Page 93 of To Free a Soul
“I don’t care! You brought us into this world and then abandoned us in it. To ferrysouls.”
“That’s not true. I’ve always tried to be there.”
“And yet you weren’t!”
Before Lindiwe could utter another word, Merikh roared, his orbs darkened into a nightmarish red, and he shifted into his more monstrous form. He attacked her ghostly body, and nothing she said to try to console him worked.
Whether it be anger, confusion, or loss, it was just too heavy for him to carry. He couldn’t regulate his emotions; all he knew how to do was maim when he couldn’t escape pain.
Lindiwe retreated, and he chased her intangible form. Enraged, inconsolable, he fought air.
She slipped inside a tree and waited while he slashed at it with deadly claws. When he wasn’t looking, distracted by the trunk as if his bloodlust saw it as a living, breathing Lindiwe, she fled.
The cracks and groans of it being destroyed until it eventually fell reached her ears even when she was deep inside the Veil’s forest.
Only when she was so far from him and his massacre that she was no longer in earshot, and her scent would be difficult to chase, did she turn into a human. Pressing her hand against a thick tree trunk for support, Lindiwe breathed through her anxiety, her regret, and the guilt that festered within.
I shouldn’t have told him. I shouldn’t have said anything.
It didn’t matter that he wanted to know, deserved to know; apparently this knowledge was just too much of a burden forher children to bear. They weren’t human, and they didn’t understand the weight she, or they, carried – not like her.
I really, really fucked up this time.
He will tell Jabez. She didn’t think it would matter, but she’d just pushed Merikh further away from her.Does this mean I shouldn’t tell... any of them?
“Curses, Weldir! Where are you when I need you most?!” she screamed out, before gasping at a roar in the distance and the loud thumping of a four-legged nightmare heading her way.
Merikh had caught the thread of her scent and was hunting it.
Lindiwe flipped her feathered hood over her head and transformed long before he could find her.
I’m so tired of learning as I go and failing constantly.
Why could nothing go right?
February 23rd, 1872
The unbridled, unyielding rage that seethed beneath the surface of Lindiwe’s very flesh was scorching. It boiled in her veins, in her muscles, until it clutched her bones. It was so lethal it was like a living, breathing, dangerous aura that pulsated around her.
And as Lindiwe stormed between the beautiful, tall flowery hedges that acted as thorny fences for a pathway, her heart swelled with the way the world reflected her unrest.
Behind the small castle she kept her hateful stare on, lightning cut across the sky in blinding flashes. It crackled and boomed, and the thunder seemed to rumble the very ground, so loud, so deafening, it rang in her ears.
The grey clouds, heavy and angry, kept out the midday sun, making everything bleak. The rain had yet to pour, but she could see the wall of it heading towards her in the distance, sped along by violent winds. It was powerful, and the rush of it exhilarated her down to her very spirit.
Her worn and torn feathered cloak fluttered across her body,pulled tightly around her. A downy plume tickling her cheek slipped loose and flew away, as had many others in the decades it’d been since Lindiwe last heard from Weldir.
Soon... she doubted she’d be able to fly.
Her dirty white dress clung to her torso and limbs, while her bun kept her curls out of her eyes.
Demons intercepted her, trying to bar her entrance to witness this sad and pathetic attempt at being kingly. Jabez didn’t need a castle or a throne; he needed a fucking grave.
She’d help give him one.
Despite how much this would likely impact Weldir’s dwindling magic and fading mist, she made shadowy tentacles form.
Most of her opponents were medium-sized Demons on their way to completion. Half humanoid, half disgusting vermin, they either walked on all fours, slithered on their serpent tails, or squawked on bird legs.
