Page 7 of The Unweaver

Sputtering candles illuminated the crypt scraped out of the mud. Elongated shadows twined on the walls peppered with gore. From a dark corner came a steadydrip, drip, drip.

Death tugged Cora deeper inside. Something squelched underfoot. Blood and sinew and chunks of bone. She followed the trail to a human-shaped lump lying in a chair on the ground, as if it had been knocked backwards while sitting. Around the body glimmered a pentagram.

Teddy stepped into a puddle of gore and cursed. “I just know this will stain,” he muttered with a disgusted sound, shaking off his patent leather Oxfords.

Slowly, she neared the corpse, bracing herself for that familiar rictus grin on the face. Except, there was no face. It had beenblown off, along with the top of the skull. A pulpy crater remained where the bullet had cleaved through. The shock of white hair, soaked with brains and blood, was the only suggestion of the corpse’s former humanity.

Forty pounds, Cora told herself, fighting back a wave of nausea.

A shadow flickered over them. They whipped around.

A candle. It was only a candle.

With Mother’s questions in hand, she knelt in the pool of congealing blood and removed the gloves she always wore. No sense in rotting off yet another pair. Her hands hovered over where Moriarty’s heart, the vessel of his spirit, had once beat.

She hesitated. Communing with a spirit was like living their obituary for herself. People whose lives she’d never known, whose deaths she’d never forget. The fodder for her nightmares.

Death was jarring for even the mildest of departed spirits. Communing with the newly dead was particularly unpleasant. They were not yet accustomed to the reality that all their aspirations and failures had culminated in this: a body with broken, rotting parts, a spirit drifting through the black veil into the Death Realm.

Life was the gradual return to nothingness, and death was the end of possibilities, all as inevitable as leaves falling. Yet few willingly succumbed to death’s embrace. They struggled to reconcile that their plans would go unfulfilled. Problems unresolved. Potential unrealized. Once the horror of dying subsided, though, death could be like dreaming an endless dream.

Having his face shot off would not improve the Chronomancer’s transition into the Death Realm. Steeling herself for the nightmare, Cora lowered her hands.

A clanging noise above startled them. She fell back, and Teddy steadied her before she collapsed in the gore. The shadows in the crypt seemed a living thing.

She strained to hear over her pounding heart and ragged breaths. “What was that?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to stay to find out. Commune with him.Now.”

“It’ll take a while. His death was… traumatic.”

Teddy grimaced down at the faceless corpse. “You don’t say.”

The clanging sounded again. Either an omen of structural collapse or a very punctual Realmwalker.

“Hurry,” Teddy whimpered, guiding her hands onto the corpse.

Necrotic veins spread up her arms. Her eyes rolled back. The black threads of death pulsed in an unheard symphony, part of the countless threads woven like a veil between Realms.

Her magic reached out to part the black veil. Death reached back.

Chapter 2. The Enviably Dead

Her spirit departed her body, sinking through the black veil and into the abyss. Among the enviably dead, at last, Cora was just another incorporeal spirit wandering the Death Realm. Only it was not her death she was seeking.

Spirits in death were tethered to their bodies, and sometimes objects, in the Living Realm. The longer since their death, or less intimate the object, the longer Cora had to search the Death Realm for their spirit, draining her own spirit in return. With a fresh corpse, the search for Moriarty was brief.

She landed in the corner of the Death Realm where the grave for his spirit had been dug. Cora never knew what would greet her when she descended into someone’s Deathscape, the unique landscape of how the spirit remembered itself. What was sown in life was reaped in death.

Cora found herself in a cottage tucked into rolling green hills. Instinctively, she knew this was the Irish countryside Moriarty had grown up in, and the freckled woman smiling beside the hearth was long dead.

“I won’t stop time!” the Chronomancer cried in a thick Irish brogue, pulling on his white hair. His face, as creased as well-worn leather, twisted in anguish. “I won’t make time stop for you!”

Cora reached for Moriarty. The instant her fingers made contact, his death throes started. A highlight reel of the strongest emotions of his life and death. Awash with his memories in a deluge of sensation, she experienced them all as if they were her own.

Some dead felt only anger for the life they’d been robbed of; an agony that frothed from their dead spirit into hers. Others felt inconsolable grief, or the ultimate tranquility of suicide. For a lucky few, death was the peace at the end of a long struggle. Like letting go.

Moriarty had not let go. She relived the turmoil of his final moments. He’d fought against death like a bear in a trap, then finished the job himself before the hunters could collect.

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