Soul Forged: Chapter 8

The rune’s resin casing scratched a jagged line down my throat as I swallowed.

“No!” Colter squeezed my lower jaw in a vice grip, thumb and middle finger digging into my cheeks to force open my mouth.

The little piece lodged somewhere near my Adam’s apple for one awful second, but I fought the urge to gag, gulping instead as I glared up at Colter. His pupils were dime-sized, his lips parted in open dismay that brought a vicious smile to my face as the obstruction slid free, into my esophagus.

Colter released me with a feral sound of frustration, then cracked his open palm across my face, shooting stars through my vision. His fist caught in my hair, yanking me back upright on my knees before I could fall sideways. My ear was ringing, but in the muffled half-silence it created, I could hear that weird, low-frequency static like a white noise machine cranked uncomfortably high.

“Damn it!” He pounded between my shoulder blades with bruising force. “Torrin, you damned fool. Cough it up!”

Just when I thought he might collapse my lung, he tossed me aside by my hair, and I hit the ground with an arm bent beneath me and my cheek in the dirt—a cruel mirror of Seth. My left eye felt too big for its socket, but even with my hazed vision, my brother’s pale face leaped out at me. Colter’s armored legs paced before me, but I kept my gaze on Seth, willing him to move. Please.

“It’s fine. It’s fine,” Colter repeated, levelling his tone between harsh breaths. “It’ll still work. It’s my word against no one’s.” His feet paused inches from me. “Or… mine against his?”

Another pair of legs came into view, and I vaguely registered Rhea’s voice. “Colter—”

“Give me a minute.” 

“Colter,” she pressed. “We’ve secured the auxiliaries. But what are we doing here?”

I tore my eyes from Seth and rolled onto my side. Rhea’s words might have given me hope she’d stop this madness, if not for her urgent tone and my brother’s blood on her axes. 

“What’s the new play?” she asked, intense eyes locked on Colter’s face.

He stopped pacing, but his knuckles massaged under his chin in a nervous tic. “I need to think. In the meantime, get rid of the witnesses.”

Rhea drew her axes and looked down at me.

“Not him,” said Colter. His face hardened as his eyes dipped to mine. “Not yet.”

She nodded, then faced the rift behind me. “No witnesses,” she barked.

Screams rang out, chilling my blood. Dread pooling in my gut, I twisted to track Rhea as she stalked past me.

In the eerie crimson light cast by the inner rift, a cluster of bodies in medic white and bulky boneforger overalls jostled each other like a herd of startled sheep, backing away from the brandished blades that were closing in on them. A woman broke free, but Fintan skewered her before she got ten paces. Rhea’s axes cut down a pair who fled hand in hand, trying to make a break for the shelter of the gnarled trees. The head boneforger, standing crooked on his splinted ankle, swung a hammer at Gavin, but the ardent severed the oncoming arm and the weapon with it.

A young medic knelt and tried to hug Leon’s knees, crying, “No, no, please, I’ll say whatever you guys need! Don’t—” Leon’s backhand smacked the man aside, and a swing of his hammer silenced him for good.

Behind Leon, Priscilla crouched over a body, blood spatter painting her face as she yanked her knife free of the man’s rib cage. Before she even straightened, her head snapped toward another crawling, bleeding boneforger like a feline spotting an injured mouse, and her dagger drove down through his brain stem.

Sick to my core, I turned away from the brutality and found my brother’s face again.

Colter had resumed his pacing, his path wider this time, travelling from me to Seth and back again. He was muttering under his breath, but I didn’t try to decipher it. I just wanted to get to Seth.

I didn’t want to die alone.

“Get over here, all of you. I think I got it,” Colter said, boots scuffing to a stop way closer to Seth than he had any right to be.

I heard them all coming, but I didn’t care. It seemed they didn’t either; no one stopped me when I pushed up to hands and knees. They just passed me by. We all knew I wasn’t going to get far if I ran. 

A pang went through my stomach, the muscles seizing from the sharp pain. I looped an arm around my gut, wincing. I imagined the rune tearing up my intestines. They weren’t supposed to be swallowed. The resin was bad enough, but who knew what horrific side effects the bloodrune might cause if it dissolved in my stomach. What could happen if a Red got a high dose of raden to the bloodstream?

Whether it was by Colter’s hand or the rune’s doing, I wasn’t getting out of this. Seth’s command to survive still rang in my head, but all I wanted was to lie down beside him and go to sleep.

The pain dissipated, and I tentatively put one hand in front of the other, afraid to try and stand. When my stomach didn’t protest, I started to crawl toward Seth, only half listening to Colter.

“We can mostly stick to the old story,” he was explaining. “But we say the Red here tried to make something of himself. He stole the parasite rune while we were all fighting the reanimated drake beast. When I caught him and tried to talk him down, I could see the greed in his eyes. He wanted to be an ardent so bad.” Colter sighed in feigned pity. “He swallowed it.”

“And we say that’s different from you absorbing the drake rune because…?” asked Gavin.

Surprised by the pushback, I looked up to find Colter in Gavin’s face, a finger rammed into the divot of his collarbone. 

“Because I had to,” he snarled. “We’re all alive because I did. He’s a greedy little Red who hid and then tried to steal from the Conglomerate. It’s my word against his. You got a problem with that story?”

Gavin backpedaled, throwing up his hands. “No. I’m just making sure we’re clear.” He flashed his ultra-white teeth. “Making sure Fintan’s getting it”—he punched his brother’s arm—“and paying attention.”

Fintan was looking around the forest, fingers clenching and unclenching at his side. “What’s that sound? I hate it,” he said. “It won’t go away.”

Colter snapped his fingers in front of Fintan’s nose. “Listen up. I’m getting us all out of this clean, alright, but you have to pay attention.”

“That sound’s not right,” insisted Fintan, one eye scrunched into a wince.

The white-noise crackle was really starting to hurt my head, too. It made the world even fuzzier, made me feel like I had something crawling over my skin. I rolled my neck, trying to shake off the feeling, as I continued my path to Seth. Just a little further now. I was beyond Colter’s group. Almost to him. If they were really taking me with them out of here, I couldn’t let them leave him lying here alone. He didn’t deserve that. 

He deserved to go home.

Colter was going to try and have me thrown in jail—would succeed, most likely—but I had to make sure Seth got back to Hanna. If I could do that, I didn’t really care what happened to me. Not right now anyway. A numbness had trickled through my body like ice water. I didn’t feel much of anything.

That is, until another debilitating pain ripped through my stomach, and I dropped to my forearms to breathe through it.

“Fintan has a point,” I heard Priscilla saying. “Whatever the plan, let’s make it quick.”

Heavy footfalls drew near, and a big fist knotted in my jacket collar, yanking me up and turning me toward Colter. My arm was twisted behind me, dulling the pain in my stomach with fresh agony, and a dagger danced in front of my face.

“The quickest way,” Leon growled in my ear as he dipped the blade toward my stomach, “would be to cut the rune out of him and be done with it.”

A bolt of panic fired through my head, and I tried to rip myself free but just ended up drawing hissing, pained breaths through my teeth when Leon increased the pressure on my shoulder joint.

“That way, nobody contradicts the story,” Leon went on. 

“No,” said Colter. “We might damage the rune. It’s our proof of the parasite. Best thing to do is get him to the medical bay, have them cut it out.”

“We don’t need him alive to use his body as evidence,” said Priscilla.

“True…” Colter scanned me, contemplating. 

I glowered back at him, the gears in my head turning slowly at first, then hitting their groove as the moment stretched. I ran through my training. Eventually, something will take you by surprise, or be too fast, or catch you wrong-footed, Seth’s voice echoed. It isn’t just your ability to react that will keep you alive, but to act.

But how?

Analyze, interpret, take action.

I looked at Leon’s hovering hand, the blade aimed to slash open my gut, arm corded with muscle. But no raden! He hadn’t bothered. I was just a Red. He didn’t know anyone had taken the time to train me to hit hard with what I had.

Assess his stance, Seth’s memory demanded.

I looked down. Leon’s feet were braced to either side of me… but he favored his right side, put more weight on it. His left knee didn’t fully extend, remaining fractionally bent. An old injury. It trembled… No, it rippled with a crimson light, like a shadow cast by water.

Huh?

I looked around. Everything was red. 

“No,” Colter decided at last. “If we keep him alive, the media will make him a sideshow. A crazy Red who stole and swallowed the rune of a deadly parasite? They’ll be so focused on that story, the rest will be white noise.” 

The red glow stretched all the way to Seth’s body on my right. I met his vacant eyes, and for a second, they seemed to come back to life, drilling his final word into my head. Survive.

“God, that sound! I can’t take it!” Fintan suddenly roared. “It’s making everything shaky.”

“Get him under control,” Colter snapped at Gavin.

“Guys,” cried Priscilla, “the rift!”

Leon twisted left to see, putting more weight on that leg, and I kicked him as hard as I could in the bum kneecap. He went down with a bellowing cry, and I wriggled free of his loosened hold. 

I rushed to Seth’s body, no real plan other than to keep him with me. I crouched and got my arms under him, rolling him onto his back so I could get him in a proper fireman’s carry. His limbs flopped and his head lolled, eyes never finding me. 

A knot in my throat, I drew up his knees, threaded my arm through, and then hoisted him across my shoulders with a groan. Hamstrings already heating, I turned to the rift, and for a second, I thought my tears were making mirages. The rift was expanding in stops and starts, the edges serrated like a shark’s teeth that seemed to devour its surroundings in uneven bites. The trees beneath the rift buckled and folded into nothing. The ground around them rolled up like a carpet. Colter and his team were sprinting toward the widening red maw, shouting at each other over the staticky crackle that had grown into an ear-piercing whine. I took a few shaky steps forward, but then the edges of the rift began to sputter, popping like spitting embers. 

Beneath the rift, the pile of bodies… moved. A shape stirred in its center. I squinted at it, making out a figure with chin-length hair pushed back from his forehead. Taj?

He stumbled and half-crawled clear of the dead. A weak glimmer of raden wavered around his legs like he was preparing to jump, but he swayed on his feet. His head twisted between the oncoming ardents who’d thought they’d killed him and the rift far above his head, its swirling center turning from red to pink to white.

The space beyond the rift was a black void. Around it, the environment crumpled like paper, but below, the bodies of the auxiliaries were swallowed by the growing mouth. Lightning bolts of raden fired out from the now-white center, striking at Taj, who flared his raden and took off at a pitiful, hobbling run across the quickly vanishing dirt floor to no avail. He vanished, screaming, into the blinding tear in reality. 

Seeing Taj swallowed by the light, Colter and his crew turned tail, rushing back toward me, raden glowing much stronger around them. 

I wrapped my arms around Seth’s shoulders and pulled him into an embrace, at a loss for what else to do but hold him. The rift was coming to me, consuming the world. Soon it would take us too. At least we’ll go out together.

The white center pulsed, sending out a shockwave like an explosion, forked bolts of raden slamming down on anything solid left standing, shearing through the farthest trees that hadn’t yet dissolved. A scorching flash like an imploding star burst from the rift and washed over everything. It chased the ardents down, turning them into dark silhouettes.

I watched the light come, let it wash over me. The pain I expected didn’t arrive with it, though, just the usual pop of my eardrums as an unseen pressure pushed me from all sides. But instead of the shrill ring of passing through a rift, there was a whooshing gale. I felt myself leave the ground, a tornado wind tossing me around as I plummeted through the emptiness. I clutched Seth tighter, anchoring my fingers under the segments of his armor.

I expected to hit some sort of bottom any second, but instead, shadows swirled around me, taking shapes. Ardents, judging by the weapons in their hands, but I couldn’t say who. They weren’t tumbling or flailing around like me. Just standing there. One man looked distinctly bald, his head a boulder on massive shoulders, a monstrous sword spanning across his back like crooked wings. Clinging to his shoulder was a fuzzy thing with little antlers between round, bearish ears and a fluffy nub of a tail. Beside him stood a woman, strong and tall like Rhea, but her hair flowed down her back in a braid, unaffected by the slipstream around us, and she bore an elegant sword. Less distinct figures hazed behind the pair, all of them just dark mirages. I passed so close to the woman that I reached out, trying to grab onto the one solid thing in this white maelstrom, but she was suddenly yanked backward. Her form slammed into the bald man, and they both shrank to pinpricks before disappearing entirely.

Abrupt as a camera flash, the white light cut off, and my body met hard floor with a mild “oof.” 

Seth’s weight lay heavy on my legs. A dampness seeped into the back of my pants, and I looked down to see a slick marble floor run through with deep cracks. A thick coating of mildew and moss held onto moisture, filling the space with a dusky scent. Muck, blood, and bits of viscera lay scattered in every direction, attracting flies. It didn’t help the queasiness brought on by another intestine-twisting pain from my abdomen. I felt feverish, sweat cold on my neck and between my shoulder blades.

A soft scuffing made me turn my head. Taj sat nearby, pulling his right leg gingerly toward his body, massaging his thigh and knee, both swollen to twice their normal size. When he sensed my stare, he gazed back at me, the two of us just blinking at each other. Until his eyes dropped to Seth.

Or… Seth’s body.

My brother was dead. Murdered.

The grief was a dense blanket that wrapped too tight around me, muffling the world. My brain slogged as if through a mire. Taj’s horrified stare only made the suffocating pressure pull tighter until I wanted to scream and cry and fight and curl up in the fetal position all at once.

Unwilling to let Seth go, to lay him down on this rotten floor, I looked around and saw bodies draped over odd, humped structures. More lay strewn on what looked like short stairs. Some were in pieces that made bile rise to the back of my throat. Others were stirring, a few already standing.

Rhea hoisted Colter to his feet. Matthew and Arnold brushed off moss and checked their weapons. Leon coughed and cussed as he rose on an elevated level of the dilapidated building, near a hole in the wall that led into a space filled with rubble, including thick metal piping that reminded me of… something. There was more of it throughout the vast area, threaded through the curving walls. As I traced it, I noticed Priscilla turning a slow circle, similarly scanning the place. When her head tipped up, my gaze followed and saw open sky. The building was rounded, and the tops of the walls ended in twisted struts and jagged remnants of glass panes.

A loud groan drew my gaze to Gavin, pushing up to one knee and shaking soil from the rift forest out of his hair. “What the hell was that?” He looked to Fintan, who offered no answer, just sat staring at a darkened area beyond an archway at the far end of the room, his brow furrowed.

“The better question is, where the hell are we?” Priscilla rounded on Colter and snapped, “I told you we needed to get out.”

Colter didn’t even glance at her as he spun a frantic circle. “Where’s the drake?” he asked, raking fingers through his hair as he spun a circle. “Did we lose it?”

The dragon’s corpse was nowhere in sight.

“It must not have come through with us,” said Rhea.

“Through what?” asked Leon. “We didn’t actually step through the rift.” 

“The rift… collapsed,” Fintan said hesitantly. “Maybe both of them? I think we got sucked through.”

“You don’t know that,” Colter scolded.

“It definitely felt like passing through a rift,” Gavin jumped in defensively.

“Shouldn’t we have fallen out of the sky between the towers in that case?” said Leon. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“Not necessarily,” said Fintan, getting to his feet and moving to examine one of the strange structures set at intervals throughout the room. “We didn’t exit normally.”

“But then where’s the drake?” Colter repeated, voice hovering just below a shout, nostril flaring.

“The rift spat us out,” said Rhea, brow furrowed, “but maybe the beast stayed because it’s part of the rift?”

“Are you sure we exited at all?” asked Arnold, a creeping panic making his tone uptick at the end. “What if we’re stuck in one of the rifts?”

His fear started to infect the space. Anger and worry rose like steam, stiffening everyone’s posture.

“I think this is… Lumen Central Station,” said Fintan, holding a piece of warped, cracked plastic.

Suddenly, it clicked: the structures were information desks and brochure holders, the chrome detailing dulled and the bolted foundations sagging beneath the weight of rubble from the collapsed dome ceiling.

Thinking to get a view of the street, I looked opposite the archway to a familiar row of seven doors set into the curving front entry. Their frames were warped, the glass set into their decorative metalwork either shattered or clouded with filth, making it difficult to see beyond them.  

“No way,” said Gavin, skepticism dragging on the last syllable.

“No, he’s right,” said Rhea.

“When is he ever right about anything?” huffed Leon. “He doesn’t know which way’s up if Gavin doesn’t tell him.”

“Let him explain,” said Gavin, his glare a warning that Leon only rolled his eyes at. 

“Can’t be the station,” chastised Colter, heedless of both of them as he continued to look around like the dragon might be lying just out of sight. “Must be one of the abandoned cities. How long would it take for all this moss to grow?”

“Look, that’s the bubble tea place!” said Priscilla, pointing to what was once a storefront, a twisted metal sign on the ground in the entryway. “We are home. But what happened?”

It looked like a bomb had gone off. No… it looked like Lyman. Like the Lightbridge rift had burst and expelled its environment onto ours.

Hanna. Her name tore through my head and made a rip in the heavy covering of grief, quickening my breath and my thoughts. Where was she? She’d been in the Towers. Had she evacuated in time? We’d been in the rift an hour, maybe two, before it collapsed. That was long enough for her to get away, right?

I needed to find her. I started to extract my legs from beneath Seth.

“We should get back to Lightbridge, report in,” said Rhea.

“Report what exactly?” demanded Matthew. “What’s the story now, Colter?”

“Yeah,” said Arnold. “There’s bodies all over the place, out in the open inside the train station for God's sake. If anyone looks at them properly, they’ll see a beast didn’t do this.”

“We should cut them up more, make it look more savage,” said Priscilla.

I froze, one leg still beneath Seth. I looked down at his face, finding the two moles beneath his eye, and gripped him tighter at the thought of a knife slashing them away, leaving gaping claw marks across his cheek, his teeth exposed, throat torn open.

Warm breath at my ear made me jump, but Taj clamped a steadying hand on my shoulder and brought a finger to his lips. “We should run for it,” he murmured, so low I barely caught it. “Can you help me? I hurt my leg when they…” He swallowed hard, not needing to finish the sentence.

I bit my lip. I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to leave Seth to mutilation. I opened my mouth to tell him to go for it alone, and I’d try to distract them, but Colter shouted, “No! Everybody shut up!” and Taj’s eyes went wide. He started scooting away from me.

“He screwed us somehow. That light wasn’t normal.”

I followed Taj’s eyeline to find Colter striding toward me, head lowered like a charging bull. I wriggled free and stood, stepping in front of Seth’s body to meet him, fists at my sides.

“What did you do, Torrin? Did you use the rune you stole?” He grabbed my jacket front and hoisted me easily onto my toes, so my nose was closer to his snarl.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Taj get onto unsteady feet and take one limping backward step toward the exit to the street, eyes bouncing between the ardents. Then Rhea posted up to Colter’s left, blocking my view of Taj and the doors, but I didn’t intend to run. 

My whole body was shaking with the urge to do something stupid. To make them pay. Somehow, some way. And Colter had given me an idea. Maybe I could use the rune. Maybe the sickening sensations running through my gut right now meant it was trying to work.

“No way he activated that rune,” Matthew called out. He and Arnold were trying to peer deeper into the train station, the entrance to the turnstiles partially obstructed by hunks of marble tile, drywall, and more of that abnormally large metallic piping. “Can a Red even absorb a rune? One he swallowed?”

“Cut him open and see if it’s still in there,” said Leon, stalking toward me with Priscilla.

I focused my concentration on my gut, trying to spread whatever power might be lurking there, to channel it like a raden user.

“You sound like a broken record,” scoffed Gavin, flashing Leon an unfriendly smile as he joined the ring forming around me and Colter. 

It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself surrounded by ardents, my fate bound to whatever Colter decided. This time, when Colter’s green eyes scanned my face, I took his advice, looked death in the eye, and matched his glower, fury thudding through my head like a second pulse.

“You don’t even know what you did, do you?” He shoved me away, and I almost fell on top of my brother. “Useless little Red.”

A roar filled my head. My blood was on fire.

Prove to everyone—especially yourself—that you can keep a cool head even in the thick of it.

I distributed my weight, cocked back a fist, and punched Colter square in the jaw.

Bone met bone, but it was mine that crunched with bruising force, me who cried out in pain. Colter barely flinched, head turning an inch to the side and then levelling back on me as a coldness smoothed out his angry snarl into a more sinister mask.

He backhanded me across the jaw in a move too fast to track. Gavin’s laughter mixed with a whine in my ears as the building tilted around me. I landed right next to Seth with a thunderous boom that shook the floor. Groggy, my thoughts ground to a halt, then wound backward. That sound couldn’t have come from me.

Another quake, then another. Like footsteps. Big ones. Galloping ones. Getting closer.

Then the metal struts at the top of the wall groaned as a massive parabeast pulled itself over the lip with giant forelegs that looked like they wore craggy, rock-plated vambraces. The toes of the feet curled into prehensile fists, hauling up a beast that might have crawled out of hell—its body a dark umber plated in black rock, eyes burning like embers, curved horns like a demon, and visible veins of raden running through its entire form. Its wide head was half mouth, and its maw opened to reveal rows of both tearing and crushing teeth. The roar that burst from it sounded like a bull elephant’s trumpet and made the remnants of glass still around the building vibrate and shatter.

Its much shorter back legs scrambled onto the lip of the wall and launched it into the station before anyone could react to Colter’s shouted orders for a defensive formation. Its front feet, curled into iron fists, smashed down near the lobby’s back entrance and pinned Matthew to the marble floor. He screamed through a bloodied mouth, flaring his raden and futilely trying to get his hands and knees beneath him to push up, get free. 

The beast slammed its huge forelegs down on Matthew in a rapid succession of punch-like motions that shattered his raden and left his body a bloody pulp mashed into the hole the creature had pounded into the floor.



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