Chapter 117. The Essence of the Soul (Patreon)

[ Long chappy today. I'm thinking about doing a live reading of Thursday's chapter for fun since I'll have the day off for Thanksgiving, maybe around noon EST (GMT -5)? Lmk what you think in the comments/on discord. ]

Ian wasn’t sure when Soolemar’s assessment turned into a lesson.

At the end of the day he’d sought out Soolemar to learn necromancy, but he’d expected that the ‘learning’ part would come later. All of his forays in the past had been simple, noncommittal dabbling...there was plausible deniability if people approached him about it. He could feign ignorance.

Before today, before this moment, Ian Dunai was a decemancer. Now that he’d actually stepped on the path of learning necromancy from an expert, he wouldn’t be able to deny it any more in good conscience: He was a necromancer.

For now, Ian resolved not to think too hard about it.

Ian stared down at the Death-coiled construct in perplexion. Souls were mindless blobs: they didn’t have energy or physical substance and drifted like balloons...unless confronted with pregnant women, at which point they’d swarm like sharks. There was something special about being embodied that gave the souls something more, but Ian wasn’t sure what.

“What do souls even do?” Ian wondered. “I think with my brain, breathe with my lungs, move with my muscles...you say I have a soul that’s been nearly torn to pieces, but that doesn’t seem to have affected me at all.”

Soolemar walked over to the temple doors and leaned against the left side of the doorway, his gaze falling to the canyon and the slowly-setting sun. “That’s the question at the heart of what you’re trying to do now. Ever since the beginning of recorded history, we’ve known such basic physiology from Life and Death practitioners. However, isolated communities of regulars lacked this knowledge and instead believed that consciousness came from something else...something beyond the senses.”

“...But it doesn’t.”

Soolemar shrugged his shoulders and glanced over. “What makes someone real? Sure, lobotomize someone and they’ll think differently. We can analyze and break down how people make decisions, how they see, how they smell, the mechanisms that control the human experience. It’s all possible.”

Ian knew that Soolemar was building up to a greater point. Achemiss, too, made his own cryptic observation about the presence of a soul marking a person as real or fake. The soul was what set the Infinity Loop’s fidelity above other dilation chambers.

What Ian still didn’t understand was why.

Ian placed his hands above the mannequin, sinking them into the layers of Death energy covering its surface. He could just barely feel the edge of the soul where it conformed to the contours of the mannequin’s torso. The soul offered no resistance when he moved his fingers but still settled around them as if it were a viscous pool of water.

It didn’t seem like it had any kind of will he could harness: It was as conscious as a jellyfish. Ian tried thinking while placing his hand over it as though he could transmit his thoughts through touch.

“Move,” he thought, closing his eyes. “Move...move...move.”

“You know I can hear you,” Bluebird chirped mentally.

“Shush.” He already felt stupid enough without Bluebird calling him out. How else was he supposed to get the soul to use the Death energy fiber network to move? He didn’t expect it to be able to actually stand up or do any kind of coordinated movement, but he had hoped that it would maybe cause some of the fibers to twitch.

“Alright, stop,” Soolemar said, clapping his hands together and peering over. “This is painful. What have you been doing the past five minutes? Thinking the soul to death? Hard to do, that, considering it’s not alive.”

Ian narrowed his eyes and met his stare. “Funny; are you going to help, at least?”

Soolemar snorted. “You haven’t even given me the chance to come over. I’m not as limber as a sprightly youth like yourself.”

Ian turned away and rolled his eyes at the necromancer’s wild exaggeration. Still, he waited with anticipation as Soolemar walked over and kneeled down to where he was sitting on the floor.

“Look,” Soolemar said, pressing his hand through Ian’s Death energy and onto the chest of the mannequin. “Place your hand next to mine. Good. Now...try and see if you can feel what I’m doing.”

Ian tried his best to focus, but he couldn’t sense anything. The soul maybe seemed to shift slightly...but it was hard to tell.

“Alright, hold on.” Soolemar placed his hand on top of Ian’s. “Better?”

Ian could feel a slight shifting of energy on the back of his hand, as though a circle of Death energy was rotating around an energy-devoid axis. Ian decided to try and mirror the energy movements. To his surprise, the soul only took a second to congeal to the hollow of his palm.

“Now try and invest meaning. Think of a clear, concise command. Perhaps envision the command coursing from your mind to your hand.”

Here we go again.

Bluebird decided to chime in, crooning, “Second time’s the charm!”

Rolling his eyes at the bird, Ian repeated the word “move” like a mantra. All the same, the soul refused to do anything.

“What command are you thinking?” Soolemar asked.

“‘Move,’” Ian grunted.

The necromancer sighed. “Dunai, what does it mean for a soul to move?”

“...It means for it to use the Death matrix I’ve constructed to exert force on the environment and produce locomotion.”

“That sounds nice and scientific, but is that a clear and concise command?”

Death Constructs typically worked well when given general orders. Ian found that trying to specifically tell them how to move or attack was a misguided idea best left up to the construct to solve on its own.

Souls apparently followed different rules. “I’m not grasping why souls and normal decemantic constructs are different. What can that–” Ian pointed to the hovering mannequin– “do that any of my constructs can’t?”

Why bother with necromancy at all? Clearly there was some reason or Achemiss wouldn’t have nudged him to pursue it.

Soolemar followed Ian’s gaze. “Ultimately, the soul is a canvas for the human experience. It’s the chaos that bends your will in seemingly inexplicable directions. It’s the sponge for consciousness.”

“Sure; but when people die, their souls turn into mindless, floating spheres.”

“Right.”

“...How does that square with what you said before?”

Soolemar sighed. “If there’s time, I’ll try and show you more clearly later. In short, the soul is a strength...and a vulnerability. The ascendants know this and keep their souls elsewhere, protected. While necromancers often focus on harnessing souls to create powerful constructs wielding powers beyond those of their creator, the true power of necromancy lies in manipulation of the soul itself. For now, we’re going to stick to the former task.”

Ascendants keep their souls separate? Ian wondered, his brow furrowing. How was that possible?

“There will be time for more questions later,” Soolemar said, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t forget we’re in the middle of a test. How are you going to get the mannequin to move?”

Ian opened his mouth in protest, but closed it and sighed. He thought for a moment before settling on the command, “Pull Death fiber.” He waited while churning energy in the circular pattern. Before long, one of the thousands of Death energy threads moved on its own, trembling as though brushed by a breeze. Ian turned to the side to see Soolemar smiling at him, flashing teeth.

“A good first step. What were you thinking?”

“‘Pull Death fiber.’”

“I see...alright. To increase the complexity of the command, you’re going to need to layer different meanings and conditions.”

Now that was an insight that made intuitive sense. The kind of logic that applied to glossY programmatics usually only applied to bone constructs on the highest level, the key exception being when he developed his bone shield and the deathseeds. Those required more deliberate logic to constrain autonomous operation and account for divergent situations and edge cases.

Ian began to recite a new mantra, trying his best to create a simple algorithm on the fly to tug on a Death energy thread each time the circle of energy on his palm made a full rotation. As soon as the algorithm repeated once, one of the Death energy threads began to pulse up and down rapidly.

Soolemar’s brow twitched. “Can you try and change which threads the soul controls?”

Ian narrowed his eyes and contemplated the simplest way to accomplish something resembling locomotion, the end task in mind. Could he convey something more than words? Perhaps he could use the image of a person standing...or a marionette strung up to rigid attention.

Ian decided to go with the latter idea for its relative simplicity. He envisioned the strings of a marionette all coming from the center of the puppet and, in a strange defiance of physics, coiling up and around to hold up the mannequin’s Death-wrapped limbs. The key was thinking of the Death energy fibers as marionette threads, each pulling a single limb into a standing stance.

Ian kept the idea in his mind for half a minute before giving up. Perhaps I shouldn’t try doing so much at once, he thought. Instead of standing, why not just having the entire body twitch together? If he could at least get the body to move in sync, he’d be on the right track.

Now, rather than envisioning the threads pulling on pieces of the mannequin, he simply thought of them moving as a chaotic whole. The mannequin twitched, then began to pulse spasmodically as though having a seizure. Startled, Ian released his hand and leaned back, brushing past Soolemar.

“You’re getting there,” the necromancer observed. “What were you thinking about?”

Ian rubbed his jaw. “I was thinking of the mannequin’s body as a system rather than trying to control it with single words. I know you said clear and concise is better, but–”

“Pictures are fine if they work,” Soolemar interjected. “Depending on the circumstance, they might be more clear or more confusing...but I’d say for what you were trying to accomplish, they’re effective.”

“Let me try again.” Ian made a few small changes to his original movement algorithm. When he applied his energy this time, the construct jerked upward to a sitting position before dropping back down, its body landing with a thud.

Just once more...Ian thought, inclining his head forward and leaning against the mannequin’s torso. This time he slid one hand under the mannequin’s back so that it mirrored the hand above. He tried to manipulate the energy again, making it so that each hand directed the swirling of the soul’s substance in the same direction.

When he tried to imbue meaning into the soul this time, he did so with picture, word, emotion, and even scent and sound. What did it look like to sit up, what was the sensation, what did the ruffle of skin and cloth sound like as the body crunched upward?

Sitting itself didn’t necessarily elicit strong emotions. Instead, Ian tried to think of sitting in a different context. He tried to imagine what it would feel like to sit for the first time.

No...that’s not right. Ian felt that he needed something stronger. He let his thoughts wander for a minute; eventually, his mind gravitated to the ravaged people on the Menocht Bay cruise ship, their bodies wasted by neglect and the sun. He recalled how their emaciated bodies collapsed bonelessly on the deck once removed from the pool. He thought of Jeremy, the lone survivor who could stand and talk.

He then tried to imagine being Jeremy: blind, weak, starved. The more he ruminated, the more he realized just how incredible it was that Jeremy could remain coherent and walk around Menocht Bay dealing with the ginger crisis. Ian was no stranger to exhaustion, but the level of torture associated with literally baking to death and losing yourself enough to stare at the sun until you became blind...it was a fundamentally different kind of torture from what Ian had experienced.

As Jeremy, Ian imagined the superhuman effort of standing tall.

With a sudden jerk, the mannequin heeded Ian’s command even as its rapid rise brought it out of his grasp.

Ian stepped back and admired his handiwork. Compared to Soolemar’s steadily-hovering example, I still have a long way to go, but this is a good start.

“So, how did I do?” Ian wondered, turning to the side.

The necromancer rolled his eyes. “You’re a fast learner. Would you say that decemancy always came naturally to you from the beginning?”

Ian shrugged. “Yeah. The Crowned Prime guesses that I awakened with an affinity over 80%; that probably helped things along.”

Soolemar reached for his ring, twisting it to the left. Both mannequins disappeared from sight. He gazed at Ian, his thoughts inscrutable.

“It is starting to get a bit late at this point,” the elder necromancer muttered. “You can explore the canyon if you like, or you can continue to accompany me as I see to the temple.”

“I’ll continue with you,” Ian replied. He didn’t see how the canyon could be the more interesting option.

Soolemar grunted, then grabbed the green orb from where it hovered over its pedestal and tapped his foot against the pedestal base. The pedestal’s top melted away, allowing Soolemar to place the orb down into a perfectly-fitting indent. He kicked the pedestal base again and a fluid began to pour out around the green orb, eventually recreating the top section of the pedestal anew.

He rubbed his hands together and walked to a door at the back of the room, opening it onto an aged, spiraling stone staircase. He walked up the steps with practiced ease, Ian following just behind. They emerged in a chamber looking out over a previously-unseen half of Yurusi Canyon, its absent back wall exposing it to the elements. The floor was fashioned out of slabs of dark, swirling stone; Ian thought it might be granite or marble. There were worn inscriptions all over the surface, pale etchings on the dark background.

I’ve never seen anything like this before, Ian thought, frowning. The script reminded him somewhat of Minoan, but it had more coils and artistic accents than the more-rigid Minoan alphabet. And for all that the script curled and flowed, it had a clean, geometric spacing; Ian got the impression that clusters of script bunched together into blocks to form words.

“You won’t recognize the text,” Soolemar called out. “It’s ancient Moronan.”

Moronan wasn’t a particularly widespread language, mostly spoken by people in the Adrilli Isles and some regions of western Sere. Ian knew that it once shared the same parent language as Minoan, but over thousands of years the chasm between the two languages became a continental rift.

His gaze gravitated upward and took in the form of Soolemar standing at the very edge of the room, hands clasped behind his back. The necromancer sighed and turned to a small table nailed to the floor, its weathered wooden surface covered with faded patterns of dark, chalky ink.

“The soul,” Soolemar began, “is malleable.” He held out his right arm, pulled back the sleeve, and beared the index finger of his off hand. He raked the finger across his forearm, the nail drawing a thin line of crimson. Soolemar took the red-stained finger and drew a triangle at the center of the table. He re-wetted the finger in blood before drawing a second triangle, completing the outline of a six-sided star.

Ian noticed that the inscriptions on the floor now started to glow a muted red. He watched in silence as Soolemar left behind the table and twisted the ring on his finger. A small basket of bread and an intricate knife appeared on the floor. The necromancer bent down to grab the knife and a single unleavened roll, proceeding to cut it into two halves. In the end, six halves of bread lay on the ground, the intensifying red glow of the inscriptions illuminating them from below.

“And when we die, our souls forget us. They move on. But there are ways to shape souls so that they remember.”

Soolemar began to speak in another language. Unlike some that Ian found rather harsh, such as Luxish, Soolemar’s tongue sounded like flowing water and the break of dawn.

“Shoramaia shui jinshara, shaeradela shur shruin shollastry.” The necromancer turned Ian’s way and repeated the phrase in Swellish: “Fragments following time, announce your presence.”

Ian thought he could hear the faintest sound of something echoing back, like a series of barely-audible but distinct voices.

“Shruthi.”

“Lellias.”

“Shinai.”

“Bruinshin.”

“Woeshiv.”

After the five voices spoke, the room fell silent.

Soolemar sighed and sat down on the ground at the center of the scattered bread, a hand propping up his chin. Ian watched on with rapt attention as five of the six pieces of bread began to shudder in place. Finally, one piece of bread broke into rapid jitters before disappearing. Four shaking pieces of bread disappeared in short succession until only two pieces remained.

Soolemar snorted and lay down on the ground, his stomach pressing against the cold surface. He lowered his head down next to the jittering piece of bread and stayed in the position for the next minute.

Ian was still trying to puzzle through what was happening between the blood-letting, the bread, and the voices when the piece of bread moved–trembling–to Soolemar’s lips. They parted at the bread’s touch in a deceptively intimate gesture.

Soolemar soon ruined the poignant moment by biting down on the bread and masticating it roughly, dragging around his hand to assist in tearing off a flaky section. The necromancer sat up and leaned over to grab the single untouched portion of bread, the last of the six.

Ian cocked his head in surprise as Soolemar pulled back his arm and lobbed the bread toward Yurusi Canyon. As there was no banister or other protective barrier near the exposed edge of the chamber, the bread’s flight was completely unobstructed.

Soolemar then turned Ian’s way and swallowed another bite of bread.

“For some reason I didn’t think you’d bleed,” Ian murmured. “Or eat, for that matter.”

Soolemar barked a laugh. “Give up food? Please. I’d be better off dead.” The necromancer began to laugh, then fell into a melancholic pause, his gaze alighting on the inscribed text between his legs.

With a grunt, Soolemar shook his head and bounced up onto the balls of his feet, letting his heels fall back down to the stone with a clack. “I think that’s enough for one day; let’s not keep Jordan waiting.”