Peculiar Soul - Chapter 126: A Cruel Man

Listen, and you will hear a truth: each of us holds a world within, and no two are alike. So different are these worlds that none could tell what truth has made itself known, yet even so we may recognize it as truth.

Listen again, and deepen what you have learned: the many truths within exist in harmony, and each bears as much worth as its fellow. But where they seek to once again enter the world, they must reconcile to become one truth. The world is shared between all beings, and thus must all truth be shared.

Not all of the evils of men have their root here, but many do. We draw blood and shed tears to assert our truth upon the world; at the end of all things there remains space for only one to stand.

Do not abandon your truth, for it is you in a way that even your flesh cannot equal. It is a reflection of your inner self, and must be defended lest no hint of you ever emerge into the world, and all of your wonder perishes unseen.

Yet – choose your struggles carefully. Without the voice of caution, you shall be lost to grief as your precious truths are cast down. No man may win every battle. Some men may win one. If greed tempts you to more, weigh your worth with great discernment before giving it heed.

– The Book of Eight Verses, the Verse of Blood. (New Kheman Edition, 542 PD)

It took much longer to make the trip out to Raven House than the last time Michael had come. Aside from their lack of a carriage, they found several streets on their route that had been blocked by collapsed buildings or hastily-erected barricades.

None of these were problematic obstacles for Michael, of course, but he did not feel like drawing undue attention to himself while he was here. The quiet of the city was unnerving, and the lack of any response to their arrival had begun to wear on him. It felt wrong that anyone should be able to walk blithely down the streets of the capital unchallenged.

Unchallenged by authority, that is, for there were certainly a few men who aimed to stop them in their transit of the city. Michael had successfully frightened off observers here and there, but before they had left the boundaries of Calmharbor proper they found a barricade in their path, and men filing out from the surrounding buildings to cut off their escape.

One of them approached, holding a standard-issue army rifle casually against his shoulder; there was a lazy grin on his face. “Rough times,” he said.

Sobriquet laughed and stepped forward, not waiting to hear the rest of the clumsily-veiled threat; blurs of light danced next to every man on the street. A moment of silence passed while they sagged forward, their eyes rolling up into their heads. Michael only had time for a bemused look before the entire rough-clad greeting party was twitching on the cobbles.

“Abrupt,” he noted, turning his attention to the barricade; it disintegrated into a pile of cold sawdust and metal shavings as they resumed their journey.

“I’m not about to let Daressan lives slip away while some mouth-breathing bandit indulges in theatrics,” she said. “Kinder this way, anyway; if I had let him ramble on to a point then I expect Zabala would have killed him.”

There was the sound of a palm-sized, weighty rock clattering to the street. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Zabala said. “I had every confidence in you and Michael to handle the situation appropriately.”

Sobriquet raised her eyebrow. “Very much appreciated.” She looked around at the houses, which were beginning to grow tall and stately as they progressed away from the city. Many bore signs of looting. Gates were flung open and windows shattered; ominous dark stains marred the stone in places.

For the most part, though, the neighborhood was gripped by a deep and unsettling quiet. All around them were signs of lives interrupted, of homes once well-loved now cold and empty.

“No more surprises ahead?” Michael asked.

She shook her head. “It’ll truly be surprising, if there are. Most everyone around here is either gone or huddled in their coal cellar.”

“They know we’re here,” Vernon said. “Those coal-cellar residents, that is. Seems that we’re not the first group to come out here from the city. Other men, maybe those ones we ran into earlier, they’ve been combing through houses for food, valuables – people, sometimes.” He cocked his head slightly, his eyes distant. “Not to be uncharitable, but it seems like killing them would have been justified. Not a pleasant crowd. We’re not seeing anyone here because they’re all terrified of those men, or men like them.”

“Something to keep in mind if we meet again,” Sobriquet muttered. “But that’s not why we’re here. Unless I’m looking at the wrong patch of woods, we’re coming up on Sibyl’s house.” She nodded ahead, to where the hills grew dark in the morning fog, grasping bare branches clutching upward.

Michael nodded and picked up their pace. Eventually the houses yielded to overgrown forest on one side, reaching out over the road with winter-bare boughs. They plodded along in silence until they came across the estate’s lone gate; the copper raven was still there, glaring balefully down at all passers-by. Without pausing, they turned and followed the track through the woods to Raven House.

It was a very different approach than before, with the skeletal winter trees clustering tight against the road. Rather than the impenetrable well of blackness that it had seemed on his last visit, the forest felt sparse, drained, a thicket of bones rattling their displeasure at the intrusion. They did little to hide the house, surrounded by the ruins of overgrown gardens and unkempt lawns. Plants lay dead and brown around the mansion, which showed neglect in its facade.

Sobriquet paused as they came into the clearing, surveying Sofia’s home. “That’s seen better days,” she noted.

“I think most of us have,” Michael sighed. He trudged down the remainder of the path towards the door, but before he had drawn close a voice rang out from inside.

“Turn around. Leave the woods. Never return.”

It rasped with a harsh command, one that curled its way into the ears of everyone listening. Michael saw Zabala frown, saw Vernon’s eyes glaze over. Brant was already facing out of the forest, while Sobriquet shook her head as if bothered by a particularly insistent fly-

Michael let his soul flow out, gently, countering the voice’s command. He kept it wrapped around the others as he continued to walk forward, raising one hand in greeting.

“Hello, Vera,” he called out. “I’d rather not leave just yet.”

There was a long pause, followed by the noise of rapid footsteps from within the house. The door flung open to reveal Vera’s tousled blonde hair, a weary smile on her face. “Michael,” she breathed. She stepped cautiously from the doorway, as if unsure he was really there, then tottered forward to wrap him in an embrace. He returned it, gingerly. She was painfully thin, and in dire need of a laundress; nevertheless, her blank eyes crinkled in a smile when she pulled back to look at him.

“It’s so soon,” she murmured, raising her hand to hover just shy of his burnt face. “My sight is waning as Sofia’s does, and I didn’t recognize-” She paused. “But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Your face, your eyes.” She let her hand drop and took a shaky step back, casting her sight around at the others who were – and weren’t – standing behind him. Her breath caught. “What happened, Michael?”

“We fought the Ardans in Ghar,” Michael said. “Friedrich is dead, and his soul came to me. And – I’m sorry, Vera. Charles and Lars died in the fighting.”

Vera’s shoulders slumped, and she took a dazed step to one side. “Oh.” She clenched a fist spasmodically. “Oh. She didn’t mention – that.”

Michael reached out to steady her with one hand, lightly gripping her shoulder. Vera let herself be guided back upright, her head coming up to look at Michael – though her face showed none of the grief that pounded from her in excruciating waves. “But that’s not why you’ve come,” she said, quiet and matter-of-fact.

“You seem to know a lot about why I’d come to Ardalt,” Michael said. “In your note you took it for granted that I’d be looking for Sofia. Why?”

“Because she talks about it,” Vera rasped. “It’s all she talks about. She sees you in her dreams, at the end of every hallway and lurking in every closet, and it’s breaking her.” She took a shuddering breath. “I thought I could take her here to try and find some measure of peace.”

Michael nodded slowly, buying a moment for her words to muddle together in his mind. “Inviting me here seems to work counter to that goal.”

“I didn’t think you’d come looking for her so soon,” she said. “I thought she’d get better, not worse.” She turned her head up to Michael, her eyes tight with a tense fear. “What’s happening, Michael? Some of the things she’s said-”

“Like what?” Sobriquet asked, stepping forward. “Is she perhaps worried about a giant fucking storm that threatens to devour half the continent and render the rest unfit for human habitation? Feeling a little guilty, perhaps? Or is she still wallowing in selfish pity?”

“A bit of both,” Sofia croaked.

Michael, Vera and Sobriquet turned towards the house, where Sofia stood in the doorway, half-hidden under a heavy robe. Her hair was tousled and matted, her face pale save for the dark circles etched under her eyes. The feverish glint there was the only thing that marked her as alert.

For as long as Michael had known Sofia, those eyes had been perpetually unfocused, the telltale distance of a spector observing everything but what was in front of them. Now, though, they did not stray from him. For a brief moment Michael met her gaze in a way that he had not been able to do since his sight was disjoined from his eyes. Sofia looked right into the part of him that saw – then shuddered and turned away, waving them listlessly towards the house.

She trudged out of sight back into the interior, and Vera turned back to them with a pensive expression. “Perhaps you had better come in,” she murmured.

They filed into the house behind Vera. Michael found himself looking around; he had been in no fit state to observe things on his last visit, and had spent little time inside. The foyer was nearly bare compared to most wealthy Ardan homes, with only a few well-made chairs of simple design. The walls were white paint on plaster, with a thin strip of wooden paneling that ran across the top and bottom.

Yet as he looked, he saw that it was not simple at all. Patterns ran through the plaster, barely visible under the paint, and the wood was similarly etched with markings so subtle as to be mere variations in surface texture. The fabric of the chairs glittered here and there with reflective thread, and the stitchwork was unusually ornate.

It was almost wasted effort, for how little difference it made in the finished product – but this wasn’t a room made for normal eyes to appreciate.

He slid off his shoes, then padded back into the sitting room where Sofia was waiting, perched with her knees tucked up against her chin on an oversized armchair. Her eyes tracked Michael with no less intensity than before as he took the seat directly across from her. Sobriquet and Vera slid into others; the rest of their party idled in the foyer, perhaps sensing the tension crackling between all present.

Sofia said nothing. She reached down to a table beside her chair, picking up a steaming mug of some dark tea; she took a sip and set the drink back down again. “You’re a cruel man, Michael,” she murmured.

The air fairly crackled around Sobriquet as her hand gripped white-knuckled on an armrest; Michael laid his own hand on her shoulder. He kept his eyes focused on Sofia.

“And why is that?” Michael asked softly. “I could guess, but I’d rather hear it from you. I think we both know how little time there is for games.”

A harsh, manic little laugh tore loose from Sofia’s lips. It was cut away almost as soon as it began, her feet tapping one-two under her robe against the chair. Her eyes shrank down to flint chips, glaring at him. “Games,” she spat. “This was never a game. For you, but for nobody else; we were always fighting for our lives.”

She glared a moment more, then took another sip of tea. Drops spilled from the rim of the cup as her hand trembled. “The challenge of my soul is that I can see whatever I want. When we met on the continent and I offered to bring you back here, I looked ahead and saw those futures. They were good futures.”

Another sip. “Knowing what I know now, I can see how vanishingly unlikely that outcome was. How misleading it was, for the Michael who accepted that offer would walk a very different path from the one who didn’t. It’s all too easy to get invested in futures that may never come to pass.”

Michael remained quiet, watching as Sofia drew her legs up closer to her chest. Her grip tightened on her mug. “It made it all the more painful when Vincent died. When my father died. Neither by your hand, but both inextricably linked to your presence. I came to see you as a poison, a corrupting influence that destroyed good outcomes.” Her eyes glittered. “And there is a destruction that clings to you. My sight fails when I look too far ahead, now, and it fails where your influence grows too strong. Yours, or Luc’s.”

“And so your solution was to support Luc?” Michael asked, leaning forward; he was unable to keep the frustration fully from his voice. “Even at the end, when you fled him, you fed his power. Why?”

“Because he was going to kill you,” Sofia snapped. The mug in her hand jerked, and tea sloshed onto her robe. “Because I couldn’t see any other way to check your growth. Sometimes the brambles grow so thickly that the only way clear is to start a fire.” Her anger flared, then faltered; she slouched down once more. “So we started fires, Isolde and I. Isolde and I. Just the two of us. With her, it was easy to keep – focused on you.”

Michael frowned. “I can’t help but notice she’s not here.”

“She is,” Sobriquet murmured. “In the kitchen, towards the back of the house.”

Surprised, Michael moved his sight to check and found Isolde standing quietly in the house’s spacious kitchen, her thin hands bereft of their usual gloves – drying a plate. Her eyes were unfocused, her face bland. Michael moved his sight closer, puzzled. “Why is she-”

At the sound of his voice, the muscles in Isolde’s face twitched, ever so slightly. Her lip quivered, and the movement of her hands stopped. They resumed moving a bare moment later, only a slight hitch in her work, but Michael saw. He recognized it.

Michael reeled his sight back to the sitting room, turning to look at Vera. She shrank away from his gaze, shaking her head. “I didn’t mean to,” she whispered. “She came in with Sofia, into my flat, and she was screaming – screaming, and cursing your name, saying that we were all going to die because of you, and I just wanted her to calm down-”

Vera took a shuddering breath, smoothing the front of her dress; with an effort, she raised her head to meet Michael’s gaze. “I took her hatred,” she said. “I didn’t know how little would be left when it was gone.”

“Vera saved me, in point of fact,” Sofia said. “I relied on each of them to help see for me – to keep me grounded in the wash of time and space. To help me focus my attention where it should go.” She took a long sip of her tea, then set it down. “After Vincent died, Isolde blamed you for it. She wasn’t alone in that. I did, for my part. But she – she saw it as a betrayal. She loved Vincent, and both of them were more than a little fond of you, Michael.”

Michael nodded, his hand rubbing the old wounds on his arm. “I remember,” he murmured. Isolde’s face flashed in his memory, indignant, trying to make him really look at the scars-

“Especially after my father died,” Sofia said quietly, “it was easy to accept what she saw. To reinforce it with the worst of what I could see – and I saw you slaughter thousands, while thousands more died around you with an oath to you on your lips. ‘My soul to the One.’” She raised an eyebrow, looking pointedly at Michael.

“I never asked for that,” Michael sighed. “Pushed against it, but I can’t be everywhere at once.”

“I can.” Sofia let her legs slide down to the floor, leaning forward in her chair. “So I know better than you how far it spread. How dangerous that is, for a man with your abilities to have such a following. This storm we face isn’t the worst that might have resulted.” She tapped her finger next to her eye. “But it blots the future from my sight. The storm, or any one of the uncountable atrocities you might have committed in its stead. I can see to it, but not past it. Not within it. Singularity is the death of futures, and you’ve always carried that seed within you. Our death.”

She leaned back in her chair once more. “My death.”

Michael held his tongue. It was very quiet in Raven House. Not even a clock broke the silence with its ticking. Eventually, he sighed and let the tension bleed from his shoulders. “I suppose I needn’t have worried about how to explain myself,” he said.

“On the contrary.” Sofia folded her hands in her lap, a rare smile pulling at her lips. “I could guess, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

The retort wrung a nervous laugh from him, and he scratched at his bare scalp. “I suppose you’re owed that much.” He met her eyes. “I can’t defeat Luc as I am, and I don’t have any way forward without your soul. I’ve come to claim it, Sofia.” He paused. “I’m here to take your life.”

“Now I’m glad I asked,” she said, her eyes focused on something else entirely. “Phrasing is – indicative of much.” Her eyes fluttered half-shut for a moment, then snapped back to him. “No.”

Michael blinked. “No?”

“No,” Sofia confirmed, speaking as though it was a speech she had memorized thoroughly. “I don’t want you to kill me, Michael. I want to live, and try to remedy this evil I’ve caused with the same hands that helped bring it into being.”

Words failed him. Michael had been prepared for much, but not this. Even Vera looked nonplussed, although Sobriquet was stonily unimpressed.

He saw Sofia register his astonishment, and his utter lack of a response; to his further confusion, there was a deep pang of loathing that rang through the room, echoing and painful, followed by hollow, bitter resignation. Her face showed none of it, though, as she craned her neck towards the kitchen. “Izzy, can we have some of those biscuits?” she called out.

“Coming!” Isolde’s voice replied brightly. Michael turned to see her walk out of a side door with a silvered tray. She set the tray down and kissed Sofia on the crown of her head. “Anything else? More tea?”

“No, thank you,” Sofia said. “Stay a moment, look who came to visit.”

Michael froze as Isolde’s eyes came up to his own. There was the tiniest of twitches, a pang of revulsion that skewered through him in an instant – and was gone just as fast. “Ghar’s blood, Michael?” Isolde said, rushing over to his side. “I thought I had heard – what happened to you? Your eyes-” Her hand came up to hover near his cheek, then dropped to her side. “Oh, no. I’m not sure there’s anything to be done for an injury like that.”

“It’s – okay,” Michael replied, clinging to the thread of the conversation like a drowning man; this entire experience was intensely wrong. “I’d actually determined not to heal them, to better explore my spector soul.”

Isolde nodded once, sharply. “I’ve heard of such cases,” she said, no small amount of disapproval in her voice. “I won’t press you on it, but do reconsider, if only for the neuralgia-” Her voice caught, her fingers twitching; her eyes widened with sudden, momentary hatred-

She shook her head. “Lost my train of thought,” she mumbled. “That’s happening more and more, and more.” Her fists clenched. Tears glimmered in her eyes, and a trickle of saliva dripped from her lip. “And more. And more. And more. And-”

“These are lovely, Isolde,” Vera said, gliding up from her seat. Her voice was steady, though tears ran freely down her cheeks. “Why don’t I help you clean up in the kitchen?”

“It’s no – sure,” Isolde mumbled, letting herself be steered out of the room. The two women left, leaving Michael and Sobriquet alone with Sofia, staring appalled as she picked up a biscuit.

She took a bite, then set it down on the tray. A moment later she seemed to catch herself, sighed, and picked up the last bite, placing it in her mouth and chewing slowly – savoring the taste.

“She’s remarkably functional,” Sofia said, washing the biscuit down with a sip of tea. That, too, she set down deliberately, carefully. “Compared to Spark’s horrors. Whatever lessons Vera took from you, they seem to have had a profound effect. But after my disgust diminished – it’s still there, Michael, I assure you – one question pressed itself upon me with incredible, undeniable force.”

Sofia stood from her chair to cast a dark look down at him. “If that is what true compulsion looks like,” she asked, “then what did you do to Vera? She was as shocked as I was, when it happened. She was convinced, to the core of her being, that you had taken her soul’s ability to harm. To twist, to corrupt. Yet in one action she proved why that can’t be the case. If not that, then – what was it?”

Slowly, Michael stood. Past Sofia, to the side, he saw Vera standing in the doorway to the kitchen. There were still tears on her face, wet in the dim light. “Almost nothing,” Michael said, not daring to look away. “I told her to listen to her remorse. I reminded her of who she wished she could be, and made her believe that I had wrought a great change in her. Other than that – no.” He shook his head. “I placed no other limits or compulsions on her.”

Vera’s hand came up to her mouth; she sagged against the doorframe. Sofia began to walk slowly forward. “I surmised as much,” she said. “At least, I entertained the idea that you had done no great wrong to Vera, as you and she both claimed. I began to retrace my sight forward from that starting point, follow the paths that perspective showed me. Absent Isolde’s hatred, and as much as I could bear – absent my own.” She paused when she was just shy of him, standing very close. “Do you know what I saw?”

“A tragedy, I imagine,” Michael replied softly. “Because it has been that.”

“I saw a blind, foolish woman ruin her life,” Sofia said, a rasp asserting itself in her voice. “I saw myself send a friend to his death and drive another into exile. I saw my father alienated, suffering, forced to appeal to you because he saw no hope in what I had become. I saw myself killing innocents in the very War I abhorred, and-”

Her voice had risen towards the end, and here it cracked; she balled a fist and slammed it ineffectually into Michael’s chest. “And you dodge all the blame, you fucker!” she spat, drawing her fist back to punch him again, and again. “You tried to tell me at every turn! And if you weren’t the most persuasive – that’s still no excuse for fucking Sibyl – not to see – not to-”

She collapsed to the floor, toppling backwards with her robe around her in a heap, struggling to draw breath through her anguish. Her eyes were sparking fire, locked on Michael’s face. “And the worst fucking part of it is that you don’t kill me,” she snarled. “You don’t – oh, don’t look so surprised. There are futures where it happens. But not if I ask.”

She gave a manic, choking laugh, stumbling forward on her knees. “Not if I say, sorry, but I’d rather not die – like I did just now, when you decided not to kill me. And that’s – it.” She let out a mad, choking laugh. “I don’t have to fight you. I don’t have to run or rage or kill my friends, or watch the world drown in blood, or do any of the things I fucking did, because in the one place I can’t see, the one place in the world that’s opaque and terrifying to me, there was never anything but a man who wants to make everyone happy. That’s your fucking future, that’s all it ever was, and the world shakes itself to pieces rather than let you have it-”

Sofia was screaming now, hoarse and ragged, her robe flying open to expose her stained shift. Vera was standing in the door with both hands clasped over her mouth, weeping, while behind her Isolde pushed past with a furious look on her face.

“You all need to go,” Isolde said, tight and angry. “Now. You’re upsetting Sofie-”

Sofia pulled a small pistol from within her robe and shot Isolde in the forehead. It was a flawless shot; Isolde dropped to the floor even as Michael staggered back under the weight of her soul. He felt it less, these days, but the sudden shock of her death slammed into him sideways, blindly.

Vera screamed and dropped to her knees beside Isolde, turning her face furiously to glare at Sofia – who was watching Michael with intense focus.

“She – came to you,” Sofia whispered, letting the gun sag down in her grip. It was a military model, Michael noted absently, the same as any officer’s pistol from the Ardan camps. “That’s enough, then. The act itself. She came to you-”

“Of course she fucking did, you crazy bitch!” Sobriquet retorted, starting forward only to halt when Zabala’s hand clapped onto her shoulder; the others filed in behind him, drawn by the gunshot. Michael felt the man’s soul wrap around them all, a protective shield. “She was always going to end up with him! Who was more obsessed with Michael than her?”

Sibyl gave a croaking laugh. “You’d be surprised,” she said. “You have – so many people attached to you, Michael, more than you’d ever guess. They’re dying in droves right now under the weight of that storm, yet how many souls have you gained? Hmm?” She gestured wildly with the gun. “How many since the storm started? Ten? Five? One?” She bared her teeth. “None?”

A horrid feeling began to coil in Michael’s gut, made worse by the burning of Isolde’s presence, slowly growing hotter within him. “It’s been harder for me to feel them lately-”

“You would feel this,” Sofia promised. “It’s death by torrents, by red floods, so many people caught unawares by it as the storm sweeps across the land – and so many that yearned for your embrace, hoped because of your example. Yet no. Souls. For. Michael.” She tapped the gun against her leg. “Because that thing in the storm isn’t you. Not the same person. Not the same manifestation of that soul, and that means the rules are different. It’s not affinity, with Luc. Who goes to him? What’s the rule, if not that?”

She looked at Michael expectantly; Michael struggled upright, still clutching at his chest. He felt the hammering of his heart keenly. “He touches them,” he said. “With his hand – my hand. Everyone I’ve seen him steal, he’s been touching them when they died.”

Sofia began to laugh, slouching sideways back into her chair. She turned away from them, curled into a ball under her robe, muttering something under her breath.

Sobriquet looked down at her with exasperation, then at where Vera still knelt cradling Isolde’s corpse in her arms. “Every time I think these people can’t get crazier,” she muttered. “What the fuck does she mean?”

Michael shook his head, his thoughts racing. His chest burned. “Luc always said that everything special about him came from me, from the hand. He treated himself like some useless lump stuck onto it. The hand was the real power. The hand was the-” He paused. “The hand was the power. The two were the same in his mind. He wasn’t touching them with the hand-”

“Every fucking person in that storm!” Sofia crowed. “Everyone who dies to his light, everyone whose life is cut short by his souls!” She fell out of her chair, staggering upright from the floor again.

“And that’s why you’re cruel,” she spat. “Because you couldn’t bear to take any of that evil upon yourself, you left a space for him. He gets to be the evil, the assertive, the choice that makes itself unless resisted. We can’t be ignorant or fearful anymore, not like normal fucking people, no, we have to be better than that. We have to run towards you with all of our strength to survive, and if even that isn’t enough – we can only blame ourselves, for being weak, and stupid, and – and inadequate to the world.” She stared disconsolately at the ground. “I see them even now. Failing and mumbling the words they think will save them. But it won’t.”

Her head came up to look at Michael; she was crying now, her eyes swollen and red and fully awake, here, in this moment. “It won’t. They choose, and fail, and it’s not enough. You have to act. I have to act, or the balance falls to ruin, because that’s how your stupid rules made it work. You assume everyone can live up to your faith in them, and we can’t! We fucking can’t! We break, Michael.”

Sofia’s voice was torn, bloody, escaping between shuddering breaths. “And even if I hate you for being who you are,” she hissed, “for making my failures hurt this much – I am still Sibyl, you bastard, and I’m not going to fucking fail anymore.” She stood up straight and glared at him, loathing dripping from every angle of her form, redolent in her mocking tone as she spoke.

“My soul to the One.”

Sofia’s arm came up, and she shot herself in the head.