Soul Rift

The Souls Pour Out

Soul Rift - Chapter Four - The Souls Pour Out

Nyla was flying.

Her silver aura was weaker in the world of the living, and she didn't feel so weightless, but it was exhilirating to again be in the world she'd missed so much since dying.

The ground was so close, only a few hundred feet.

And then she realised that her aura was getting weaker and weaker, until the air around her was clear, and her aura was not visible at all.

The aura was the sign of the dead.

Does this mean I'm alive?

But of course she wasn't, she was sure she wasn't

After all, she was flying.

***

The gold and silver sparkles were very close to the ground now.

Karzil was still running towards them. But he began to realise that the closer they got to the ground, the less they seemed to sparkle. In fact, in some of the closer ones the sparkle had gone out altogether.

He had no time to think. They were landing, and only a short way away from where he was.

So, it was that almost at the brink of the valley, where it turned back into the city, he met Nyla.

Nyla was just getting to her feet after the long flight, when Karzil caught sight of her. She looked in every way like a normal human.

Well, in almost every way.

She had eyes the colour of jade, and hair the colour of wet sand.

The only thing that made her a certain non-human was the fact that there were wings at her back.

Her wings were snowy white, but for a smudge of brown at the end of every feather. They splayed delicately from her shoulderblades, and as she got up she folded them neatly so that they lay against her back.

She had obviously used them to fly on the way down.

She looked up, and caught sight of Karzil.

"Are you a living?" she asked in awe.

"A living?" repeated Karzil in some confusion.

"Yes a...oh, of course. You wouldn't know. I keep forgetting, you see. It's been quite a long time..."

Karzil was nonplussed. He stared at her in silence.

"You don't know what I am?"

He shook his head.

"No. How come you have wings."

"Well...I'm...I...I died. A few years ago. You get wings when you die, you see."

Karzil had seen enough crazy things today to believe that he could talk to a dead person. But one thing still troubled him.

"You look so real..."

He strode over to stand directly in front of her.

"You look like I could just touch...oh!"

He'd reached out his hand, expecting it to glide right through her, but instead it stopped at the warm flesh of her stomach.

"I'm sorry," he said after a minute. "I didn't know that you had a body. I thought you were just a soul."

"I didn't really have a proper body before. I don't know what I looked like because all people could see when they looked at me was my aura."

"The silver and gold things?" he asked.

"Yes."

They both looked up at the sky, at the sparkling auras still falling towards the ground from the rip in the rift, and at the souls whose aura was blinking out as they got close to the earth.

And then suddenly Nyla caught sight of the one that was different.

"There! Look! The Cutter."

She pointed up at the emerald green speck floating down from the sky.

It looked certain to land near them.

"The Cutter?"

The green sparkle was travelling faster than any of the other auras. Nyla had no time to answer before Zhaverie was landing next to them.

His aura had disappeared on the way down, like the others, but he was still strikingly different.

Zhaverie's face was cold and beautiful. His dark wings were still outstretched, and they had a huge span. The Cutter towered above Karzil and Nyla.

He looked dangerous and grim and powerful.

But not quite a Scintil, somehow, thought Nyla.

His eyes fell on Karzil immediately, and a furious rage filled them so that Karzil could look at nothing else.

"Living...
'When you die, you shall be one with us,
Then you shall have no choice but to come with us,'"

It sounded like he was quoting something, and he said it in an icy voice.

"Why did you open the rift, Cutter?" asked Nyla boldly.

Zhaverie took his eyes off Karzil, who sighed in relief. The Cutter closed his wings and set his gaze instead on Nyla.

"'With a knife of flowers, a knife of lead,
The Cutter cut the rift apart,
And the living and the dead,
Felt the change with excitement and with dread.'"

"But why?"

"'His purpose to save the souls of the gone,
Those who've been unjustly forgotten, forlorn,
He cut and through they drifted to the other world.'"

"So you wanted to free the dead?" asked Karzil.

"No," said the Cutter, turning angry eyes on him again. "I wanted the living to pay for what they've done..."