Page 40 of To Trap a Soul

“There is no need for you to turn physical in my presence,” he added, wishing she’d cease doing so and stay tangible to him. “I do not intend to physically force you, as I have clearly stated. I’d rather look upon you properly.”

He’d rather see her beauty more clearly.

Lindiwe’s gaze softened even more, as did the tension in her locked-up positioning. She turned incorporeal, which made her tangible to him – and him alone.

“That was my first time, and I admit I didn’t handle it too well.” She scratched at her left forearm absentmindedly as she looked away. “I was told it would hurt, but not likethat.”

“I don’t intend to do that again,” he repeated his assurance from earlier. “I’m also sorry for the hurt I caused. It wasn’t my intention to do so. My learning shouldn’t be above your wellbeing.”

As if he’d said something of significance, not that he was quite sure what, her bottom lip trembled before she stilled it by biting down on it. Her eyes softened at him before a more determined expression took over. “Then okay. We can do it.”

He doubted she actually wanted to, and just wanted out of his realm.

Seeing there was no point in arguing further about it, Weldir moved closer while forming a tendril. He pulled from the part of him he’d only recently discovered when he first brought a soul to his realm – a place of life he’d never known existed.

It was how he knew he wasn’t a demi-god of death, but merely a simple part of it. A soul eater that could, if he so chose it, give life. He could gift spirit – his own.

With her hands balled together near her chest, Lindiwe closed her eyes and parted her thighs for him. Weldir pulled all of his physical matter to the tendril’s tip in order to touch her with it – rather than it merely passing through her. Then, looking down at her mauve slit, he watched as it dragged through her darker lips, and then prodded her pink opening.

She flinched when he slowly inserted it, and her features bunched up further when he went deep until he was unable to gofurther. Instead of trying to force it deeper by having his tendril mould to her insides, he let his essence go.

A strange light-grey iridescent liquid fell from her hole when he withdrew, and he found that particularly wasteful. He didn’t understand how creatures could procreate if the females lost much of it.

The little human instantly shut her legs and turned her head away. “M-my pants and boots... please?”

Weldir wondered how she truly felt about the process as he moved her through his consciousness, so her artefacts were within her reach. She had to turn physical to grab them, as the material had turned solid once removed.

This interaction left him with the same feeling as before, and he wasn’t quite sure why. As he looked upon the creature looking off to the side with a shy, pouted bottom lip, guilt nibbled at the fraying edges of his black mist.

Is having a mate always this hard, or is it just because of what I am?

March 17th, 1689

With a chill creeping down her spine that shouldn’t exist in the early autumn air, Lindi gripping the blanket of the bedding with tight fists. Heat radiated through her entire head as she clenched her eyes tight, and she tried her hardest not to bite through her bottom lip against the pain. The bed she knelt down next to, while heaving her torso across it, was her anchor.

Her body flickered between physical and ghostly, her mind fighting to stay present while her body wanted an out. Hot strikes shot down her abdomen and blasted into her thighs during every contraction that assaulted her.

Then, once the invisible pressure at the top of her stomach stopped twitching and clamping, she was given a moment of reprieve.

As she often did, with tears dotting her eyelashes, she looked around the room. It looked emptier than when she’d been here six years ago, and yet nothing about it had changed.

Well, that wasn’t totally true, as the bedding was different, and the painting on the wall hadn’t belonged to her parents, butit was still set up the same.

Sure, it was dusty from disuse, but their bed with its oak frame remained the same. The white sheets were still unfolded and twisted, as if the last occupants had disappeared before they were to remake them, their pillows dented as if they’d only just laid upon them. Against the wall was her parents’ chest, yet it was filled with an abundance of clothes that didn’t belong to them. Other than a box, which had acted as a table for a candleholder for her parents, there was little else that had changed other than some discarded bowls and rags.

It was obvious someone had once occupied her family home, perhaps even multiple someones, but it was now vacant. How long, she didn’t know, but the evidence of left-behind medicine and bowls hinted at a story of sickness.

The occupant must have died, and the village had yet to place anyone new in it.

It was her home, but she felt so far removed from it.

Her house had barely been touched, as if the village had maintained it in the hope that someone would live there. It had been newly built by her grandfather and her father when he’d been a teenager, so destroying it likely would have been deemed wasteful.

Tithes were due, and she was sure the lord who oversaw this land wanted his payment of crops.

It appeared as though the village had banded together and absorbed the farm. The fields had been worked, fresh crops were sprouting, and even the fences were in good repair.

The only thing beginning to deteriorate was this house.

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