§119 Simon (Patreon)

Taylor - Wokehaad Farms

Maestro Nelis agreed to be Taylor's watcher, along with the farm's dedicated healer. They reviewed Mensa's instructions several times over and then tried to convince him not to go through with it.

"Nobody has ever spent three hundred on one skill. You should wait until you're older," said Nelis. "I wasn't planning on losing my new friend quite so soon."

The comment raised a well of warmth in Taylor's chest. He took the old arc's hand in both of his. "Thank you for that, Nelis. You don't know what it means to hear someone call me friend, and not master."

"Let's not get maudlin about it. People are watching." Nelis mocked him by pulling away his hand as if it had been burned.

The healer's smile was slight, but his eyes shined bright at their exchange.

"What are these rocks?" Nelis reached for one, only to have Taylor block his hands.

"Best not to touch. They don't look like it, but they're fearsome dark magic. Touching them triggered Knexenk's offer to take this skill. When I master it, I'll be able to unravel them – without resorting to extreme measures."

"I would argue spending three hundred points is extreme. That's every skill point you get in the first two tiers."

Everyone knew the formula: Knexenk gave five points per level for the first tier, ten per level in the second tier, and fifteen per level in the third tier. Thanks to bonus points for quests and titles, Taylor had well over six hundred saved up. So far, he had never wanted a skill he couldn't get on his own. But this was Soul Handling. In all his lives, he only met two people who could directly influence souls (not counting gods and the Great Contemplative Sages of Mi'iri).

"Fair point. But I want the skill for its own sake, and I want the power to undo the works of someone like Black Rod."

When he was ready, Taylor took six pills and a packet of powder mixed with lukewarm water, followed by a handful of fruit. He lay down in bed and made himself comfortable while he waited for the drugs to take effect. His class window waited for him.

Purchase [Soul Handling] for 300 skill points?

There was an awkward several minutes where there wasn't anything left to talk about. Everyone was waiting for the drugs to start taking over, and for him to hit Accept in his class interface. Strangely, Taylor didn't feel it when the drugs hit him; it was the healer who noticed.

"It's time. You should start."

"What? But I … don't … feel …." The world blurred when he turned his face to the healer, like matter couldn't keep up with the motion of his eyes. His hands were floaty and uninterested in moving. Taylor could read the weave of mana in his Knexenk panel, minuscule motes of light magic backed by a matrix of meaning, tethered to magic like an appliance plugged into an electrical socket. How long had it been since he had seen an electric appliance? "A-a-a-n-y-y-y-t-h-i-n-n-n-g."

It was definitely time. Not trusting his tongue, Taylor thought the word in Mi'iri: "Accept".

Taylor was familiar with dying. He should be, given how many times he had done it. Getting to death was often difficult, full of agony and uncertainty. Then, there was that moment when his body gave up. It let go of the soul it held captive, and that brief instant of revelation and release just before … nothing.

He could never remember what happened between one life and the other, with the sole exception of when he came to Aarden and was interviewed by the gods. Every other time, his ultimate act of freedom ended an eternal fragment of a second later in a collision between matter and soulstuff.

This was not that.

"Dummy! Wake up!" Something hit him across his … well, not his face. Whatever he had instead of a body.

Taylor reached for his body, found the nerves, skin, and tendons that held everything in place, and tried to settle in again. That's what he usually did.

"Wrong, wrong, wrong!" A sensation like pain, but not pain. How did one feel pain without a body? How did memory exist without a brain? 

Yeah. That conundrum had bothered him for a long time. Where did he keep his memories when the bodies that collected them were long gone?

"Focus, dummy! Focus on me!" That shock of not-quite-pain again, and a direction. Someone else was here, in the senseless place after death.

He had no mouth to speak with, but he had a mind. If he didn't, where did feelings come from?

"Stop hitting me," he thought in Mi'iri. Because, why not?

"Ooohh, aren't we the smart one, using the first language. Now do something impressive and focus!"

It was hard to care about things when one was dead. What was the point of being dead if one was going to keep on obsessing with all the same things one did when they were alive? But Taylor had a sense that this was important, that he had come here for a reason, and maybe he should trust himself enough to see it through.

There it was again. He was quite sure he was dead, but he was thinking. How did that work? Maybe the annoyance would tell him.

"How am I thinking without a brain?"

"You're thinking because the mysteries of life exceed the meager stuff of matter and mana." The voice delivered this nugget of wisdom with so much attitude that Taylor couldn't tell if the sarcasm was because life had no real mysteries in it or because the speaker cast aspersions on Taylor's feeble attempts at thought.

"You're not the only one of us here, are you?" Taylor was no stranger to seizing new sensations. It was like learning mana handling all over again, for the umpteenth time. He had that twinge of something new, a figurative muscle he had never felt before, and grabbed onto it. That's where the similarities ended. Souls were as different from mana as mana was from matter. 

The room had become shadows: shadow walls and shadow bed, empty windows looking out on shadow trees rimmed in lesser darkness. His attention was drawn to the row of trapped souls he left next to his bed. Each glowed dimly in its dark prison. Nelis and his healer were indistinct, but pulsed with life. They were seated, hovering over Taylor's shadow body. 

Taylor was dead right now. He hoped they weren't worried about him, but he found it difficult to care overmuch. He felt a great distance between himself and the living. Taylor and the other soul were in one space, and mortals were in another.

Taylor's attention moved to the presence near him, a humanoid shape of light backed by an even greater light, spread behind it like wings.

"Congratulations." Its words oozed, thick with sarcasm. "You're not a complete failure. My name is Simon. Henceforth, every night while you sleep, you will assist me in my work. Try not to mangle any souls while you're at it. Her Ladyship is kind, but she is not soft in the head."

"I'll do my best." Taylor discovered he was standing and bowed to the spirit.

"Do your most mediocre if you want to. Just don't rip the souls. Now follow me, unless you feel like giving up early. Do you feel like giving up early?" Hope lightened the words.

"No."

"Pity," said a disappointed Simon. "Much to do. Let's begin." Taylor sensed motion and darkness, a great wind, and confusion, like he'd been tossed onto the back of a gryphon and flown through a moonless night. Then, the world came to a sudden halt.

"Focus!" There was that not-pain again, reminding him to flex his new muscle. Taylor fumbled it the first few times, but Simon didn't distract him by yelling again. Light glowed and sharpened, gaining shape, organized in two rows surrounded by shadow-space. They were lying down, and upright figures moved among them. A hospital ward, or some place similar. A good place to find dying people.

"Where are we?"

"Precisely where we need to be. Watch. This one is dying now."

They stood over one of the light forms, lying alone in its shadow bed, unnoticed by the others. Taylor looked harder, trying to bring the being into focus. It was anchored by a weave of shadow stuff, which he surmised was the person's body. Or, more likely, what his thinking-without-a-brain mind was interpreting as a body when seen from his currently altered state of being. His perception would change with practice.

"Focus!" Simon demanded and swatted Taylor with the soul equivalent of a ruler to the knuckles.

Taylor focused. The shadow weave caging the soul was giving way, fraying before his eyes.

"Any moment now…," narrated Simon.

As the other souls in the room went about their business, doing shadow things with shadow lives, the soul-trapping mesh in front of him loosened as the life-force keeping it together failed. Matter slid aside, and the soul rose, free and bright. Taylor thought he saw hints of difference between this one and the others nearby, but it would take time to learn to see them properly. Study and practice. Any new skill required study and practice.

He wanted to talk to the soul, ask it how it felt and if it remembered its life, but Taylor didn't get the chance. A gate to the well of souls opened beyond the room. Or it would be better to say it bloomed there, as it appeared to him less like a doorway and more like a crysanthemum. Its petals reached out in all directions from a center beyond their current existence, stretching outward, seeking.

Standing near the center of the flower, Taylor recognized C'cora, Guardian of the Well.

C'cora waved. "Hey, Taylor. Soul training?"

It was the first time Taylor had even seen the gods doing their jobs. He was surprised to catch one doing anything at all, and lacked a protocol for the event.

"It's my first day."

The loose soul gravitated toward the well, lazily at first, then, gaining speed like a satellite lost in its orbit, grabbed by gravity, and in the early stages of freefall. It traced a long, arcing path into the flower where it passed through into some greater beyond, or merged with the gate itself. Taylor couldn't tell which.

"Simon, should I keep this open for a bit?" asked C'cora.

"Please do. We'll be but a moment." Simon entirely lost his sarcasm when he spoke to C'cora, but his words retained their ooziness. "The assistant will follow me."

They sank through the floor to rooms below, where bodies lay in cold storage until they were claimed by their families or sent away for a pauper's burial. The crysanthenum of light kept its distance from them, neither coming closer nor moving farther away. It occurred to Taylor that the gate was open everywhere it needed to be, all the time, with C'cora standing at the wellhead.

In the morgue, they found a soul. It was a sullen thing, too stubborn to leave and unable to live. Simon knelt before the soul. "Nothing binds you here. You should be with others of your kind, waiting. You will never live again if you linger here."

Simon lifted the weaker soul and pushed it toward the well. It drifted, reluctant, until C'cora reached out his hand for the lost one and drew it gently in. The flower closed around them both, leaving Taylor and Simon alone with the soulless dead.

"Why weren't we pulled in by the gate?" Taylor asked. "I'm surprised I didn't feel anything."

"I wasn't pulled because I am strong enough to resist," Simon sneered at him. "The only reason you weren't extinguished from your frail little life is that you're tethered. Look down."

Taylor looked, and found a black cord sprouting from where his navel should have been. The taught line reached into darkness, tied to something he could not see.

"Alas, you are too weak to go on," Simon mocked him, "yet I shall have to suffer you again tomorrow. For now, begone."

A hard yank, sudden speed, and the howl of rushing air, and he found himself in his own body. For every time he had died, Taylor had come back, and he knew a poor merging when he felt it. He took his time settling in, found all the places where his body held him, and shifted his limbs a little at a time. For all of Simon's presumed ability to manage disembodied souls, he didn't know much about getting souls into bodies. It was a tricky process, and was best done gently, without any shoving.

As mortal senses returned to him, Nelis and the healer came into focus. They were staring at him. His body still felt fuzzy and light.

"How long has it been?"

"Only thirty-two minutes," said the healer. "Did the attempt fail?"

 "No, it succeeded." He was still loopy from the drugs, but he managed to check his class.

You have acquired [Soul Sense]
You have acquired [Soul Handling]
You have acquired [Soul Walk]

"It worked. 'Hundred percent."

"That's good news." Nelis sounded relieved.

"Did something happen?"

"No," he said uncertainly, "not exactly. We thought you were in a coma and might not come back. That's all."

"That makes sense."

Nelis looked angry. "A little warning would have been nice."

"I didn't know what to expect. It certainly wasn't that."

"You should eat something if you can," said the healer. "Your cook made a broth and sandwiches."

Slowly, carefully, they helped Taylor up. His mind was sharp and loose at the same time. His limbs were painless and lazy. Someone pressed a mug of warm broth into his hands. Looking into it, Taylor could read Cook's great care shimmering on the surface, rising in its steam, ancient history in every molecule.

"There is great meaning in this cup of soup."

"That's just the drugs talking." Nelis patted his back. "Drink your truth and get some rest."