Free Web NovelChapter 429: Soul Harvesters (1)
And then the wave passed Bruce.
It washed over the three of them, and Bruce flinched, on pure instinct, expecting the same dissolution to take him. But it did not.
The wave moved through his soul-body like a gust of cool wind, neither hurting him nor helping him, just acknowledging him and moving on. He understood, in some dim part of his thoughts, that the wave knew the difference. It knew what to take and what to leave. It had been calibrated for hollows only. The awakened souls inside its path were not its prey.
The wave faded out into the deep grey beyond, and was gone.
The three of them stood alone.
---
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Bruce had heard since arriving in the Soul Realm.
No shrieks. No clutching hands. No press of cold bodies. Just the slow drift of the mist and the distant fading echo of the bell.
For a long moment, none of them moved.
Then Kael’s legs went out, and he sat down hard on the grey expanse with a sound somewhere between a laugh and a wheeze. The young man with the wrenched arm simply folded, knees buckling, body going down, and ended up half-sprawled, breath coming in ragged shudders, staring up at the place where the carriage was.
"Hah hah hah." Bruce did not sit down, but only because he was not certain he would be able to get up again if he did. He stayed on his feet, hands on his knees, head down, just breathing.
He looked at himself.
His soul-body’s edges were dim. The faint glow that had been bright when he first awakened was now thin, almost guttering.
He could see cracks, small ones, hairline, running through his arms and across the back of his hands. He had been close. Much closer than he had let himself feel during the fight.
Another minute, maybe two, and the cracks would have widened, and his soul would have started to come apart at the seams. The wave from the carriage had reached them in time. Barely in time.
He glanced sideways. Kael looked the same. The young man looked worse, full of small bright fractures across his face and chest, his glow nearly out, looking like a soul that had been about thirty seconds from joining the hollows it had been fighting.
If the carriage had come a little later, Bruce understood, all three of them would have died.
He turned his head to find it.
The carriage was still coming.
That was the strange thing. The wave had cleared the entire horde out to the horizon in a single pulse, there was nothing between the three of them and the carriage anymore, no obstacle, no enemy, nothing, and yet the carriage had not picked up speed. It was still drifting toward them at the same unhurried pace it had been moving at since Bruce first saw it.
Slow. Steady. The way a man might walk who knew he had nowhere to be in particular and that whoever was waiting for him would wait.
Bruce found himself staring at it. He could see it clearly now, with no horde in the way.
It was beautiful, in an unsettling sort of way.
The carriage itself was a tall, dark, elegantly carved thing, old-fashioned, the kind of carriage from the oldest paintings Bruce had ever seen on Earth. Long body, high wheels, a small canopied seat at the front for the driver and a closed compartment behind. It was being pulled by horses, or things shaped like horses, and the horses were glowing, pale white-gold, their forms made of light contained in the rough outline of a body. They galloped slowly through the air, their hooves rising and falling in steady rhythm.
Their feet did not touch the ground.
Wherever a hoof was about to land, a small disc of pale white something formed in the air just under it, a thin sheet of what looked like ice, or condensed light, just wide enough to take the hoof’s weight. The hoof landed on it. The horse moved on. The disc dissolved into thin curls of soul-energy mist behind it, evaporating up into the grey. The whole apparatus produced a soft trail of vanishing light footholds behind the carriage as it traveled, the path it had taken slowly fading away.
The footholds, Bruce understood after a moment of watching, were made of soul energy. The horses were carrying their own road with them.
And riding the carriage,
Bruce squinted. freēwebnovel.com
Riding the carriage were figures, several of them, sitting up on the high seat and standing on small platforms at the sides. They were people-shaped, in the sense that they had heads and arms and torsos. But they did not glow.
That was the first thing Bruce noticed. Every soul he had seen in the Soul Realm, himself, Kael, the young man, the hollows, the half-eaten clusters, every drifting soul he had passed in hours of walking, glowed. The glow varied in brightness, in clarity, in stability, but it was always there. It was the basic visible quality of a soul in this place.
The figures on the carriage did not glow.
They were dark. Robed, maybe, Bruce could not quite tell from this distance, and what he could see of them in the gaps of the robes was not flesh but bone. Thin, pale, smooth. Skull-shapes where heads should have been. Long-fingered hand-shapes where hands should have been.
Skeletons.
He had never seen skeleton-shaped beings in any realm before. The closest had been certain undead in the physical realm, but those had been ugly things, clumsy and rotting. These were clean. The bone was beautifully white. The robes hung on them the way robes hang on living men, gathered correctly at the shoulders, falling correctly past the knees.
And the eyes,
The skeletons had no flesh in their eye sockets. But the sockets were not empty. Inside each pair of eye holes was a small, steady orb of glowing light, hanging there like a star caught in the bone. The light was a cold pale color, somewhere between white and blue, and it tracked. The skeleton at the front of the carriage turned its head slightly as it approached, and the orbs in its sockets shifted in unison to look at Bruce.
Bruce’s spine went cold.
It was not just that they were skeletons. It was the aura coming off them. Bruce could feel it, even from this distance, a presence, a weight, the way a powerful awakened’s presence pressed on the room without them doing anything. The skeletons had that. Each of them had that. It was not threatening, exactly. It was not friendly either. It was simply vast. The kind of aura a man would feel and immediately know not to provoke.
Bruce could not place the kind of aura it was. He had felt powerful presences before. He had stood in rooms with a universal-tier being like Akashic.
The skeletons’ aura was not like any of those. It was its own thing, old, quiet, a little terrible, and Bruce filed his ignorance away with everything else he had been filing today.
He thought, briefly and with some embarrassment, of old Earth Christmas stories. A carriage. Glowing horses. The horses with their hooves on a path of soft frost-light that no one else could see. If you swapped the skeletons for a fat old man in red, it would have looked exactly like a children’s picture. He almost laughed. He did not laugh, he did not have the energy, but the thought helped a little.
Glowing horses. Frost in the air. Robed skeletons with star-eyes.
This was what a harvester was.
---
The carriage took an unbearable amount of time to reach them.
It was perhaps a hundred paces out when the wave of soul energy went off, and it covered those hundred paces at the same slow walking pace it had been using before, and Bruce, Kael, and the young man stood and sat and sprawled where they were while it came. None of them spoke. None of them moved. They were too tired to move, and they did not yet know whether the harvesters were good news or bad news.
The wave had killed the horde. That was good news. That was, in fact, exactly the help they had needed.
But Bruce remembered the older woman’s last words about the harvesters. ’They come, and they look, and they choose, and they take.’
He remembered asking her if anyone came back?
And she replied with a blunt no.
He kept his eyes on the carriage. He did not let his guard down, even though there was nothing left in him to guard with.
The carriage arrived.
It drew up beside them and stopped, without any visible signal between the skeletons and the horses, the horses simply stopped, and the small fading footholds vanished one by one behind it until the whole apparatus was sitting still in the air a couple of paces above the grey ground.
