Page 2 of To Free a Soul
Although she couldn’t hear him, his bashing against the inside of his prism had managed to stir her from her deep, regenerative slumber.
“Weldir... my sweet little pool of darkness. I’m so sorry I didn’t protect you as I was supposed to, and needed you to save me.”
He pulled away from the barrier and stared at her.
I wish she would stop blaming herself.No one had known this would happen.She was only trying to protect the mortals, as is her duty.
It’s not her fault that I am merely a floating consciousness.
Weldir, in his prism, entirely lacked a form. Hewasthe darkness within it, the empty vastness of nothing. A being whose shroud of consciousness ate all the light. He couldn’t touch himself, see himself. He could be heard, but his voice was too quiet, like the echoing in the back of someone’s mind.
In reality, his prism of whatever fucking shape was made of a crystal so pure it looked like glass. Inside it should have been penetrable to the eye, and had it been anyone else, they would have been seated inside it and able to wave to the outside world.
No. He filled it like a storm of clouds, and his roars and growls were merely a squeaky thunder she couldjustperceive.
It’d been that way forElvendecades.
From the very moment he’d been born and his consciousness had tried to absorb anything and everything. From the Elven world she rested inside of, to the other deities he’d consumed until not even a fragment of them survived. His cloud had eaten his many fathers, his brothers, his sisters, and even one of the three pinnacle deities – an uncle, one of the triplets.
All that remained was her, one of his potential fathers, and Rökul – an uncle. His grandparents, long forgotten, no longer existed within this plane of life and hadn’t for a long time. The god in charge of death had made her own realm to be with the many dead, but she was a recluse and preferred the quiet.
They all doubted she knew what had happened to her fellow deities, or it was possible she cared so little that she still hadn’t returned. Mayhap it was even fear that Weldir would break from his prism and consume her as well that kept her at bay all these decades.
She must know,he often thought.Those eaten by the Daekura will have told her.
And the Daekura were the very reason as to why Weldir was the way he was. When he looked up at the Gilded Maiden, who no longer shed ethereal golden tears, the Daekura were also the reason for her frail state.
He couldn’t ignore his hand in all this, despite the fact that he’d been prematurely born, disorientated, and incapable of controlling his mist. He’d just greeted the world, malformed and too soon.
He remembered nothing of when she tried to aid the Daekura by giving them fully evolved forms. He’d been told the tale of how she’d taken the darkness that housed their bodies andcaused their hunger, so they could live normal Elven lives like she could sense they were supposed to.
She wanted to love them and bring them into her heart, like all the Elysian Elves who lived within Nyl’theria.
His mother, the Gilded Maiden, could never have known how chaotic that darkness was. She was supposed to be immortal, with nearly infinite mana to offer, with power so strong and magnificent that no other could compare.
Yet it infected her. It festered within the well of her mana pool and drained it away from her very bloodstream.
Within the heartbeat it’d taken for it to reach Weldir, his unborn body had nurtured her in return as a means of survival. He took that darkness, consumed it himself untilhebecame the void, the death, theevilthat it was, and made it his own.
But Almethrandra, his mother, couldn’t hold that kind of chaotic energy. She couldn’t heal through it, siphon it out, or fix it. Her body gave up, vomiting black goop from the pit of her immortal soul. Golden tears had run black, and anything they touched melted and sickened.
Her womb couldn’t hold him as he roiled and toiled under the broken power he’d absorbed. He had left the safety she providedviolently.
What followed was him reaching out to anything and everything for stability in an attempt to find a physical form when his own transcended space and reality. It wanted to house something or be the centre of something, and yet nothing he touched offered salvation.
When the crystal cage surrounding him had locked in tight, and he’d stared down at his uncle Rökul, the god’s lavender skin had paled, the blue of his hair dull as he’d writhed on the ground, gaunt, thin, with his mana and lifeblood half eaten. Just a few seconds longer, and he, too, may have been consumed in Weldir’s birthing frenzy.
The first thing he remembered afterwards was Almethrandra’s shaking hands holding his prism as she limped around, only to collapse. Weldir had bounced – he didn’t know how far – into a corner of the room and underneath something. It’d been an exceptionally long time before he’d been retrieved and placed within Leyfr’s vermillion mending vines alongside his mother.
Silence had been his life from then on.
Until memories played around him. A life he didn’t know nor understand, singing, dancing, and movement all around him.
It took him too long to realise they were Almethrandra’s, and even longer to understand that it was knowledge about her, their realm, and sometimes even the lives of Elysians in their parallel mortal world.
When she’d had very little to give, she’d played them for him when he’d bashed against his prison, and had wept as she did – just as she did now. But her lucidity was infrequent and short, and already he could see her eyelids waning against the tiredness.
“Hurry up and collect your essence, so that I may hold you one day,”she whispered with an exhausted sniffle.
