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He was cold, but this was nothing new. He had been cold on the frigid Icefield, living with the clan allied with his mysterious father. It had been cold the day he went out and never returned. It was cold as he lay gasping in the bloody snow surrounded by slavering and snapping maws, and death was like slipping into cold dark water.
That had not been the end, as the Mirrors’ Ridgeback master yanked him back from the possibility of peace. His soul was ripped in two like his body had been torn to shreds, and a numbness had come over him. He hardly noticed that his silks had been torn, that his wings were ripped, or that his face was poorly stitched together. He only cared about the little piece of his soul that was hammered into a ring and traded to his new Guardian mistress.
His current assignment was not the worst that he had been given. This time, he only had to keep watch while his mistress extracted her quarry from the wounded Tundra before her. With a last plunge of her paw, the dragon fell still.
He handed his mistress the incense and the empty glass orb and she began the ritual. She lit the incense and the smoke spiralled into the grey and empty sky. She directed it back down with a lazy swirl of her claw, reaching into the thick chest fur and seemingly extracting a silver stream from the dragon. She breathed it in, and for a moment was still.
He looked away. This was nothing new to him, but it still unnerved him to see part of the method that had led to his own creation. He had seen too many times now the deceased soul fighting his mistress behind her eyes, time seeming to stop while the battle raged. He silently and signlessly always hoped that the deceased would win, that a new soul would inhabit his mistress’s body and he might finally be free.
He was back on the Icefield, perhaps near the area that had once been his home. The tundra was mottled with the browns and whites of oncoming winter. The trees drew thick black lines up into the sky.
Just for a second, he thought he saw a flash of red.
A gasp from behind him signalled his mistress’s dominance in the internal struggle. She exhaled deeply into the glass orb and sealed the prison of the new pearly white Wisp, slipping it into his satchel.
He turned back to the tundra. There was nothing there.
*
His mistress decided that they would make camp on the Icefield and set him outside a cave for the night. He blocked the entrance with his body and she curled up inside, the fire glancing tantalizingly off the ring that held half his soul.
As the light danced off scales and walls of ice, he took up his sentinel post. He would not move throughout the night. He did not need to.
He saw it from the corner of his vision: the light bounced off something fluid like smoke, slinking through the darkness towards him. He did not flinch; he was incapable of fear.
The dragon’s arrival was announced by actual smoke, dark but thin, drifting around its body. It was a Pearlcatcher; but when he looked closer, he saw it had no pearl. It was luminescent white with somewhat bedraggled crimson wings, shining brilliantly under the rising moonlight. It had what appeared to be a mask, which moved fluently over its face. Its eyes, strikingly, featured the same blank stare he knew from his mistress as a sign of struggle for possession.
It sat on its haunches facing him and began to speak. Its voice rippled with echoes, pitches higher and deeper interspersed with the curt accent of the Icefield like a dragon’s claw dipping into a pool of water.
“What is your name?”
He considered, then looked down.
“Ah, you do not remember. We understand. Details slip away like stardust after too long. The two of us are similar; we remain in a world that should have moved on without us, haunting through discord.” They tilted their head. “We will call you Haunt. And you may call us Xenin.”
He paused, and then his voice came deep and gravelly like boulders scraping over plateaus on sheets of ice. “You cannot enter.”
Their face contorted with humour underlaid by a deep sadness. “She has stolen something from you that should never be anyone else’s. She takes and she collects and she toys with laws with which even the Plaguebringer and Gladekeeper do not interfere.
“We did something terrible once. We feel the wrongness of it every day and night and we can only hope to somehow make it right.” Their eyes glittered in the rising moonlight. “We want to help you get back your soul.”
They exhaled, a breath that seemed too long for the air in their lungs, fogging white in the chilled air. It swirled around Haunt, seeming to give off echoes and whispers, before dissolving. When it dissipated, Xenin sat atop a crag several dragon-lengths away, gazing out over the cliffs at the icy landscape below.
And we will succeed.
Haunt cocked his head. The words had come from Xenin, he knew, but they also seemed to come from within him; it was as if he himself had imagined their words.
There was plenty of room in that cavity you consider your body. We will guide you until we meet again. Until then, we will stay close.
He turned and looked once again at Xenin’s perch. They were gone.
The night passed cold and dark, the howling of winter wolves and the clink of the longnecks’ picks being his only indication of time. The moon rose and the moon set, and he sat unmoving, watching. Unthinking, except of the ring on his mistress’s finger.
As the sun escaped from the clutches of the possessive frozen land, sowing the earth with a grey light, there was a commotion from within the cave. Haunt stood, moving away from the entrance so that his mistress could leave. Her usual confidence seemed perturbed as she threw on her cowl and hat, scowling at her servant.
He felt something, a twinge of something stirring like a memory, but one which he had never had. A great room filled with glass balls, filled with smoke, the energy swirling and the souls straining against the walls of their prisons. The wisps giving a cry as one that turned into an unrestrained cackle revelling in the chaos. And then the memory, if it was that, was gone. Haunt blinked, an old habit.
“I must leave temporarily,” his mistress said to him brusquely. “Remain on the Icefield until I return. Keep looking for the haunted lair. Those tundra fools may be superstitious, but I’d put it down to an unsmoked soul any day.” She touched the ring on her finger. “I will find you.”
They set off in opposite directions, two halves of a soul travelling away from each other.
He set off down the mountainside, wandering but feeling almost tugged in certain directions. A gut feeling, he would say, if his gut still had any function. Soon enough, he saw them: striking crimson wings against the ice, the image shimmering through the drifting smoke around their body. Xenin. As he approached, he exhaled a breath that he hadn’t known he had been holding, and, despite the fact that his body was the same temperature as the air, it came out fogged. He felt heavier, suddenly, but less corporeal: he only noticed with dull acceptance as Xenin breathed back in the piece of their soul.
They tipped their head and spoke again. This time their voice was crisp, feminine, with that same clipped Icefield accent, the ripple of echoes more faint and subordinate. “The first step in our journey together involves a certain abandoned lair. Your mistress –” Their lip curled at the word “– believed it, like the locals, to be haunted. I know where it is.” Their eyes glittered. “The entrance is in fact quite closeby, but I cannot enter. I will need you to go in and retrieve a sword. You will know which one.”
The two started walking, and Haunt turned his attention on the Pearlcatcher. They walked with a stiff-legged step, an irregular lope at different speeds; it was if one leg were trying to run and another trying to limp while the tail lashed back and forth with excitement. Xenin was something of an enigma, he realized, a chimera. Something had happened to them and they were no longer one being.
As they neared, Xenin’s face began twitching, and they muttered low things that Haunt could not catch. He only knew they were close because they would laugh occasionally, their eyes open and afraid, or grit their teeth. The lair did not look like a lair at first. Merely a slightly higher mound on a field of snow mounds, Xenin brushed the snow and revealed a hole, just big enough for an Imperial to squeeze through. The hole was dark, and Haunt could not see the end. A sudden fear gripped him, one that he had not felt since his death.
“You must enter!” Xenin’s voice was loud, a proclamation, a decree of things to come. He would enter; it was foretold.
He shook his head, claws gripping the snow.
They whispered now, voice deep and reassuring, a promise. “I’ll protect you, my bamboo shoot.” Their voice became slightly more nasal, the echoes starting to resonate and overlap with each word. “I trusted you!” Young, high-pitched, feminine: “Be brave.” And then they let out a scream and bounded away, leaving the Imperial alone before the hole.
He sat, and considered, slowly. This had to be important. His soul was at stake.
He wriggled into the hole, and it quickly opened up into a larger cavern. A set of heavy wooden doors were shattered and off their hinges, a number of weapons strewn about the floor. Arrows were embedded in the icy wall, their tips charred and their lengths twisted. There was a path through the doors that was clear of any debris, an odd and disturbing path that seemed out of place. A battle had taken place here, but the attacker had not been touched.
Through the doors, everything was tidily in its place. A labyrinth of pristine glass cases, holding a variety of weapons and trophies, lined the walls and extended out into the cavern. He took a step forward.
He heard an echo from somewhere in the lair. What are you doing here? But it was not his voice, not his echo, and he was alone. The voice had a curt Icefield accent, naggingly familiar.
He took a few more steps, twisting between the glass cases. I’m here for you, of course. The voice sent chills down his spine, devoid of emotion but somehow toying, sadistic. He stopped for a moment as he crunched on broken glass.
I know what you’re doing. I heard about it and I won’t let you.
An image now: The Pearlcatcher glowed bright blue, shattering the case with a fluid punch. The Imperial put herself behind another one, stalling.
Haunt stepped forward, following the path of the echoes. There was something lingering in this lair, energy encasing the past in ice.
And what am I doing? The Pearlcatcher picked up one of the swords. The Imperial’s eye twitched a little.
You’re trying… you’re trying to make a monster.
Haunt could almost see them now, the two dragons circling like predator and prey. He could smell the desperation in the air.
No, Lyla. I’m trying to make the most powerful being that has ever lived.
He followed the apparition as it lunged around a case, driving the sword with a fierce finality that evoked a piercing cry. He saw the Pearlcatcher, iridescent white body and crimson wings, light the incense and smoke the Imperial’s soul. And he saw, when the hazy concoction of emotion subsided, the skeleton of an Imperial, lanced with the sword. And he understood.
He removed the sword and prepared the burial, carefully whispering a prayer over each bone as he interred it. He cleaned up the lair, removing the debris and broken glass, pushing the darkened snow over the fresh grave. When he was done, he wriggled outside, filling the hole with as many stones as he could. The energy was gone now, and there was no more reason to disturb the lair.
There was the issue of the sword. Xenin had requested it, but he understood they did not intend to come back. They wanted to make amends with the world, somehow, and they could not do it alone. The sword was a gift, and a powerful one at that. And he knew what he had to do with it. He was given a new purpose: when the Soul Smokers left a mess, he would clean it up. He would fix the disrespect they gave to the bodies of their victims, make sure that no Shade or energy used to the body for its own purposes, and take down any that had been reanimated. He attached the sheath to his body.
“Ah, there you are.” The familiar voice made his eyes go wide. He spun as his mistress approached, the ring gleaming ominously on her finger. “You found the lair, I take it?”
“It shall not be broached.”
Manylem frowned, touching the ring. “What did you say?” she whispered dangerously, her eyes narrowing.
Haunt felt the ring bite at him, his own soul urging him to obey. He felt as if the ring were screaming quietly, calling to him, begging. And he felt the sword in its sheath respond, giving him the willpower to draw it, to raise it, and to take the ring that was rightfully his.
He put the ring on, and left the guardian. She was no longer his mistress. He had spared her, and that was more than she deserved.