#soulsinger

Steps were a struggle– she had let an invocation of demonic flame devour her energies out of necessity, anything to deliver her mind to despondency, even some thoughtless coma. She needed this death of the mind to find her center again. The Harvester slid to the floor of her own summoning gate – almost. She could feel…something catch her and slump with her to the base of her gate. The numb bubble of distorted silence began to at last dissipate, at last letting sound crack through at the behest of another, well known shadow. She dared a brittle smile as she felt the First Perished’s signature wash over her, wrapping her in the cloak of his own presence. She was finally safe, here. He was Home.

“Who d’ I need t’kill, cherie?” the promise was whispered and then pressed against her temple with the gentle gravel of her Soulsinger’s voice, gathered up against him. She felt his rough, pale hands squeeze into her with the urge to comfort. Her fingers twitched as he checked for signs of life, finding her heartbeat, sliding shadowy fingers down the strands of her turbulent soul. A massive scattering of void-addled soul crystals released from the undulating aura of her body. She was breathing, cognizant, but weak by the flesh.

Tears edged the corners of her eyes, craving his anchoring. An anchoring was always needed, but now moreso as the Harbinger’s whispers were seeded deep, and left her haunted with the dark mirror of what she truly was. Harvesting the Ascended Nerubians was all that she could do in her desperation, to cling to the masked layers she did not want to have torn away. It did not matter if she lived on 100 different lies, only that they were hers, claimed of her own volition. But even in this act of individual rebellion, the Harbinger’s forces fought her just enough to present the challenge. In the end they were just the lure with their sacrifice, just as the Harbinger planned. 

Xala’tath was kin. She felt it at her core, as any remade by the Void would. The Harbinger sifted through her labyrinth of borrowed memory and history and found her obscured core, pulling it into clarity for them both to see. She had always been a Child of the Dark, connected to the Unseen spheres from the moment she opened her first grimoire and heard the ‘forbidden’ speak, and recognized it as an aspect older than Creation itself. And within her was a dormant path to change. Change was evolution, and through her it could be enacted so easily with the web of her worldly connection, resource, pathing, vital location, and subtle influence, leading to the deconstruction of cyclic systems of stagnant ‘civilizations’ only serving the Light-favored, wealthy, xenophobic and militant few. And change could only ever be enacted when one took the hand of power to level the playing fi–

Safrona wrenched her mind from the Harbinger’s vision of possibility, struggling to mentally cage the will of the Ascended she had taken into herself and the dark pulse of desire that had tried to build through her with it. It was a certain break in sanity bled with a long quiet rage that the Harbinger sought to enable in her, driven to systematically tear down the infrastructure of so many cities that she had worked herself to the bone to support, like some scorned sociopath. It was some old spark of scorn dredged up from the betrayer she had once been decades ago. An unsettling downward spiral that she did not wish to admit she had stared down from an upper wrung, especially after her exile. The fact that she could envision it at all spoke to something that remained twisted in her, but an aspect of her nonetheless. 

“I…I think enough have died tonight…” she finally voiced, indicating the void corrupted shards spinning away from them on the cellar floor, the many Ascended she had consumed in a last defense that had started her own undoing. She knew not if they were even fit for the Loa’s taking and had no strength to release them to his altar. But there was hope always in her Soulsinger’s arms.

Language was the simplest touch, a sacred exchange as their fingers met and intertwined as they had a dozen times before. “I am yours and you are mine,” she whispered repetitively to her beloved like a mantra, fingers hooking and curling into his physicality with a possessiveness. She breathed the soil and smoke of him as if he were clear air, an absolution. He was a shade that would not flinch from her, that would not burn with more than devoted passion, that could not erode. She could summon armies of demons and malefic entities to serve her from numerous realms, conduct a symphony of fear and pain over an army alone, but she felt a strength in her Orchid that was beyond her, and had long fascinated her, even now. He equalized her, gave her balance, and she loved him for it all and more. 

“I need you,” she whispered with varied meaning, all collecting at his lips as she pressed to them in a soft kiss. Here, she could taste the elements of the soul she loved so well, a link that quelled one madness, and delivered her slowly into another she much preferred; love was its own brand of insanity. A craving made tender, until it was not. 

Safrona’s fingers trembled to free a caged soul from a shard, fueling the ritual to contain her precous Soulsinger’s spirit to a Soulstone. Then the inevitably of her yawning hunger rushed to claim him, to drain and devour with an unholy desperation. 

“Then take, lova’ mine,” his whisper invited fearlessly, found her at the soul with a tender urging. She felt his heart blazing beneath his chest between splayed fingertips, enthralled by the vital transfer of one that worshipped her so reverently. “Y’already have all of me…” 

Phantoms woke in the Altar room of the Perished amidst the sweet sacrifice, called by the First of the Perished with what draining strength he had in him to command. However corrupt, each crystal the Harvester brought was carried by ephemeral hands to the Altar, for each was a boon of power promised to the Loa. The carousel of ghostly offering continued, until the First’s life force drained to its last, the fire of his heart, dulled. With his death rattle, the ties that bound him to life and his charges snapped, casting the cellar into a desolate silence.

Broken from her euphoric theft but renewed and cleansed by her beloved’s sacrifice, Safrona devolved into a trembling panic for several manic seconds as she processed her Orchid’s wilted form slumping to the cellar floor with an awful sloughing. Grasping the soulstone tighter in her grasp, she shattered it to release his safeguarded soul.

Dread washed over her so deeply in the passing of seconds, seeing a repetitive nightmare playing out before her now in the waking world. Dread that she had gone too far in her hunger, and that her beloved Orchid would not return. Gripped firmly by her own traumas, another terrible reality layered on to her spiraling thoughts: what if he then came to only live within her, as the many she had consumed before him?

Then she heard the soulstone’s magic resolve like a resounding funeral bell, chiming in its finality. A sound of hope, nestled at the bottom of the puzzle box of wrong released on her tonight. An ethereal play of light played over his face as his spirit returned, and the Orchid’s own brand of shadow soon flaked from him as he stirred, renewed. The burning heart flared to life with a particularly wicked afterburn that rung around his ribcage as he drew himself back up to sit, causing him to cough aggressively. His eyes found her intently as the vital rhythm settled in him. She was stricken, yet vibrant with the chaos of a layered emotional resonance she so rarely let herself feel. They called it, ‘living’.

“Promised t’ya," he spoke, her Orchid’s hand reached to cup tenderly around her cheek, thumb grazing a stream of tears. “Neva lettin’ go.”

The warlock felt her own chest heave with relief, and soundlessly, she fell forward to wrap the love of her life in the tightest embrace she could muster.