The quiet came easier than he expected.
Nathan sat against the broken wall with his eyes shut and let the noise drain out of his head, one thread at a time. The hunger. The theft. The dead room. Kira breathing in the corner. He didn’t fight any of it. He’d learned that much in the tree and on the storeroom floor: you didn’t force the stillness, you sank beneath it, down through the water into the cold place where nothing pulled at you.
The world thinned. The light behind his eyelids went black.
And then he was standing in it.
The endless dark opened around him, floorless and silent, and Nathan let out a breath he wasn’t sure he’d actually taken. Last time it had cost him his life to get here. This time he’d simply closed his eyes and gone quiet, and here he was, whole, alive, standing in his own Sea of Souls by choice.
’So that’s the door.’
Three flames burned in the black now, spread out across the dark at a distance from one another, each a small steady point of pale green light.
He went to the nearest and knew it before he reached it. The wolf, curled patient inside the fire, oversized paws and thin legs, the whole animal wound down and waiting. The other two he liked less. He recognized the shapes in them the moment he got close, the broad slump of one and the lean crouch of the other, and something in him went cold.
Perrin. Hask.
They’d killed him, so the Mark had taken them, and now they hung here in his dark like the wolf did, his to raise or his to spend.
Nathan looked at the two slaver-flames for a long moment.
’No.’
He didn’t want them at his back. Not walking beside him, not fighting for him, not existing near Kira in any form. Whatever use a pair of dead slavers might have been, it wasn’t worth carrying them.
He reached toward the first, and thought, the way he’d reached for the wolf in the storeroom, and the system answered.
[Render marked soul into Soul Essence? — Hask]
’Do it.’
The flame guttered, shrank, and collapsed inward, and where it had been there was a brief bright bloom of green before it winked out entirely.
[Soul rendered. Soul Essence +1]
He did the same to the second.
[Soul rendered. Soul Essence +1]
Perrin’s flame died the same quiet way, and then there were two lights in the dark instead of three, and Nathan felt no grief at all watching them go. They’d smiled at him on the road. He watched them become fuel and turned his back on the empty space.
That left the wolf.
Nathan crouched in front of its flame. The animal’s dead green eyes tracked him from inside the fire, and he felt that same thread run between them, taut and cold, his.
He remembered the clearing. How it had crossed nine paces in a stride and a half. How it had planted a paw and turned its whole body around it, faster than anything he’d ever seen, grazing him four times before he’d even found a weapon.
’That speed.’
’I couldn’t touch it. I want that.’
[Extract ability from bound soul? — Wind Wolf]
[Cost: 1 Soul Essence]
’Yes.’
The cold thread pulled tight, and something flowed up it out of the flame and into his chest, and Nathan felt it settle into him and take root, a coiled readiness low in his legs that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
[Ability Acquired: Wind-Stride — Apprentice Grade]
’A burst of speed. Change direction on nothing. Close distance before your enemy sees you move.’
Nathan opened and closed one hand in the dark.
’Now we’re getting somewhere.’
More text was waiting, patient, in the green.
[Level Up! — Level 1 → Level 2]
[EXP: 110 / 100]
[+3 Stat Points]
He’d crossed a hundred somewhere in the storeroom, the two kills tipping him over. Nathan pulled up the allocation and looked at his stats, and they were still the numbers of a half-starved boy, but they were his to change now.
He thought about the storeroom. About Blade of Death surging up his arm and the grey draining the strength out of him even as it fed on Hask, about how close he’d come to being too slow when Perrin reached for him.
The skill cost him. Every time. It ate his vitality to do what it did, and if he was going to lean on it, he needed a body that could take the strain and legs that could carry him out afterward.
He put two points into Agility and one into Stamina.
STR: 2 | AGI: 4.5
VIT: 3 | INT: 4
END: 4 | WIS: 3
The change was small but he felt it, a faint loosening through his limbs, the deep ache of the last two days easing by a fraction. Not strength. He’d never be the man who overpowered anyone. But speed he could use. Speed and rot and a thing in the dark that came when he called it.
’Enough to work with.’
He almost left it there.
Then his eye caught the last line on the interface, the one he hadn’t looked at properly since the forest, sitting quiet under everything else.
[Soul Mark]
Three names under it now. He’d half expected to see Perrin and Hask struck through, spent, gone. Instead there was only one name still lit, the other two greyed and crossed where he’d rendered them down.
The lit one was Nolan.
Nathan reached for it, curious, wanting to know what the Mark actually did with a killer who was still walking around out there somewhere.
He touched the name.
And the dark tore open.
The Sea of Souls dropped away from under him, the flames and the black and the quiet all ripping sideways at once, and the world lurched, and slammed back into place somewhere else entirely.
Nathan staggered.
He was standing on a wooden floor. Warm light, low and yellow. The smell of spilled ale and woodsmoke and too many bodies in one room. Somewhere a fiddle was going, badly, and men were laughing over it, and a woman was shouting an order across a bar counter thick with old varnish and older stains.
A tavern.
He was standing in the middle of a crowded tavern, and none of it was his. He hadn’t walked here. A heartbeat ago he’d been sitting against a broken wall on the edge of the district with his eyes shut, and now there was a fire crackling to his left and a drunk man passing straight through the space where his shoulder should have been.
Through him.
Nathan looked down at his own hands and saw the room dimly behind them.
’What is this?’
He turned in a slow circle, and the tavern turned with him, solid and loud and real and utterly unaware of him, and his heart was hammering in a chest that was somehow both here and sixty feet away against a broken wall.
’Where am I? How did I get here? This isn’t the Sea of Souls. This isn’t anywhere I’ve—’
Then he saw the man at the corner table.
Sitting alone with his back to the wall and a cup untouched in front of him, flat-eyed, patient, watching the door the way a man watches a door when killing people is his trade.
Nathan’s blood went cold.
He knew that face. He’d only seen it once, for a moment, in the dark of his own bedroom, right before it flicked a wrist across the room and opened his mother’s throat.
Nolan.