Page 3 of To Free a Soul
He growled at that.
He had no idea how to do such a thing!Do you think I have not tried? My efforts are for naught!Yet rather than focusing on escaping once more, he turned his endeavours inwards.
He pulled at the cloudy, fraying edges of his conscience. He sucked, he yanked, he pushed and pushed to no avail, as he’d done the years before and would continue to do for the years to come.
He ate at himself, and coughed himself up. He eclipsed himself, and shadowed what he could. He bubbled, boiled, and frothed in the darkness of his own vastly empty self.
All the while, she slept peacefully and shared dreams that always sat at the very edge of his periphery. He chased those sounds, those images, as much as himself, his mist and cloud circling and circling,rumblingandrolling,until...
He didn’t know whether it was yesterday or tomorrow that it happened.
Much like the Daekura, with their glossy void-black bodies, something formed. It was transparent, ghostly, and gave the impression that nothing else was inside him except essence.
After so long, Weldir couldn’t help staring in awe at the only part of him he’d ever created.
A spectral, shadowy, pitch-black right hand.
In that same moment, he realised his stomach held another place, a realm somewhere outside of himself – and just as trapped within his prism.
October 9th, 1830
The soft candlelight illuminated a well-polished Blackbutt desk scattered with an array of thickly bound leather books. Its orange radiance shone along the thin nib of a feathered quill pen, and the glass vial of ink refracted just enough to cast an orb of muted light against the pages of an open journal.
Bookshelves situated against every wall gave the room a musty aroma. The scent tingled her sinuses, occasionally making her nose wiggle as she tried to ignore the irritation mixing with the pleasant frankincense that wafted from every nook and cranny of this temple. The wooden floor was cold, allowing a draft to creep underneath the skirt of her long robes, ensuring she shivered.
Lindiwe straightened and sat back from the book to glance at the dying fireplace safely tucked away from all the flammable material. With just a twitch of her face, a shadowy tentacle glittering with sand formed.
The magical limb curled around a log of dried firewood and gently placed it atop the smouldering embers. New flames lickedat its fibres, and before long, the chill in the air subsided.
She was able to concentrate on her studies peacefully.
Autumn cooled this part of the world. Snow collected upon the windowsill in front of her, partially obscuring the view from the tower in which she sat. The creeping shadows of late night made it even harder to ascertain the outside world, but the strategic sprinkling of firelight glowed a path to a stronghold opposing this temple.
Guild members trained well into the evening tonight, and she only watched in pensive thought or to relax her tiring eyes. They were there, and she was here in a different stronghold, but it often seemed like her current life swayed and pulled between both.
It’d been that way for eighteen years.
The length of time passing may have been long and strenuous for humans, with their finite number of years, but for her... it was merely a time which she spent in the northwest of Unerica, a country so large it only outsized Austrális by a fraction. Although she’d been staying in this city for that long, she’d been living in Unerica for over twice that. She could be here for another eighteen years, and it wouldn’t matter to her as someone undying.
She’d given birth in Unerica two times already and had let her monstrous children roam free to hunt Demons. After spending a year or so with each of them, guiding them to make sure they didn’t drown before they knew better, or helping them against predators, there was no reason to visit them when they were mindless and easy to enrage.
Once they understood life, she returned to hole up in this large city, studying and training as if the minutes ticking by didn’t matter. It had long become a hobby she threw herself into with tenacity and unbending will.
Slipping the shaft of the quill from its ink, she waited for the excess to drip back into the bottle before scribbling down a note in her journal. Lindiwe copied the words from the temple book, so she had the knowledge for her own safekeeping.
This journal was one of many she owned, which were scattered between her room within this stronghold, and the world she’d only visited fleetingly in the past eighteen years to create life. A place of beautiful nothingness, of comforting weightlessness; somewhere so vast it could hold all the knowledge she wished to retain without the evidence of time withering it away.
Somewhere in the ether, she had her own library. Most of it was filled with books she’d scribbled her notes into, many taken from dilapidated buildings before they could be fully destroyed.
Her haven. And her home, considering she still lacked one in the real, living world.
After slipping her quill back into the ink jar, she raised her arms above her head and stretched to relieve the tension from slouching over the table like a prawn. She tilted her head to the left until the muscles in her neck screamed in protest, then moved it the opposite way before arching over the book in front of her once more.
“Hello, Lindiwe,”a familiar, depravedly decadent voice rumbled in the back of her mind.
Her youthful features, still twenty-two and unageing, twitched in surprise before falling into a nondescript, unbothered expression.
“Hello, spirit of the void,” she answered.
