Bullets From the Heart – Part 7

I find myself in a rather exciting position.

I have asked for a spot in the busy schedule of my favorite artist.  Her name is Alli White, and she did the cover for Temple in the Stars.  Her work is amazing, and I’m hopeful that I can get time with her before too much longer.  That next project will be Board Queen.  It’s a story that I did on these here pages, and it’s turned into a much larger project.  I’m close to complete with the rough draft, and after it is done….

After it is done, Bullets From the Heart is next.  I have enjoyed this story immensely and writing the backstory for it on Wednesday sealed the deal.  I need this story in my life, not just the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am of the normal story arcs in this here blogge.  I must have more.  MOAR!

So more is what I will have.  I shall feast upon the story as I place it in the blog.  When the meal is finished, I shall take the beautiful bones I have built and boil them down into broth.  That broth will form the stock from which I will stew a masterwork.  It won’t be easy, but I can see that I’ve landed on a great angle to take the whole ‘undead necromancer’ thing.  I am most excited, and grateful to have a third novella project.

That’s me.  Of late I’m more on top of my game, work and house-wise.  I need to tighten up my writing game, and get more into the thick of things with publications.  Patreon is currently a work in progress, and my novella has yet to get everything it needs for a true professional release.  The day job is allowing me to have a steady, reliable source of income while I try to get everything online with the writing.

Let’s hope I can hold together long enough to pull it off.  I believe, if nothing else.

Bullets From the Heart – Part 7

The mass of rotting flesh stank.  My nose, so recently turned back online after centuries of disuse, staged a momentary rebellion as I knelt down over the putrescent remains.  I searched desperately for what I hoped was still there, and gasped with delighted relief as I spied the korin Necromancer Bryce had so recently been trying to kill me with.  It was whole, runes softly glowing along it’s metallic surface as the trapped spirit within fed them power.

I grasped the korin, bits of vitriol clinging to my fingers as I raised the weapon.  I gagged anew, feeling the slimy flesh.  Dry heaves rocked me, and it was only a small eternity later that I was able to refocus on the task at hand.  I had dropped the gun while racked with the paroxysm of retching.  I fumbled for it, bracing myself for the slime and muck, and quickly wiped it off on my robes.  I didn’t know if I had made the problem better or worse, but at least the gun was clean for now.

I had been forced to bond three korin’s during my lifetime.  Each was a uniquely painful experience, and took an enormous amount of time to complete.  Done wrong, even by the slightest margin, and it could be you in the small torture chamber which powered the gun.  Or you could be dead.  Or your soul could blasted into a thousand pieces.  None of them were particularly appealing ways to die. 

I was out of options, however, and it was time to make a choice.  I didn’t have time to plan.  I didn’t have time to prepare.  I was stranded in this god forsaken excuse of a ruined city in the middle of The Fracture.  It was asking to die, but at this stage I was dead already.  Night was coming, and I was running out of time and options.

I brought the weapon up, as I knelt in the mud, resting the barrel along my nose and forehead.  I still my breathing, stilled my shivering body, slowly letting every thought slide from me until I was empty.  Slowly, carefully, I drew the energy of the trapped soul into the void where I should’ve had feelings, emotions, or life.  The soul, recognizing a vessel and desperate to escape the confinement of the korin’s energy chamber, slid through the gaps I had made with what little power I had left.

The soul flowed into the space, and I sprung the trap.  My thoughts came rushing back in, swirling around the freed soul.  I exerted my will, honed over hundreds of years, expecting the conflict to come.  I was prepared, I was ruthless.  The struggle was violent, more violent that it should have been.  This soul was old.  Ancient in the way that Bryce I and were.  This wasn’t the first time this soul had been subjugated.  It retaliated, striking out with animal ferocity to try and escape the imprisonment it knew was coming.  I doubted it even remembered who or what it had been prior to its captivity. 

I used every trick of mental discipline I could imagine, our battle fought in the malleable landscape of dreams and imagination.  I was bleeding from a thousand mental wounds, yet the tides began to build in my favor.  Slowly, agonizingly, I pushed the soul down, slicing small sections off and adding their strength to my own.  I knew this game: soon the spirit would break, having lost too much of itself to maintain the conflict.  I would take the remaining scraps of soul and feed it back down into the power chamber.  Having consumed portions of the soul, I would be able to guide and direct it as my own, drawing upon the pain and suffering it endured to produce the effects necessary to get me the hell out of this mess.

Yet something was wrong.  The spirit wasn’t being beaten down.  I was consuming too much of it.  My heart beat faster, but remained beating. 

It kept beating.

The enormity of that made me panic.  I had dominated and consumed part of a soul.  I should be dead by now.  It was how I had become a necromancer, all those centuries ago.  It had been an agonizing way to die, to violate your own soul in that fashion.  Yet my soul had remained, tethered by my will and training to my body.  But I wasn’t dying now.

It had been my only plan, my only play.  I had desperately needed to become the undead once more.  There wasn’t any other way out of this fix.  The Fracture was a nightmare of irradiated hellscape.  My heart beat faster, the traitorous prick.  The consuming increased, far beyond my control now.  I realized with a start that the soul I had freed from the korin was pulling me onward.  It was forcing me to continue eating it.  I couldn’t resist, couldn’t fight back.  No one had ever even considered that a soul might want to be devoured.  The very idea was abhorrent. 

My memories, my thoughts, my life stretched out before me in the muck of the nameless ruins.  I saw it as a winding road, specific scenes set as paving stones as it soared out before me into the distance.  The soul of the trapped woman, fading, laid herself out along the paving stones like asphalt.  Nothing about who or what I was changed, yet she refused.  As my body continued living, the several hundred year old tortured soul of a nameless woman paved herself along my life.  I couldn’t think, couldn’t reason, and couldn’t resist. 

For the second time that day, I couldn’t maintain consciousness. 

As I flopped lifelessly into the muck, and the rain continued pounding down, I recognized three things.  First, although my robes, belt pouches, and underclothes were soaked, I was quite pleasantly warm.  Second, the korin lying in the mud before my limp fingers was stripped of any color, the runes as devoid of light as the surrounding earth. 

Third, a voice was whispering to me as my eyes closed.  A single name came through, and my mouth gave shape to the name as all became blackness.

Susan. Her name was Susan.

To be continued…

Susanfully,
Justin