Page 66 of To Trap a Soul

Of course I do.Her right hand balled into a tight fist around her arrow with the left squeezing the reins.Every time I use your magic, I think of you.Every time she looked in the mirror and saw she hadn’t aged, she thought of him. Every time she remembered the last twenty-one years since she gave away her soul, she thought of Weldir.

After staring at the corpse with a disgusted sneer, she looked up, welcoming the oncoming light gust of freezing wind with her arms outstretched. “How may I assist you, oh great Warden of Darkness, demi-god of some faraway realm, and the consumer of souls?” She lowered her arms and placed a hand on her hip. “Is that better?”

“It seems you have grown rather sarcastic since we last spoke,”he murmured. Then humour once more filled his voice.“I like the praise, and the sudden playfulness. Do go on.”

Lindi rolled her eyes and lifted her palm out towards the dead occultist, knowing the other had likely fallen from his magicalnoose by now. “Do you mind if I incinerate these two? It’s been long enough that if their souls were going to appear, they would have.”

“You could always wait longer.”

She didn’t want to. And, since she knew she wouldn’t be reprimanded or punished, she let a flame explode from the centre of her palm. It shot towards the occultist and quickly wrapped him in black fire. She placed a sandy dome over the top of it, having learned that using a barrier stopped the spread.

Once the flames died out, she backtracked towards the other corpse while leading the horse, looking around to figure out where she was. She needed to return to the town she’d been scouting before she followed these two out of it when they were spilling from her grasp.

“How is Nathair?” Lindi asked, evading his statement with a question she asked whenever Weldir attempted to talk with her.

She always thought about him – and how much Weldir had said he’d changed. He’d grown bigger, had gained a gender – although she was displeased that it required eating a human to do so. He’d become strong, and... dangerous.

After being incapable of staying away, Lindi had asked Weldir to help her find him just once. He’d been just as violent as the last time she’d seen him – like he couldn’t remember her.

That had been heartbreaking for her, and the sorrow of it weighed on her shoulders constantly. But, in her own way, she still adored him.

He was hers, even if he wasn’t normal. Even if he was destructive and what she, in the past, would have considered as evil as the Demons. He was... beautiful, even with his deathly skull and enormous serpent body.

“He is the reason I have called to you,”Weldir said, just as she turned to the horse and was readying herself to climb atop it.

She gasped when she got the impression she was falling feet-first through the ground and scrambled to cling to the saddle, to no avail. This was how it felt every time Weldir stole her from Earth. Her heart would leap and squeeze with the stomach flip of inertia, and her hair would lift around her as if she fell from a high place.

In the blink of an eye, she went from bright morning to pitch darkness.

“I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” she grumbled with the lightest echo as if she was in a vast room, and she slowly threw her arms around to get her bearings in the weightlessness.

“Why not? How else am I to bring you here?” he asked, his voice stronger and louder, and she turned her face in the direction of its owner.

“At least give someone warning before you make them disappear from the realm they were standing in,” she answered, turning incorporeal – which made her tangible to him, as per his preference – while taking in his ethereal form. “I also wanted to keep that horse, by the way.”

There’s less of him than usual,she noted. His physical form was barely a strip of chalk and glittering black sand. It swirled around his legs, his waist, his torso, and arms. Only his nose and cheeks were visible, below a small amount of two-inch-long hair coming from the crown of his head.He wasn’t this powerless the last time I saw him.

How long ago had that been? Four years ago, maybe a little longer? It’d been a while since she’d died, as she’d grown more adept with his magic. Lindi was able to better fend off Demons now, and she’d never had any issues enacting justice against the occultists.

“I will try to give you warning, then, if it pleases you,” he said, mouthless and without eyes to offer an expression. White flames pulled from the satchel at her side and floated towards the partof his hand she could see. “You have collected four souls. It hasn’t been that long since you returned to my mist.”

“Some Demons are reaching towns.” With spite, not aimed at him but at the changing state of the world, her jaw muscles knotted when she ground her molars. “It means there are more people – moreGhosts– for me to find.”

His face tilted back, as if to look at some non-existent sky. “So... that time has come, no matter how much I have tried to prevent it.”

The outer corners of her eyes bowed with discontent and worry. She knew what he spoke of.

“I know you opened portals to bring wildlife from other lands here,” Lindi stated, remembering how he’d told her of such details. She’d even seen them – an abundance of prey animals and predators that shouldn’t exist here. “Can’t you just... do it again?”

A sigh flittered around her. “No. That was not my power, but another deity’s. It was only ever meant to be a temporary solution.”

A few years ago, Weldir had informed Lindi that he’d opened a portal and moved it across the world at will. With it, he’d brought all manner of creatures here to Austrális, as it didn’t have many to begin with. A wide range of prey and predators were introduced, although mostly the latter, in the hope they’d whittle down the number of Demons naturally.

He’d also done it to give the Demons things to hunt and eat other than humans. In those few years, and currently, those animals had grown in numbers at a startling rate. The expanding forests of Austrális gave them plenty of life to fuel them, although there were a few hiccups regarding predators harming some humans who hadn’t yet moved to walled villages.

Brown and black bears were a new thing, and they were rather large and frightful beasts, especially during mating and offspringseason. New species of deer, antelope, and hares had been introduced, giving everything something to chase – although they were easily startled and fast. Wolves, large cats, and even foxes had begun making their homes across the land as well.

So, so much has changed.From the fauna to the flora, and Lindi was witnessing it all, ever stuck with the knowledge but unable to do a damn thing to help.

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