Page 86 of Bright Soul

Geryn smiled warmly. “Nonsense,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

So, Phaeron stayed and eventually learned the peoples’ many reasons for hiding from Myuna in Shenmaw. He started acknowledging his own resentment of her, created by the thousand cuts of indifference she’d led her followers and his parents to inflict upon him.

Auric took Phaeron on days’ worth of tours deep with discussions on magic and meaning. He showed Phaeron how easy it was to call upon his latent soul magic here, so close to a rip in reality, implying with his knowing smirk that he should practice with it. The Void must have informed him of a possible future where he needed it.

The problem with the Void, though, was that all true things it possessed represented all that was, is, and would be. Soulmagic was akin to a party trick on Soiluire, though Myuna took a shine to those who had true skill in it. Most of them became torchbearers…except for Phaeron, ever the forgotten shadow to Endaeron.

Still, he made a mental note to practice glancing deeper into others, stealing glances at their souls.

Long before he ever saw the rip in reality, his conversations with Auric and Geryn steered him toward airing how deep his burden had burned into his being. “Without a family of my own making, I’m not sure of my purpose anymore,” he murmured to his friends, who listened well. “I am tired of making war for no benefit of mine.”

He only wantedpeace. The desire echoed back to me full definition. He still yearned for it.

When he finally accepted this truth about himself and began to feel his pain ebbing, Auric took him to see the Void. It was in a cavern deep within Shenmaw, where the blackness of the Void leaked into reality. Their surroundings distorted in the narrow corridor, and Phaeron felt the chill of the space between worlds for the first time.

Its laugher immersed him, and he growled, swinging his head around, looking for the threats mocking him. He kept a leery eye out, fearful of the alien presence of the magic and how it felt digging into his senses.

Visions played across the walls. Faceless figures drifting in and out of focus, interacting with Phaeron’s shadow in various ways. Creatures dying, spraying blood from a slash of his sword. Females laughing, giving him the charmed looks over their claws that he once strived to earn. Laughter. Screeches. Demonic, warped noises that could’ve once been words.

He hunched and covered his ears as the whispers pushed in, too many to be understood.

“You have to ask it to focus on what you want,” Auric advised over the cacophony. He took him by the arm and guided him to the site of the rift, where the visions and sounds were at their most real.

The Void responded to Phaeron’s thoughts, a blessing when he’d have to scream over the echoes as they intensified in the small, cavernous space. He wanted to know there was a future for him, that the piercing loneliness he contended with each day would pass.

The Void’s chill intensified, prickling over his skin like ice needles, and answered. Half or more was madness and distortion, but Auric was there to wave away the worst of it.

The future immersed him. Voices of all kinds spoke his name. Male, female…kind tones, needy ones, furious intonations.Auric and Geryn swirled in with them before stopping abruptly.

I didn’t recognize any others at first, but woven into the tapestry of sound was Keshora and then Morgana. And…my voice. Ben and Geo were there too, and all our friends and eventually Auric once more. Phaeron didn’t realize there was a change of worlds and languages. The Void presented us all as the same: those that would cross his path in the future.

Phaeron raised his head, letting his eyes slip closed. My voice caught his attention, and his lips curled slowly.Definitely a lover,he thought, picturing me as a curvy Moihan female.

When he opened his eyes again, the Void showed him children. Delicately clawed hands holding an infant that could’ve been Ravai. A scramble of insanity that Auric quietly dispelled for him. Then toddler Braza shyly meeting his gaze as he placed her on a countertop.

Phaeron reached out, scalding his fingertips on freezing cold Void mist. He hissed and flicked his hand, only regretting thathe’d disrupted that particular vision. He longed to hold them with a fierceness that was nearly painful.

The two girls reappeared, older. He watched them from the edge of a field, soaking in their laughter as they played within the shadows, using them to jump around trying to tackle one another.

Hope kindled in his chest. Those were the only sweet laughs within the whole Void so far.

“It could be a turning of the millennia before this happens,” Auric said. The visions became nonsense once more as he relaxed the fist he’d been holding at his side.

The scene was just changing. There was a third child, who he caught a fleeting glance of. Phaeron noticed and ended up shrugging, embracing the knowledge that there might be more family further into his future. But I could’ve gasped, creating a dissonance that completely shifted the course of his soul memories.

Time sped by. For an age of his life, he’d stayed with the Shenmaw rebels until he became one as well, before returning to the capital with a new mate and fitting ill at ease into his old life. He’d had a spell of contentment that was ruined by the loss of everything.

I saw him with Morgana next, and yes, he’d loved her dearly. It wasn’t as hard as I’d expected to watch them together, even though I learned that he’d figured out how to elevate her to demigoddess status just so they could be together into eternity.

Phaeron’s memories jarred forward. He’d woken to a world changed, damaged librarian witch runes fading to black on theceiling above. He’d been locked away for two hundred years by Morgana, a huge breach that betrayed the vows of their mating.

“Why?” he’d asked in a pained whisper.

The emotions were still real, as recent as an echo. He’d later stood before her ghost and heard her reasons, but her memory was tainted now, a complicated blip in time for him. She had picked him up at his lowest and helped him acclimate to a new world. Her presence in his life was once hope, a promise that he was not alone on this strange world, where his people were feared and hated. Now that she had found her purpose in death, he could wish her well and allow them both to move on.

But in sealing him in stasis, she had still cut him off from everyone and everything that’d still mattered to him. He had essentially risen from his grave by waking up. That it was an accidental side effect from a blood baron’s plot to unleash the Hungering Darkness made it worse. He could’ve been lost to time in that room.

My heart twisted as I watched him struggle, his lack of apurposenow a resonant note in his memories. When he wasn’t blacking out from the Hungering Darkness’s attempts to control him, he sat in an alley with a homeless man, sipping the cheap alcohol he kept in a paper bag. I barely recognized David, a bear shifter Phaeron had later introduced me to, under a layer of hair and grime.

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