Page 111 of To Free a Soul
“Yes, Weldir?” she answered without missing a beat, pulling a small pebble from the water. She cleaned it of sediment, found a white stone, and then tossed it behind her.
“Merikh has called out to me.”
Her head perked up at that, making one of her double braids slip over her shoulder. “What? Why?”
“I have yet to find out.” He looked between the two discs, then let his eyes linger on Merikh. “Do you wish to be there when I speak with him?”
Her head lifted to the opposite riverbank, and her lips pursed in thought. Her gaze fell, and there was deep, unshakable, and dispirited pain in her eyes.
“No,” she answered in a small voice. “I think it’s best if I don’t.” She shoved both her hands into the water and began turning over the riverbed’s sediment. “I’ll only make matters worse. It’s obvious he hates me, so if there’s a potential for you toform a relationship with him, I don’t want to be a hindrance by being there.”
She has stepped away from all our offspring.Lindiwe wasn’t as involved as she once had been.
None of them liked her presence, and she’d worked out that it had something to do with her magic. Her scent-cloaking spell, the one that protected her from being hunted, was the one they disliked the most.
But he thought it was deeper than that.
She’d been with them through every beginning stage of their lives and pestered them when they wanted to be left alone. She had good intentions. Without her teaching them, they wouldn’t be as knowledgeable about the world or able to have coherent conversations.
But it’d annoyed them.
Lindiwe had also learned that in the twenty-five years she couldn’t travel due to missing her arm, they didn’t actually need her. He’d seen the deflated way her shoulders had fallen, the dejected anguish in her gaze, how she’d looked off into his void as she’d spoken about it.
It’d been a while since she’d visited any of them, and she focused all her time on wandering the world in search of untainted souls for him.
That, and playing their fun little game where her hand went diving into naughty places and he tried catching her doing so.
“Weldir!” Merikhgrowledit this time, his arms tightening across his broad chest. “Fucking Jabez. He told me saying your name would fucking bring you here. Now I just feel like a dickhead shouting into the Veil.”
“As you wish,” he said to her, before pulling himself from his realm and into his mist within the Veil. “You called?” Weldir greeted, causing his offspring to halt his retreat.
Merikh drifted his bear skull to the side to look over his shoulder. “So it does work?”
“Indeed. A deity’s true name is a link to their conscience. It’s why we don’t often share it with mortals.” It’s why his mother was known as the Gilded Maiden, otherwise she’d be pestered by thousands of Elysian Elves.
Merikh turned around and drifted his scarred snout one way and then the other. The claw marks across his snout were likely due to the altercation he’d had with Jabez years ago when their friendship had ended abruptly, and probably violently.
“Where are you?” Merikh asked, once more folding his arms in a way that could only be described as defensive. “I refuse to talk to the air.”
“I’m on the other side of your ward. I’m incapable of being seen or interacting with this world. This is all you will get.”
That wasn’t true, but complicating it by consuming a soul to the point of destruction was unwarranted.
“I wanted to speak with you, learn who my father creator is. See what you look like, sound like, what your realm looks like and why you hide in it constantly.”
“Hiding is a strong word, and wildly inaccurate. There is little reason for me to be present on Earth when there is nothing I can do on it. I cannot even shake the tree behind me or enter your territory through your ward. I am limited to my mist and where it can reach. What point is there in attempting to interact with a world that can do little more than hear me?”
“Fair enough. I was told your power was limited. Does this mean it’s impossible for me to go to your realm?”
“No,” Weldir stated honestly, but...
In order for me to do that, I will have to create a portal.Weldir already knew he couldn’t pull his offspring to him like he could Lindiwe. He looked down at his hands and collected thephysical parts of him to them until both formed – and nothing more.Can I handle such a thing right now?
He closed them and brought his attention back to Merikh.This may be my only opportunity to heal some of the broken bond between him and Lindiwe.By giving him what he sought, would that soften Merikh’s ire towards them?
“Then take me there. I want to know what is within your so-called void.”
“It’s not that simple. I can take you to the outer edge of my realm, but if it’s Tenebris itself you seek, I will have to consume you, and it could kill you. You may become stuck there.”
