I ignored the priest and his insistence that I talk to this person or that one. My feet carried me across the room to talk to two of the five humans in the room. The old woman was the first to gnce in my direction. While her focus returned to what she was doing, I was sure that I detected a smile filling her expression.
Now, I couldn’t tell you exactly what gave her expression away. Not when most of her face was tilted in such a way that I could not see much more than the side facing me. So maybe it was a combination of the wrinkles around her eyes deepening. Or maybe it was the small dimples that appeared as the tip of her mouth twitched up.
Then again, maybe it was a combination of all that and the tone in which she spoke. “Oh dear, it is nice to see you doing so well.” Her words caused the old man next to her to shake his head as he looked away from the grill. His eyes looked at her before turning to see just who it was that was approaching them.
Almost as soon as his eyes found mine, a sense of recognition seemed to fsh through his eyes. Unfortunately for them, I was fairly sure that they were mistaking me for someone else. Not when it was impossible to link my current self with the one they had met. The person that they had only talked to for maybe ten minutes.
Before he could say anything, I tried to correct them both. “I am not who you think I am.”
While the old man scoffed, the old woman barked out a short, sharp ugh as she said “Right!”
“What the cantankerous old woman…” he started but was forced to stop as she elbowed him in the ribs.
“I’ll show you cantankerous you old coot.”
“Next to me means is that we do remember you.” He spoke as if he hadn't been interrupted.
“But how?” I asked with a mixture of confusion at his words and concern for their mental well-being.
“You think that we survived to be this old simply by being lucky or by pying it safe?” The old woman pointed at the old man with the knife in her hand. “This man was always getting us into trouble. There was this one time that he accepted a dare to go after a spider nest in a cave – naked.”
“Oi,” he smacked her knife away with his spatu. “It worked out didn’t it.”
“Only because B’lin convinced everyone to go in after you!” The old woman’s voice rose as she spoke. Punctuating her words with the sound of metal hitting metal. The noise stopped when he pulled his spatu back to flip the burgers on the grill.
“I would have been fine.”
I tried to interrupt the two to get back to my question. Unfortunately, the two of them ignored me as the old woman roughly smashed the side of her knife into a piece of garlic. “Sure, if the nest was small but the damn thing practically filled the cave. A cave that, need I remind you, was nearly as rge as this fucking city.”
“Okay,” he relented. “I will admit that the nest was a fair bit rger than I had expected. Plus, who allowed the colony to develop to the point that the queen could start altering her children? The fucking fireproofed spiders were a nightmare to kill. I couldn’t even burn away the nest because of the fuckers.”
Giving up on my first question, for now, I managed to interject a new one. “So how did you kill them?”
“The old-fashioned way my dear.” The old woman spoke softly, as if to a child.
“What she means is we smashed, sshed, and squashed the buggers.” His grin was wide as he recalled the memory.
“It was a bloody mess was what it was.” Her hand stilled as a shudder visibly rippled up and down her body. “Spider blood and guts everywhere. Worst part was that we didn’t even get paid for it.”
“I was more angry that I lost the bet more than anything.” The old man’s voice was a bit mournful. They both stood there for a moment before he looked at me. “Now, what was your question again dear?”
“How do you two know me?”
“OH, that’s right.” He nodded though the old woman interrupted him. “As I was saying, it isn’t just luck or pying it safe that allowed us to reach old age. We have a few skills that help us depending on the situation. One of them, the one that is most relevant to your question, is our ability to see souls.”
“To gaze into the twilight of existence and behold the Spectral Tapestry – a swirling carnival of light and echoes. Where souls pirouette like errant fireflies. See through the jumbled prism of life’s nonsense. Witness the fractured dreams and whispered riddles tangled in the cosmic giggle. Each soul a patchwork of ancient and modern lulbies intermixed with the absurd ughter of forgotten stars. All of which dance upon the edge of reality. On the edge of life and death. Where madness meets sanity. Where the chaotic symphony of life meets the melodic serenade of fleeting shadows. Where even the logic of time and space is id bare. This is the curse and blessing of a seer.” The old man’s words were deep and full of meaning, yet, at the same time, they meant nothing to me.
“Thank you for reading the skill description out loud.” The old woman growled as her empty hand reached up to rub the bridge of her nose. “It gives me a fucking headache every time I hear it.” Her words gave me pause as that was one weird description. It almost sounded as though the system had a meltdown when it generated it.
“So you can see souls?” I asked, trying to get a handle on what they were saying and what it had to do with recognizing me.
“Sort of.” She winced a little. “We can see parts of a soul, but not the whole thing.”
“Those that can tend to go insane.” The old man chimed in.
“But that little bit that we can see tends to be enough to see just a bit of what makes that person tick.”
“And what did you see when you saw me?” I asked, a bit afraid of what they would say.
“That you…” The old man started only for the old woman to let the knife drop as she blurred toward him. Her hand smmed over his mouth as she spoke. “Unfortunately, we cannot tell you.”
“Why? Is it a system limitation or something?”
“Nothing like that. Just that, every time we tell a person about themselves, they go a bit insane and end up getting themselves killed. Taking quite a few people down with themselves.” Suddenly she yanked her hand back. She gred at the old man. “Keep your tongue to yourself you old perv.”
“That’s not what you said to me st night.” EWW, old people flirting. “And what Zelonda did was not your fault.”
“I never said it was.”
“You didn’t have to.” The old man’s spatu flew over the grill as he removed and repced the patties. As soon as he finished moving them, a little kid with floppy dog ears ran over and picked up the pte. Bringing it over to the table where a woman who looked to be his mother was pteing everything.
“Anyway,” the old woman returned to her cutting board as she tried to force the subject to change. “We can tell who you are by the bits of your soul we can see.”
“And what a beautiful soul it is. A bit tainted…”
“Whose isn’t?”
“Ithilwen’s wasn’t.”
“She was, is, an elven priestest. Of course her soul is pure.”
“It was a sight to behold.”
“Her body or her soul?”
“Both.” The old man realized what he said and quickly backtracked. “But her body has nothing on yours, my dear.” Her eyes narrowed on the man as if debating whether or not to still punish him.
She must have decided to either put it off or let him go because she looked at me as she spoke. “Still, a soul like yours is quite memorable.” Before I could ask her why, she continued. “All of you travelers are not from our pnet, or this little pocket universe.” She waved off my shocked look. “Pnetary travel isn’t something that is limited to demons. There have been stories of travel between worlds for years and our party was a part of the most recent expeditions.”
“That was back when the demons were still setting up on the pnet.” Suddenly the joy and bantering that had filled the room with life vanished, repced by tension and grief as an expression fshed over both of their faces. It looked like a bit of anger mixed with grief and fear. “So many good people were killed, sughtered by those demons.”
“That was the day we lost everything.” What they were saying was confusing. How were they powerful enough to go to another pnet yet live here now? She must have seen the question on my face, or maybe my soul gave it away because she answered. “The kingdom’s very own princess was with us…”
“Elinora.” The old man’s voice quivered a bit as he whispered her name.
“She was only supposed to be there to get a bit of field experience before becoming the crown princess and getting married. She wasn’t even supposed to be in the fighting. In fact, the whole reason half of us were there was to guard her.”
The old man smmed his hand on the counter. “Yet she went and used the one spell that enabled us to escape. A spell that took the castor's own life as part of the cost.” No one in the room made so much as a sound as we all listened with rapt attention. “I would have been more than willing to cast the spell if she had simply given me the chance.”
“Even the king and the inquisitors admitted that there was nothing we could have done to save her.”
“That still doesn’t absolve us. We failed in our duty…”
“And we paid the price.”
“I would have given up my life if it meant that she got to come home safe. Instead, we were subjected to having most of our power burned out of us.”
The old woman took a deep breath before forcing herself to continue. “As for how we can tell you and the rest of the travelers are not from this pocket universe has to do with the little ways the soul changes as it interacts with the system. Little connections they make with it as the person uses and adapts to it and it to them.”
She stopped talking to look me in the eyes. “What do you know about mates?”
A bit taken aback by the sudden topic change, I answer with the truth. “Not much, just that I likely have one out there.”
“You do.” Her words were like a bucket of water being dumped over me. While a part of me was excited at the prospect that there was someone out there for me, I also feared who it was. What they would think about me. If they would even be a match for me or if we would constantly be fighting. “While we could see the connection, it was faint. Incomplete. There but not. As if the bond was simply waiting for something to happen before solidifying.”
“And now?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“Now it simply waits for you and your mate to either accept the bond or reject each other.” She spoke softly. As if she knew who it was and was letting me know that I didn’t have to accept them. “Just because there is a bond does not mean you have to accept the person. No matter what biology, fate, or even the gods say, you have a choice.”
“I appreciate knowing that and I am guessing the bond was part of why you recognized me?” To my surprise, she wouldn’t say anything else. As if her saying another word would influence my decision or something. She didn’t have to worry though. No matter what, I was going to give them a chance before making the decision either way.
Her body stiffened just as a familiar, but impossible scent reached my nose. Something that had no reason to be here. It was a combination of fur and wet earth, the wild and a campfire. The way the smells were twined together gave rise to the image of a cabin in the middle of the woods. The st and only pce I had smelled it was during my exit.
Fearing that I would find the demon behind me, I slowly rotated to find someone almost as unwelcome.
