The Grip of Lost Souls

Pyres rarely catch in the Flooded Lands.

Peat burials are the practical alternative. Corpses may sink well beyond sight, but sometimes they return. Not as themselves. The living, quick to fear these undead, devised increasingly intricate rituals to prevent their return. Some techniques failed less than others. 

But the only certain way to stop your dead from rising is to burn them. Ashes and chips of bone cannot grasp at your ankles and drag you to the depths. 

Yet, determined as the lost often are, they've other ways to return. 

Only a fool dares underestimate the power of the dead.

A young man called Jagal with a hawk called Enthr wends his way through rainy bogland. Any long-rotted remains here are buried deep underfoot, beyond his notice. His concern is instead with the living, specifically a young woman called Kaiah whom he's never met. He has only a rough description of her appearance and the heartfelt concerns of those who glimpsed her heading this way days ago. And a promise of payment, should he successfully return her home. That suffices for motivation, he tells himself. Insofar as he's had any these past few months—years? But dwelling on that will not help to find Kaiah.

Searching the waterlogged path is little better. No footprints hold here for him to follow. Still he moves along steadily, drawing nearer to things he cannot see through the thick mist. 

He does see a woman. He does not know her. He knows her. They fought a basilisk together. Even now she stands over its body, her blood-gleaming spear thrust high in victory.

The image vanishes.

Jagal hesitates for a half-step before continuing. He wishes he were more surprised, but he often sees things that aren't there. It worsens the longer he's remained awake. He last slept five days ago now, though keeping track is difficult. Even moreso when the skies have been an unrelenting, endless grey for the entirety of his stay in the Flooded Lands.

Unrelenting himself, he moves forward even as visions come and go. A bard with a crooked hat and a worse smile. A mangy tabby about to bite his hand. A watercolor gathering dust in a closed window. Each comes with a sure sense of familiarity. He knows them.

But he doesn't. He couldn't. Had he seen these things before, his muddled memory would never have placed them so quickly.

Unease finally begins to slink around his stomach. If these visions aren't born of his personal madness, what else could they be? Nothing natural—and he doesn't much care for the supernatural. He would prefer the dead keep far away, where they cannot bother the living and the living cannot bother them. Those who die should simply stay dead, he feels.

But, of course, it often isn't so.

He's quite ready now to leave the bog behind, but the barely-crusted cut on his arm will not allow it. He vowed to see this mission through. He must return with Kaiah, dead or alive, or he will be forever disgraced—and left unpaid. That alone is all the motivation he needs, he tells himself. 

Maneuvering through mud and muck is more exhausting than he'd like to admit, but he refuses to break momentum. Still he finds no sign of Kaiah here. He curses the mist that obscures the way ahead. The erratic—spectres? hallucinations? memories?—do nothing to make his vision clearer, either.

So Enthr's cry is his only warning.

Blighthounds roam these mires. They are said to seek out places whose doom nears, but just as often they den where souls already stain the air. Wherever they may wander, they must hunt for sustenance.

And so it is that Jagal finds himself bare moments away from a blighthound's curved horns goring into him. With Enthr's warning he evades the charge, but the bog sucks greedily at his feet. He'd best stand what ground he can and eliminate the beast before it can do the same to him.

Daggers drawn, he sweeps in to strike, but the hound is swifter. Its smoke-dark teeth sink into his thigh. Despite the searing pain, he slashes at the beast, and this strike fares much better. The blighthound releases him. Jagal retreats mere steps into a patch of mist and shadows. The smell of blood is sharp, but the hound is hard-pressed to scent his direction with a drenched-red muzzle.

Jagal strikes from this darkness, and both his blades find their mark in the beast's rough hide. As his own blood drifts away yellowed in the bog water, he moves in for a final strike. Before it has the chance to land, the hound looses a howl.

The bay of a blighthound is a horror in itself. It thrums the joints, chills the spine, clenches the stomach.

And its echoes reach bones beyond the living.

Jagal's blades slip from his hands as a crushing presence seizes his skull. He is no longer in the bog. He stands in a home, his home—not his home—with the warmth and crackle of the worn hearth before him. His fianceé hums as she comes in from the snow, shaking it from her feet before she approaches. A fine shortbow is in her hands. The very one he'd fancied for a while now.

"Go on, you oaf," she says, holding it out. Unthinking, he takes it.

A horrible crunch of bone. The longbow held steadily, string still vibrating with the faintest hum, as a shadow falls down dead. He knows who it is. He does not know who it is yet. This is not real. This cannot be real. His stomach roils.

His fianceé bemoans the fletcher's prices and says he'll have to deal with that bit himself. His aunt says nothing as she bleeds out in his lap. His brother invites him to dance, hard as it will be with his arm in a sling. His daughter presents him with a flower crown already falling to pieces. He is in his home, in her yard, in the bog, in his favorite meadow. He is well, he is injured, he is dying of infection, he is everywhere and nowhere and all of them and none of them.

He cannot recall who he is.

The visions and sensations fade into the foul swamp. It has been lifetimes, but it has been mere moments. The blighthound snarls. With little time to react, the man turns and flees. Through water, through peat, through pain, through flickers of all the restless memories stirred up with the beast's howl. His ankle twists on a misstep, but even with the terrible throbbing he is not sure this is happening, or has happened, to him or to anyone else he may be.

He only knows he must run harder.

The man gasps for breath as thin branches creak beneath him. The growing downpour beats on his shoulders, plastering dead leaves to his shirt and sending more to swirl in the rising waters below. He may have evaded the blighthound, but his peril is far from finished. His leg burns and weeps with blood, and the press of his boot around his swollen ankle is growing worse. He must take action before all becomes unbearable.

Though he remains hazy on many things, the echoes in the air have faded now, and he easily recalls which healing concoctions he keeps on hand. He pries open a bottle of herbs, and the sharp scent flickers with memories—empty cabinets, momentary mentors, smaller hands changing bandages—brief and hazy and surely his own.

But Jagal must focus on his present if he's to have a future. He twists to examine the arced gouges on his thigh. With the motion, branches crack. He throws out a hand in reflex, but it's of no use. The soaked boughs beneath him give, and he plunges into brackish water.

After an unpleasant struggle with the current, he reaches more solid ground. He takes a few more staggering paces. Bits of stone begin to crunch underfoot. Through the veil of rain and his own weakening consciousness, he hardly registers what lies ahead. He perceives only some form of shelter, and that is enough. Laboriously he pushes forward into our ruins. Few ceilings remain this far from the heart of things, but he hopes to find just one spot safe from this relentless rain.

He is not the only one.

When he sees an oweote in the floods and shadows, he's first dismissive. Though the creatures' bite is menacing, the little things are rarely aggressive. But then Jagal spots a dark glint among golden scales, raw wounded flesh struggling to bridge the gaps. The beast is iron-wracked. In its pain and fury this oweote retains none of its natural temperament. With a crackling of afflicted joints and the scrape of iron on iron, it twists its sinuous neck to face its new enemy.

The man strikes first. The oweote reels and screams, but it is too furious to retreat. Claws, strong even before the iron crept in, score rib-deep into Jagal's chest. His swift counter ends the creature's suffering. It slumps into a pitiful pile of scales, iron, and sores. 

He sets about cleaning himself off. There's no shortage of sky-fresh water, though the cold is numbing by now. All the better for his wounds, but not for the coordination to treat them. By now they are difficult even to inventory.

As he scans what he thought was an uninjured arm, an odd glint catches his eye. Feeling faint, he twists for a better look as an iron-grey blemish begins to spread. The pit in his stomach allows no thought. He spins the knife in his grip and carves the infection out. He cannot let this spread to Enthr, at any cost.

He casts off the chunk of iron-flesh with a wet thap. No more takes its place, no matter how long he stares at the freshest flow of blood.

It only now occurs to him he has never once heard of a human contracting this affliction. Slowly, he turns to peer at the discarded piece of himself again. No trace of metal. Did it recede somehow, he wonders, or was it never there to begin with?

His head is in no condition to make sense of it—none of him is. He pushes further into the crumbling corridors until he stumbles on a suitably sheltered spot. Soaked and shivering, he discards whatever cloth he can afford to and sits to dress his wounds. During the effort, rations spill onto the floor, but salvageably so. Perhaps he ought to dip into them now. He must keep up his strength, and he won't be gathering more provisions anytime soon. Not in this condition.

As he wrestles with a piece of jerky, the exertion and exhaustion close in. Rain shushes and drums against what walls it can find, and sleep overtakes him before he has the slightest chance to fend it off.

Jagal jolts awake, desperately gasping for air he already has, as his dream-injuries and battle-injuries fail to separate themselves. By the time he musters any grip on his current whereabouts, he feels far less rested than he was before. He curses himself for being fool enough to stray where only nightmares ever await.

Rustling wings startle him. A bird perches an arm's length away, but it is not Enthr. Unconcerned with the man, the raven adds a dried freyberry to a tiny pile of provisions. The very provisions Jagal spilled earlier, he suspects.

With a grunt, he moves to shoo the creature but only flinches. The raven is not intimidated. It pulls a scrap of cloth up around the food, then clamps its beak around the parcel. Only then does Jagal recall talk of the missing woman's raven.

He calls for Braedan to stay where he is. After struggling to his feet, then catching his breath, Jagal explains that he's here to rescue Braedan's master. The raven at least appears to listen before taking off. He lands again before long. Waits. Continues.

Jagal struggles to follow. Shadows cut deep in this part of the ruin, and chipped floors are unkind to wounded legs. Visions yet echo—a troll hoard with a trap he knows all too well, an old hound he lost years ago—but the memories are weak enough to shake off.

He perseveres and arrives at Rif's temple. It had little majesty in its earliest years. Now it is no more than a few crumbling walls and a faded altar. And Rif themself, though they do not make their presence known. They offer no aid nor inhibition. As the Bone-God of Soundness and Stability, Rif cares not for change. If they are now trapped within this space, then they are content to remain.

Unaware of the bone-god's gaze, Jagal browses the burnt and broken offerings. Figurines worn to facelessness. Long-withered pondsblood leaves. A thin bone mirror of some value—he whisks it away. But there is nothing he truly seeks here. No traces of Kaiah, no black iron.

Only stale air and forgotten prayers.

Beneath the raven's watchful eye, Jagal wends deeper into the heart of the ruins. Though weak daylight creeps in through the gaps, the edifices are stable enough for faster progress. When he enters a second temple, he considers it a place private enough to pause and check his bandages, but nothing more. 

He is mistaken.

Knuta's temple, though wet with floodwaters, is little different from Rif's. Ashes in altars, remnants of bone and honeyseed and figurines, a smell of mildew and old blood in the air. Jagal frees a silvery bangle from the cinders. Pieces of a long-lost language are inscribed on its interior, but this causes him no concern.

He's pulling his feet through the shallow waters when comes a rushing presence. The pain of frozen air without the cold, the rasp of molded sand crumbling to nothing in your hands. Though he hasn't the faintest idea what happened, he can already feel the foreignness of it. The strength now drains from his bones like sap from a gouged tree. He relinquishes the bracelet and takes plashing steps back, but Knuta's hold is not so easily broken.

Unlike Rif, the Bone-God of Enfeeblement and Decay is eager to make herself known.

Though Jagal perceives no image, she whispers formless words that he somehow comprehends. She has been bound to this place for untold ages. Her sway on the world began to fade when worship ceased. She hasn't the power to leave on her own now, but she can bind herself to a single vessel. And should he transport her beyond these hallowed grounds, she'll at last be free to walk the Flooded Lands.

The crumbling sensation continues to eat away at Jagal. He attempts to dissuade her, but her mind is decided. He is strong enough to bear her curse a while, she's sure, and she will not let this chance escape her.

He isn't so certain. His pulse is already sluggish and feathery, enough to leave him unsteady. But sheer force of will is insufficient to drive the bone-god away, so he has little choice. The best he can do is set about his own mission with renewed urgency.

But his pace grows slower with each passing moment.

Braedan flits ahead in short stints. Jagal falls behind ever further. Rubble clutters the floors, but more than anything he struggles with the weight of his own limbs. How he's to rescue himself, let alone another, from the depths of this swamp he cannot fathom.

A shudder blurs the ceiling. Jagal sees pieces shift, as if a nest of strange, stony creatures is stirring. He dives aside as they come crashing down. Dust and ash billows, and he coughs, but only a few straggling chips come close to hitting him. The birds are unharmed, and Knuta has not slowed his reflexes.

But he can hardly believe the ache in his legs after a single jump. Rising again is a herculean effort, yet somehow he proceeds. The weakness gnaws. He soon has no choice but to lighten his considerable load. Weapons. Ropes. Lesser-used herbs. A trail of supplies winds behind him like odd meandering footprints. Braedan seems to tire of waiting for him. Jagal strives after him yet, but between hallucinations and memory-visions, he loses his way. Downward he winds instead, into the true heart of the ruins.

Far below the swamp, where the smell of rot and salt has yet to reach, lies a cavern so ancient even we cannot recall who made it. All three of us consider it sacred—at odds as we are, it is the only place we may truly coexist. We may all have little sway now, but the power we retain is strongest here. 

Jagal can feel only the faintest sense of history as he enters. Soft blue luminescence skirts off carved marble and dribbling streams that feed an eerily still pool. Though it be beautiful, he cannot appreciate it with Knuta's curse growing yet stronger. If he breaks his momentum, he fears all will be over. He should have abandoned his too-heavy boots along the way, he thinks, but he's no hope of stopping to remove them now.

Knuta, full of hope herself, goads him onward. He pleads again for her to leave, but she refuses. He has lasted much longer than her last vessel, and she is certain he's plenty of strength left yet. He is not so sure. He may be no stranger to weariness, but this is something different. An evisceration, a hollowing, an unmaking. The sensation of every bone cracking, crumbling to ash, fading into suffocating nothingness.

He cannot endure any longer. He must stop this, stop her, drive it all away somehow. But he is powerless to fight against a bone-god. And she will never relent so long as he has the strength to transport her.

So perhaps that is what he can change.

With hollowed legs and clouded mind he straddles a jutting branch of stone. With little prompting, his limbs fail. His head strikes the stone with a crack, and his consciousness sputters at the barest beginnings of pain. But he finds himself sliding further, with no strength to stop before he tumbles into the pool.

A cold shock seizes him. The water surges on all sides and swallows him up. The pool's surface agitates, then smooths again as he sinks. He struggles, but his limbs have gone numb from enervation and cold alike. The fight fades away. He can only watch a few pieces of precious air bubble away before his eyes slip shut.

These waters are not deep, but it takes little to drown. 

Jagal awakens retching water and coughing blood. With the pounding throughout his surely-cracked skull, he hardly realizes his head is above water. All is a blur of pain and cold. The most he can dredge from his rattled mind is that he must get out of here before he is found. 

His arms are slick, and his gloves provide little aid in gripping the marble. Eventually he finds the purchase to haul himself out. Something about this strikes him as odd, but he cannot say why. He knows only to keep moving, even as the world bucks and twists and threatens to fade. His boots slip and his balance teeters, but he hurtles forward.

Enthr circles between the man and the nearest exit. A few droplets hit Jagal's shoulder, but when he checks in alarm, only water stains his shirt. The hawk is uninjured. A rush of cool relief hampers Jagal's progress until he takes a number of tumbles. Finally he drags his way up the stairs, leaving the sacred place empty of all but the faintest plashing of water.

Knuta left well before him. She has no use for a broken vessel. Withdrawing to again bide her time was a great frustration, but she preferred it to the risk of dying alongside him. 

But he yet lives. Within crumbling corridors, he prods at the gash that has been dripping blood into his eyes. Though he has a better idea of the damage, the pain is such that he narrowly avoids swooning. Hastily propped against a half-ruined wall, he digs into his pack only to find his bandages soaked through. He attempts to stanch the bleeding with them. It works poorly.

Vaguely he feels he's escaped whatever necessitated his flight, but his mind remains too hazy to be sure. He pushes forward. Blood trails behind. Grimy rubble and blanched gaps of sky are tinted red in his sight. They threaten to fade away altogether. 

Then he stumbles into a room with a few walls and the majority of its ceiling. He can register no more than that before he collapses. Shakily he reaches into his bags again. A handful of herbs to stem bleeding. A few bandages, marginally drier now. He cannot close the wound in this state, but he can prevent more blood from running down his face. The task consumes every grain of focus he can summon as the room tilts softly around him. 

Accordingly, he's yet to realize he's entered the third temple.

Our temples were built, filled, and forgotten in the same way. Burnt remnants of seidrberry and hunters' bones are little different from honeyseed ashes and iron-diggers' bones. But the Bone-God of Opposition and Sustenance is not one to dwell on similarities. Kjoptr watches the newcomer collapse well within range of possession, but he makes no move to act. Knuta's traces wreath the man like a foul smoke, and Kjoptr has no use for a vessel already drained and discarded. 

The discarded vessel does not clearly remember all that happened in the last temple. Once he forces himself to his feet, nothing hinders him from browsing the remains of offerings. Though he cannot bring fine details into focus, a scrimshaw knife draws his eye. He tucks it away with some difficulty. As his arms fall, something lands impatiently on his shoulder. He startles, sending the temple teetering about him, but he seizes the altar before he can fall. The raven is unfazed.

Jagal stares at the creature for a good while, his thoughts as off-kilter as his vision, before recognizing Braedan. Another good while to recognize why he recognizes Braedan. And yet another before he notices the voice that has been calling out for him since he first stood.

Against the wall lies Kaiah, only upright enough to drink. A scrap of cloth faintly smelling of Jagal's rations lies near her hand. Braedan alights on her other side. She hardly moves, but there is nothing feverish in her eyes. Only something weary and concerned. She makes little progress ascertaining Jagal's condition by asking questions, but she is too weak to check with her own hands. Nor can she even rise—she hasn't had the strength for days now. Knuta gripped her swiftly upon her entrance to the ruins, and the curse was not kind. But when she set foot in Kjoptr's temple, it receded. Though Kaiah did not know, precisely, that none of us may enter another's domain, she knew it seemed safer here. That, and she had little choice left to her by then.

Jagal hardly listens, the buzzing in his ears allowing little more as he strains to remain standing. He absently affirms that something similar happened to him. Kaiah expresses her astonishment that he's even on his feet. With little deliberation, she attributes it to a true heroic spirit. After some delay, he laughs woodenly and agrees, with oversaturated cheer.

Before she can comment further, he kneels. Whether or not he'll stand again, let alone successfully lift her, he cannot guess. But if Knuta has taken a vessel more than once, she could well strike again. He cannot risk staying on these grounds any longer.

Kaiah drops her willowy arms over his shoulders. That is as close to holding on as she's like to get. He props her against his back, braces himself, and manages to rise on trembling legs. Her slight weight presses into his shoulders as if he carries a bundle of iron pillars. His hands go slick with sweat in moments, and the temple threatens to fade around him. 

He lurches outside before it has the chance.

The most aggressive spirits are rarely the kindest. Those that groan when their remains are trod upon, those that lash out for any chance to twitch, blink, breathe, even a moment—these are the souls that act. 

The priests sworn to us long ago twisted this to their advantage. With careful direction, the strongest mystics could determine how long and how powerfully a lost soul could influence a living being. It is an imprecise process. The lost soul skirts along the living one's scratching for purchase. With greater time spent, the two overlap more fully. With greater power, the lost soul more thoroughly overtakes what it touches.

With no one to guide them now, the spirits of the bog can only clutch blindly, casting their thoughts and memories over the living with aimless desperation. But in the old days, they could melt away specific memories on command. If sufficiently empowered, they could wholly overwrite any soul within a few paces of their own heat-fractured bones.

But with the old ways lost and the bone-gods forgotten, only one part of these ruins can strengthen a soul enough to conquer a living body.

Jagal and Kaiah exit Kjoptr's temple with mist lashing at their eyes. His footing unsteady, Jagal swiftly decides to travel along any remnants of flooring as far as he can. He will not retrace his steps, but he is certain he can maintain his sense of direction.

Something other than stone begins to crunch underfoot. The decrepit walls form odd nooks. The air grows dense and pressing. More foreign memories seize the senses of the living. Jagal is too intent on putting one foot before the other to pay this much mind, but Kaiah feels otherwise. She asks if it wouldn't be safer to pull aside, into the peat, for the remainder of their journey. He rejects the idea. Compared to struggling through the bog till the dregs of his strength give out, a "bad feeling" is surely a lesser risk.

He continues. Visions come, wave after wave. His knees scrape against obstacles he cannot perceive. Kaiah makes one more plea to turn aside, but he is too lost in infinite pasts to hear her.

They enter the Great Sacrificial Hall. Time has fragmented its edifice, yet the air still smells of ash and desperation. The bones of those who offered their souls to us, willingly or otherwise, coat the ground like worn gravel. Though innumerable graves have been swallowed by this bog, nowhere else is so steeped in death-blood and the desire to keep living.

The man moves mechanically, over bone chips that clack and crackle, his legs maintaining momentum even as all he knows goes white.

His name is Delos. He is a powerful mystic sworn to the bone-gods—the most powerful, were you to ask him—and he shed much blood for us. It was only natural for him to be burnt here himself when his time came. Though he does not agree that his time ever came—how could it, when he is alive and walking now? But his motions have an odd disjointedness to them, even as he has yet to register the pain causing it. His memories and his being struggle to cross blank spaces that they may piece back together. Whatever they must push aside to succeed is of no concern to him. He shall do anything he must to serve himself, and he shall feel no shame for it. How could it be otherwise? After his family—

His family—

His family—

Jagal revolts. As complacent as he was to watch his self drift from his grip, this he cannot allow. These memories shall not be supplanted, by any means, so long as any piece of his mind remains intact. And he cannot trust them in Delos's hands, so if Jagal must be the one to carry them, then he shall. He will not allow himself to be vanquished here after all.

But a struggle between souls is not a clash of iron. It is two molten spirits mixed together, scorching each other, droplets of both lost as one struggles to separate what remains. There are no jarring colors to distinguish or misplayed chords to pick apart. There is only the amorphous, instinctual feeling of what does and does not belong to you.

But instinct is a fickle tool. If one soul is despicably selfish and the other has long since lost the ability to consider himself, that separation ought to be easy. One could surely not be mistaken for the other, by any logic. But feeling is not logic. A battered and misguided soul could easily believe the foreign trait to be its own and reject the other.

And so the process goes. If you are undyingly certain that this is what and who you are, then that is what you will retain. Even if you are completely mistaken. 

But now you are no longer mistaken. That is the new shape of your very soul. 

And you will never realize what you just lost.

The man wakes in a fishing shack with such a strong smell of earthen decay he's surprised it did not rouse him instantly. After determining his charge—three charges currently, he manages to remember—is nearby, he moves to leave. Belatedly he stops to ascertain if Kaiah is yet Kaiah, but he only knew her poorly. It is a struggle even to recall her name, as the blow to his head did his already battered memory little service. He manages to confirm her relationship with Braedan, at the very least. That is enough for him.

But even if she struggled much less to defend her soul, she has not recovered physically. Thus he carries her again, despite recovering so little himself. He staggers along pitifully until a local crosses their path. Recognizing Kaiah, they swiftly guide the pair and their birds back to her home circle. There, the two rest. Neither is capable of more for some time.

Once the man is well enough to reject unwelcome assistance, he seeks out the one who promised payment for this quest. They linger at Kaiah's bedside. Despite her neighbors' best efforts, she has only grown weaker. The man swiftly suspects something beyond illness. For how could either of them have driven away a bone-god in the midst of fighting for their very souls? If Knuta were to silently cling to a vessel already being transported out of the ruins... 

The man voices none of this. He is prepared to walk away in resignation. But his client, knowing him to be an herbalist, promises greater payment should he treat Kaiah. From that offer he cannot turn away so easily. He may see no hope of curing her, but he can weave an illusion of recovery simply enough. It need only last until he receives his payment.

His usual store depleted, he gathers fresh herbs and returns to brew her a strengthening tea of pondsblood and seidrberry. He does not realize these are more than mere roots and leaves. They are the living things most favored by Rif and Kjoptr—their very symbols in the mortal world.

And no bone-god may inhabit another's domain.

The vessel drinks in a steep brew of these bone-gods' plants. Knuta is forced away. And now she is not on hallowed ground. She cannot survive without a vessel here. But there is another, just beyond her grasp, if she could only reach the slightest bit farther...

But the man now carries a scrimshaw knife devoted to Kjoptr, and she cannot take him, either. She hovers about Kaiah as long as she is able, but the strange secondhand presence of the other bone-gods will not fade quickly enough. With no wellspring of power here to draw upon, Knuta perishes.

There is no sign of her passing beyond the faintest thrum in the air, easily dismissed. So far as the man knows, Kaiah's apparent improvement is sure to collapse upon his exit. But he can leave satisfied with his payment, his vow fulfilled and his grift undiscovered. That is, undiscovered until Kaiah succumbs—but there is nothing he could have done to truly help her regardless. Accordingly, he wills his conscience to be silent.

It complies instantly. Even the barest insistent prickle fails to remain as he walks away.

Just for a moment, a cold feeling of wrongness presses tight into his chest, as if he'd reached for a clean bandage and been given a writhing handful of maggots instead. That was far too easy. Where was the nagging reminder that, even should he find a way to live with it, he does not for one moment deserve to profit?

The choking clash persists until he wrests it aside with bewilderment. He cannot fathom why his own reaction struck him so. Moving along without an ounce of contrition for his selfishness was entirely standard.

It is, Jagal decides, exactly how he has always been.