Page 1 of To Free a Soul (Duskwalker Beginnings #2)

A time unknown, but near the beginning

With a world-rumbling, desolate roar, Weldir threw himself against the confines of his enclosure. The obstacle, the very hindrance to his escape, thumped from the impact and then undulated outwards like rippling water.

He rushed to the other side of the fortification and crashed into the barricade there. The confines that kept him here, seething and storming, rippled again, and no matter how hard he shoved and shoved, they wouldn’t relent.

With another roar, the sound beastly and inhuman even to him, he darted down through the ether of nothingness to find a weak point. He had no idea of the shape that kept him in – whether it was round, enneagon, or even rhombus. He’d never been able to find a corner, no matter how he tried.

“Let me out!” his impalpable, incomprehensible, discarnate essence bellowed. “I tire of being in my prison!”

He tired of being stuck here with nothing but himself and his disjointed thoughts!

“Hushhh, little one,” a weak, feminine voice cooed at him, and a set of brown hands touched the outside of his prison. “Shh. Shh.”

She spun it, brought it closer to her face, and the darkness gave way to dim light on one side.

He did not feel his world shift or rotate in her space.

Like the movement evaporated more of the darkness, a section below him glowed with life, revealing some kind of bed of thick, leafy vermillion-coloured vines.

The soft mound of a bosom pressed against his prison, as if she brought him closer to cuddle whatever shape he was in. Only then did a hard edge – revealing he wasn’t in some kind of sphere – show itself. No matter how thoroughly he felt along that edge, he couldn’t perceive it.

Weldir held back a growl, hating how she’d once stated it sounded like a cute, mousy squeak, due to their differing sizes. She was huge in comparison to his prism , as she was able to gather it in her arms like it was precious.

Her palm rubbed the edge of his prism, momentarily obstructing his view of her haggard face as she attempted to soothe him without ever touching his very form. He often wondered if she truly did it for herself, pacifying her guilt and regret in a falsehood of trying to ease him.

Nothing would ease him, not in here.

Once the shield of her palm was gone, he peered into her eyes. They lacked pupils, making her golden irises appear like discs that flickered over his crystal entrapment, unable to see him.

Although her eyes were utterly mesmerising, the rest of her features were drained and worn.

Like every bit of liquid and fat had been sucked from her very body, her brown face was gaunt and her skin loose, wrinkled, and ashen.

It made her nose, cheeks, and arching brows more prominent in an unhealthy way, showing just how sickly she’d become since he’d been trapped here.

This wasn’t the face of his mother that he remembered.

Her youthfulness was still apparent, but her skin had once been plump and vibrant.

Her lips had been full, and so ample that just the minutest flick of her tongue against the seam had them dipping as though unbelievably malleable. Now, they were thin, dehydrated, and cracked, surrounded by wrinkled lines that made her mouth droop.

Her hair had once been a magnificent cloud of springy, corkscrew golden curls, so tight they haloed her head. Now they were white, brittle, and lacking in volume, as if the very health of them had been sucked away – just like their golden colour.

Behind her, iridescent wings unattached to her back flickered before quickly sagging upon the vermillion vines and the silver bedding. They once glowed a glittering gold, much like the crown that still floated above her head like an angelic halo, but both had dulled immensely.

The whites of her eyes reddened and her bottom lip shook. “You just need to control your form, and then I can free you.”

Weldir, unable to hold it back any longer, let his growl reverberate all around him.

“I know I’ve been saying that for so long,” she croaked, then glittering water brimmed her eyes. She pressed her forehead to his prism and gave a shuddering sob.

His growl ceased when one of her tears, clear like water, fell upon the bed below her. It met a dried pool of flaking gold – the evidence of other tears she’d long ago shed.

Her eyes no longer leak gold, he thought, observing the fresh tears she shed. Crying is sapping away the little mana she has left in her reserves...

Well, other than keeping him here.

His prism, the prison that kept him in this darkness, was all she could muster. Her mana was dependent upon her life force, and as her eyes drooped, she continued to waste a little more in crying... for him .

It wasn’t enough to pacify his fury, but it was enough to keep him quiet about it.

“I’m so sorry I did this to you,” she cried into the glasslike barrier keeping him in. A few of her tresses snagged on the vines, straightening their lengths before releasing and springing back into curls. “I’m so sorry that I can’t help you.”

Her tears, pity, and apologies did much to soothe him further, and he grumbled as he brought himself closer.

“I know you did not mean to do this,” he stated, pressing himself against the barrier right where her cheek was.

Although she couldn’t hear him, his bashing against the inside of his prism had managed to stir her from her deep, regenerative slumber.

“Weldir... my sweet little pool of darkness. I’m so sorry I didn’t protect you as I was supposed to, and needed you to save me.”

He pulled away from the barrier and stared at her.

I wish she would stop blaming herself. No one had known this would happen. She was only trying to protect the mortals, as is her duty.

It’s not her fault that I am merely a floating consciousness.

Weldir, in his prism, entirely lacked a form.

He was the darkness within it, the empty vastness of nothing.

A being whose shroud of consciousness ate all the light.

He couldn’t touch himself, see himself. He could be heard, but his voice was too quiet, like the echoing in the back of someone’s mind.

In reality, his prism of whatever fucking shape was made of a crystal so pure it looked like glass. Inside it should have been penetrable to the eye, and had it been anyone else, they would have been seated inside it and able to wave to the outside world.

No. He filled it like a storm of clouds, and his roars and growls were merely a squeaky thunder she could just perceive.

It’d been that way for Elven decades.

From the very moment he’d been born and his consciousness had tried to absorb anything and everything.

From the Elven world she rested inside of, to the other deities he’d consumed until not even a fragment of them survived.

His cloud had eaten his many fathers, his brothers, his sisters, and even one of the three pinnacle deities – an uncle, one of the triplets.

All that remained was her, one of his potential fathers, and Rokul – an uncle.

His grandparents, long forgotten, no longer existed within this plane of life and hadn’t for a long time.

The god in charge of death had made her own realm to be with the many dead, but she was a recluse and preferred the quiet.

They all doubted she knew what had happened to her fellow deities, or it was possible she cared so little that she still hadn’t returned. Mayhap it was even fear that Weldir would break from his prism and consume her as well that kept her at bay all these decades.

She must know, he often thought. Those eaten by the Daekura will have told her.

And the Daekura were the very reason as to why Weldir was the way he was. When he looked up at the Gilded Maiden, who no longer shed ethereal golden tears, the Daekura were also the reason for her frail state.

He couldn’t ignore his hand in all this, despite the fact that he’d been prematurely born, disorientated, and incapable of controlling his mist. He’d just greeted the world, malformed and too soon.

He remembered nothing of when she tried to aid the Daekura by giving them fully evolved forms. He’d been told the tale of how she’d taken the darkness that housed their bodies and caused their hunger, so they could live normal Elven lives like she could sense they were supposed to.

She wanted to love them and bring them into her heart, like all the Elysian Elves who lived within Nyl’theria.

His mother, the Gilded Maiden, could never have known how chaotic that darkness was. She was supposed to be immortal, with nearly infinite mana to offer, with power so strong and magnificent that no other could compare.

Yet it infected her. It festered within the well of her mana pool and drained it away from her very bloodstream.

Within the heartbeat it’d taken for it to reach Weldir, his unborn body had nurtured her in return as a means of survival. He took that darkness, consumed it himself until he became the void, the death, the evil that it was, and made it his own.

But Almethrandra, his mother, couldn’t hold that kind of chaotic energy. She couldn’t heal through it, siphon it out, or fix it. Her body gave up, vomiting black goop from the pit of her immortal soul. Golden tears had run black, and anything they touched melted and sickened.

Her womb couldn’t hold him as he roiled and toiled under the broken power he’d absorbed. He had left the safety she provided violently .

What followed was him reaching out to anything and everything for stability in an attempt to find a physical form when his own transcended space and reality. It wanted to house something or be the centre of something, and yet nothing he touched offered salvation.

When the crystal cage surrounding him had locked in tight, and he’d stared down at his uncle Rokul, the god’s lavender skin had paled, the blue of his hair dull as he’d writhed on the ground, gaunt, thin, with his mana and lifeblood half eaten.

Just a few seconds longer, and he, too, may have been consumed in Weldir’s birthing frenzy.

The first thing he remembered afterwards was Almethrandra’s shaking hands holding his prism as she limped around, only to collapse.

Weldir had bounced – he didn’t know how far – into a corner of the room and underneath something.

It’d been an exceptionally long time before he’d been retrieved and placed within Leyfr’s vermillion mending vines alongside his mother.

Silence had been his life from then on.

Until memories played around him. A life he didn’t know nor understand, singing, dancing, and movement all around him.

It took him too long to realise they were Almethrandra’s, and even longer to understand that it was knowledge about her, their realm, and sometimes even the lives of Elysians in their parallel mortal world.

When she’d had very little to give, she’d played them for him when he’d bashed against his prison, and had wept as she did – just as she did now. But her lucidity was infrequent and short, and already he could see her eyelids waning against the tiredness.

“Hurry up and collect your essence, so that I may hold you one day,” she whispered with an exhausted sniffle.

He growled at that.

He had no idea how to do such a thing! Do you think I have not tried? My efforts are for naught! Yet rather than focusing on escaping once more, he turned his endeavours inwards.

He pulled at the cloudy, fraying edges of his conscience. He sucked, he yanked, he pushed and pushed to no avail, as he’d done the years before and would continue to do for the years to come.

He ate at himself, and coughed himself up. He eclipsed himself, and shadowed what he could. He bubbled, boiled, and frothed in the darkness of his own vastly empty self.

All the while, she slept peacefully and shared dreams that always sat at the very edge of his periphery. He chased those sounds, those images, as much as himself, his mist and cloud circling and circling, rumbling and rolling, until...

He didn’t know whether it was yesterday or tomorrow that it happened.

Much like the Daekura, with their glossy void-black bodies, something formed. It was transparent, ghostly, and gave the impression that nothing else was inside him except essence.

After so long, Weldir couldn’t help staring in awe at the only part of him he’d ever created.

A spectral, shadowy, pitch-black right hand.

In that same moment, he realised his stomach held another place, a realm somewhere outside of himself – and just as trapped within his prism.