Page 57 of Bright Soul

“Shake it off,”Braza warned. They quickly realized I wasn’t the soul-eating goddess and stumbled back into the fighting.Something hit me from behind, and I fell face-first to the pavement, my sword clattering out of arm’s reach.

A fist struck the back of my head, and stars danced in my vision. The same person who’d stunned me grabbed under my armpits and started to drag me away from the group. I realized it was the first torchbearer. My light had melted away the shadowy ropes that’d bound him.

Braza wanted to lengthen my fingers into talons and slash him, but I had an idea to try first. I called silently to my handbook, and it flew into my palm. I circled my fist in a figure-eight and held it up over my shoulder, willing the Lux spell to pass through it.

The handbook flared open in my grip and emitted a spotlight of concentrated parchment-colored light into the torchbearer’s face. He released me, and I stumbled back.

“Hah, take that! Tis I that is luminous now!” the book exclaimed.

A different figure nudged me aside. I saw the flash of Phaeron’s sword, the attack checked just in time for the torchbearer’s sake. He reached into midair over the man’s chest, and he went very still.

Braza’s shadows flowed over my eyes, letting me see the knotted white ball he was pulling from the man’s chest. Phaeron passed me the hilt of his sword and took a deep breath. With both hands, he unraveled the mess of tangles the man’s soul was tied in until it was a white globe being pushed back into his body.

The man collapsed in a boneless heap. I eyed him for a moment. “Did that work?” I asked dubiously.

“Later,” Phaeron grunted.

The fighting was dying down around us, and he had a few more souls to disentangle. There wasn’t much else for me to do except to gingerly grab one of the bird corpses by the edge of awing to drag it toward the burn pile being formed on the street corner. Geo took it from me and lobbed it on top of the pile.

“Look, I’m a UFO!” my handbook exclaimed, hovering itself halfway open over a broken feather. A scorching ray emanated down from it, setting the feather’s edges on fire.

My brows rose. “Well, that’s useful,” I said. I tucked the smoking feather into the burn pile for it to spread.

“Thank you. I pride myself on beingquiteuseful!”

Braza cut off its Lux spell, to its great disappointment. With our merge, I didn’t feel how much power my spells drew, but she shared how depleted my natural reserves would be just from having the handbook lit for a few minutes.

“This is why we don’t set random tools alight,”she said. I had the feeling she’d scold me if the effect wasn’t so impressive.

I turned toward the stretch of street where Phaeron had laid out six people in total. He stood over them quietly while Wren filmed him, patiently waiting for him to say something. When I joined him, looking at them with Braza’s soul sight, I saw what had him hesitating. Braza told me,“Thebright white color of the souls within these supernaturals is highly abnormal.”

“Do you see them?” he asked me.

“I do, but I’m not sure I understand what I’m seeing,” I admitted.

He beckoned for me to kneel with him by one of the former torchbearers. “Do you see the cracks?”he asked, switching to Soiluirian in a hush.

I nodded. If this person’s soul was a piece of pottery, it’d been dropped from a low height and was barely holding itself together.

“That is soul damage. Myuna’s work is crude. The process of binding this person’s will nearly tore their soul in several places.”He frowned, the picture of troubled.

“Does that mean they’re going to die?”Braza spoke for me in Soiluirian.

“Probably. If they wake, it will be to great pain. All of these people will have died briefly and been reborn, so they are unnatural, Myuna’s will or no. They will either succumb to their wounds or their hungers.”

“No. My sister…” I whispered.

“If they are lucky, there’s a small chance they will recover. In that case…we will have to study them before releasing them back into the community.”When he looked over at me, I saw the serious prince, the man who’d led his people safely to another world. “Braza, we must contain them until we know where their fates land.”

“Yes, my prince,”she said.

“In the meantime, Myuna is probably improving on her soul binding skills. If she takes her time, the future torchbearers may have enough intelligence and presence to use their magic again,”he said, shaking his head slowly. “If that happens, we will be overwhelmed.”

He looked up at Wren and her camera. “Our mission is successful. Cress and I will use shadow magic to take these people to a safe place, then we shall return to the hospital,” he said.

23

CRESS

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