Page 44 of To Trap a Soul

She gently laid them down, her arms weak as her body caved. Tiredness clung to her sweat-slicked body, but at least the worst was done – despite the urge to keep pushing like she wasn’t quite done.

She dragged her face off the bed and lifted back so she could peek down at them when she didn’t hear a cry. Immediately worried, she furrowed her brows at the strange black blobby creature between her knees.

It didn’t look human, although it did have an impression of a baby shape – two stubby little arms and legs, a torso, and a head.

Their featureless, oval face was pointed around their nose and mouth like a muzzled creature. They had no eyes – not even concaves to allude to any – and they had tiny little ear holes rather than fleshy ears. Their little toes and fingers were stubby, with tiny, pointed tips like claws, but they were bent in different directions, as if they were soft rather than sharp and hard. She realised then that they weren’t actually black but such a dark grey that they appeared so.

They laid there still as stone but languid. She noticed that although they had the evidence of a cord, it must have snapped or ripped during birth, as the rest was no longer attached to her.

Their stomach wasn’t moving.

Gasping in fear, she grabbed her newbornsomethingand began rubbing what she thought might be their back. Their body was soft, squishy – as if they completely lacked any bones – and jiggled wildly. At least they were hot to the touch. They flopped for a few strokes before slitted nose holes flared open and they coughed up dark muck.

Lindi had held a newborn before, as she’d visited a couple in her village not long after the women had given birth. She remembered the feel of them, how delicate, fragile, and incapable they were. How their little cries sounded, and the way they looked around sightlessly and mindlessly.

That’s what she’d been expecting.

Something that would need assistance in everything they did.

Her child was so tiny that it barely fit into both her trembling hands when she went to cup them around it securely. Despite how odd they looked, the fact that they appeared blind made her heart ache for them.

She lifted her own child so she could hold them, properly inspect them, and...cuddlethem like she was supposed to.

Lindi didn’t expect for them to breathe in, and then for a horrible shriek – so loud it pierced her already ringing ears – to come from them. They leapt out of her hold and lunged within the span of a heartbeat. Lindi screamed when they parted what she originally thought was a non-existent mouth to reveal a hard zig-zagging line of black jagged fangs as they bit her.

Tearing through her shirt, their fangs sliced into her biceps. Terrified, confused, and in agony, Lindi ripped them away from her. Her skin tore further in the process, and she belted out a cry. Before she even had the chance to let go of them, they lunged again, this time biting into her thigh just above her knee.

“Weldir!” Lindi cried.

Her body protested as she fell back onto her arse and started to scramble away with horrified tears welling. She scratchedthem off her bare thigh when they bit it again, this time taking a small chunk from her. She turned incorporeal before they could do anything more, and they lunged for the blood-soiled blanket she’d originally placed them on.

As they twisted themselves up, burying into the blanket and chewing on it, high-pitched, infant snarls came from the red-and-white bundle.

A black tendril shot out from Weldir’s mist. The moment it sunk into the babything, deeper than just the skin’s surface, they turned incorporeal. They also immediately stopped moving as if they’d gone to sleep.

A sorrowful rage had Lindi parting her lips to shout at him, but she was shoved into darkness before she could even utter a word.

The moment Lindi appeared in Weldir’s realm of nothingness and weightlessness took over, she turned physical.What the fuck? What in the absolute fuck?!As much as she tried to scamper away, her legs did nothing but kick at the emptiness and keep her exactly where she was.

Turning physical removed the ache between her thighs, but she didn’t care about that other than covering herself by shoving her shirt down.

“What the hell are you?!” she screamed, watching as her baby was brought to his arm by his tendril.

Hetouchedthe creature, as if he was able to hold them. Or, rather, the solid parts of him were able to. The chalky parts of him, which had been diluting over the course of the night, rested under the child to hold them.

“I told you,” he stated with an emptiness. “I am an Elven demi-god.”

“I know what you told me, but you said you weren’t evil,” she snapped back, wishing she couldfeelthe tears coming from her. They floated off her jawline instead of dripping to the groundin this lack-of-gravity place. “You said your children wouldn’t be evil.”

“We aren’t–”

“It tried to eat me the moment I gave birth!” Her shout was so twisted and raw with emotion it was more like a screech. “Do you understand howfucked upthat is?!”

The parts of his face she could see tilted down to the child sleeping on top of his forearm. “Yes. Well–”

“I gave birth to a Demon! The very thing you said you were fighting against!”

His head cocked so sharply, she thought most people would have snapped their neck. His nose lifted, as if he greeted her eyes, not that she could tell by the lack of them present currently.

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