fuel, and they were world-class dangerous.

More disturbing than the gaping maw, the army of eyes, or the fact that it was trying to use a kid as bait, was the thing dangling around its girthy neck. There was a silver chain, covered in sigils, with a small clay talisman attached. It was a Soul Jar.

This particular Wil-O-Wispwasn’t your average garden-variety demonic anglerfish and the ashes in the urn weren’t from Terrwyn’s son at all. This was a Mortka Remnant and the ashes were its charbroiled left overs. Someone had killed this thing, enslaved its ghostly shade, then left it here as a trap for anyone ballsy enough to come looking.

Like me.