The Pale: Volume One by Jacob Long (portable ebook reader txt) 📕

Adam didn’t know if the face on the solitary totem was supposed to be an artistic representation of the Custodian, but he treated it as such.

Adam peered down the tunnel and simply asked, “What was that?”

“I’ve just released a creature into the realm,” the Custodian explained.

Adam immediately looked back at the totem in shock and anger.

The Custodian continued, “I never bothered to give it a name. It is a conduit for soul energy, just as you are, only I don’t believe it has your reservations about it. It stalks the caverns of this plane, predatorizing wandering souls not tethered to the Wheel of Fate.”

Adam grew furious, and he took a couple of aggressive steps toward the totem. He truly didn’t know what he planned on doing. Even if the totem had some sort of connection to the Custodian himself, Adam didn’t know if he could do anything to harm something so godlike . . . or if he wanted to smash his fists against whatever the totem was created from.

The Custodian wasn’t surprised in the least at Adam’s reaction. “You are going to learn to use your new gifts, or the creature is going to devour you.”

Adam’s expression softened mildly. The idea was sobering.

The Custodian explained, “As the champion of the Wheel of Fate, you are capable of more than you ever were in life. You will see.”

The creature howled again, and Adam once more turned back to the tunnel exit. His expression was an attempt at determination, but eyelids and eyebrows were more important to achieving this than he originally thought.

“The creature awaits you in the caverns, Champion.”

Adam breathed heavily, trying to build his courage. He couldn’t just stand there and wait to be eaten. If not eating souls was part of being human, then it would seem so, too, was needing desperately not to be eaten.

Adam gathered his courage and bounded into the tunnel. Running was much less painful than he thought it would be. His ethereal form definitely did not communicate damage the same way his physical form did.

Adam followed the tunnel only around its first quick bend before it opened back up into a room. The room was in many ways different from the totem chamber. It was small and circular, and it actually had a roof. The pale hue was still prevalent, and the walls were rugged stone, but the floor was polished and had a design on it. The design was foreign to Adam. It was concentrically patterned with bizarre glyphs that he couldn’t understand, but there was something else too. The glyphs seemed to shift and confuse Adam’s eyes. Sometimes a glyph would appear to be there and sometimes not. It gave him double vision that was hard to shake off.

Adam moved further into the room to examine the pattern. It was so unusual and fascinating. He stepped into the circle, and as he did, the glyphs around his feet began to glow in pale green as if responding to his presence or perhaps the presence of his energy. He lifted a foot and examined the glyphs underneath it. Despite having the foot lifted from it, the glyph continued to glow. For a moment, Adam forgot all about the predator stalking him somewhere in the caves and experimented with this concept, moving his foot around in circles. The glyphs did not respond to this motion. Despite how far Adam extended his foot, no new glyphs illuminated. Instead, the ones glowing directly beneath him seemed to track where his torso and head stood above the floor.

As Adam wondered at this phenomenon, a small bright wisp floated into the room. It appeared from the wall as if it passed through without a care. Its shining core was only a little bigger than a softball, and small ghostly green flames wafted from it. Adam didn’t notice it at first. It made no noise and produced no ambient light to speak of. It was bright, but remarkably contained.

Despite Adam’s preoccupation with other things, the little wisp seemed very interested in him. It floated lazily in his direction and fluttered around his head like a curious little hummingbird.

It might have taken Adam an eternity to notice the whimsical wisp had not the creature, lost somewhere in the caverns, registered another pitiful howl. Adam stood erect to gaze upon the tunnel that extended out of the other end of the room and nearly smacked his head on the poor little wisp. The moment Adam saw the free-floating apparition, he flinched and waved his hands around as if it were a bee, running to safety in much the same manner. If he had hair left, Adam surely would have tried to brush it out.

“Oh! Whoa! Whoa!” he shouted as he scurried a reasonable distance away. Then Adam stopped and observed the form in wonderment.

The wisp did not react in any way to Adam’s flailing and whimpering. After a moment of his staring, it simply moseyed back up to him. Adam saw as it moved that the glyphs on the ground glowed in response even feet under it.

“It’s a soul,” Adam breathed. “It’s just like me.”

Adam couldn’t help but crack a short smirk. He lifted his right hand and cupped it under the spirit. There was a gentle heat coming off it, and it seemed to respond to his advance. The wisp lowered itself closer to Adam’s skin to better feel his warmth as well.

Adam smiled. It felt good. It felt like being with another person. The little wisp didn’t talk, and it didn’t have a face to look at, but somehow it was very charming.

Adam’s amusement manifested itself as a short chuckle. He inhaled sharply in preparation for a sigh of levity, and the soul shot itself into his mouth and slithered down his throat! Adam slapped his hand over his mouth to try to stop it, but it was far too late. He put his hand around his throat and coughed, hacking as hard as he could, but nothing regurgitated from his mouth. The warm sensation flowed down his chest cavity and wrapped itself around his heart. There, the intense euphoria quickly dissipated, but it was simultaneously replaced with an equal feeling of invigoration. The powerful sensation coursed through Adam’s body and reenergized him.

As Adam stood, having been hunched over from coughing, the brilliant sensation caused his eyes to water. Tears welled up and quickly dripped onto the runed floor. When he wiped them away, he had yet another revelation that boggled his mind. The hair on his legs had grown back. The charred skin was healed. Adam stood upright and examined more of his nakedness to discover that it had all healed. Every part of him had been repaired. Missing patches of skin had been replaced. Even when he reached up to the top of his head, he could feel his tacky army haircut.

A wave of relief washed over Adam as he gazed upon the gift he had been given. A new kind of smile cut across his cheeks as he marveled at his own two hands. But this euphoria did not last. It wasn’t induced like when the soul enraptured him. He defeated it with the quick realization that he had just devoured a soul. It felt good—really good—but it was wrong. He hadn’t meant to do it.

Adam tightened visibly when the Custodian’s voice once again resonated from nowhere. “Now you see some of the benefits of being the champion of the Wheel of Fate.”

Adam looked at his hands again, but with disdain. “I ate a soul! That was a person!”

The Custodian quickly interjected. “You are confused about the nature of souls. They are nothing more than the universe’s simplest form of energy, nothing more than vibrations of matter. Only when they are given a vessel on earth and they have life experiences do they develop a personality and memories. You have retained these in your ethereal form and continue to appear human and not as a wisp because you did not complete your re-assimilation into the Wheel of Fate. There you would have lost your memories and been reshuffled into the great cycle. When you feed on the soul of another, you need not feel guilty. There is no need for you to take their entire soul. You can leave them alive. They will feed on another soul in its unrefined form and recharge. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The only variation between one soul and another is the speed at which they vibrate, their frequency in the bandwidth of consciousness. That particular soul was attracted to you instinctively because it sensed a kindred spirit within you. I designed it to vibrate at your frequency. It wanted to join with you so it could become more complete. That’s why it did what it did. It didn’t die. It simply assimilated with you, and you benefitted each other. There are other people who vibrate at your same frequency still on earth who will seek out your soul. They may even give unto you willingly.”

Adam smiled. “So you were just faking it. You created some boogeyman noise to draw me out here just so you could show me this whole . . . soul mate thing?” The relief was apparent on Adam’s face.

“Not at all,” the Custodian said. “The creature is very much real.”

Another howl reached Adam’s ears. That time it sounded much closer, and Adam’s face went blank.

The Custodian continued, “I could hardly put the fate of the world in your hands without a test, could I?”

Adam’s heart started pounding in his ears. Something was still out there in the dark, looking to eat him. In that pale light, the food chain started with the creature at the top and ended with Adam at the bottom. And to think he’d spent his whole life sitting so comfortably at the top.

“It’s time we bring this to an end, Adam.”

Despite Adam’s reservations, he still had only one goal: survive. He was a fighter on earth, and things were no different in the ethereal realm. No way could he just wait for it. In the end, the question would be whether the creature was hunting Adam or if Adam would hunt the creature.

Gritting his teeth, Adam ran through the tunnel exit of the sigil room. It was another brief trip. Adam didn’t get far before the tunnel opened back up and he was standing in what looked like little more than another hall. Only the walls in the hall were smooth, and it had nothing more than dead ends on either side. Above was nothing but the limitless black of the abyss.

What interested Adam far more was that he could see where the walls to his front and back terminated, while the dead ends extended upward without end. They just disappeared into the void. He appeared to be in some sort of deep trench. It stretched for many yards to the left and right and was at least sixteen feet high.

Adam got the point quickly. The rooms seemed to serve no other purpose than to teach Adam the nature of his new abilities. Adam set himself and rubbed his hands together in preparation, and then he bounded forward, crouched low to the ground, and propelled himself upward as hard as he could. The result was an incredible vertical leap. It truly did defy human limitations. He sailed right up and was able to catch the ledge of the trench.

For a moment, Adam hung there, exhilarated. He smiled and laughed, then let out a loud whoop. The noise was immediately answered by the creature, which roared its bone-chilling howl. It felt so close that Adam yanked himself out of the chasm without hesitation. He possessed a new cat-like agility.

Out of the trench, Adam only saw another unfinished wall a few dozen yards in front of him. He turned around to see another expanse of polished flooring on the far side of the chasm. However, on the other side of the chasm, there was an exit. It was marked with an incredibly large out-of-place golden gate. Battlements as tall and thick as castle walls stood on either side. Beyond it was only darkness and mist. The gate hung open, and in no more than another few seconds did the creature come sliding into view just beyond it. The creature appeared to have been rushing to get to the meeting.

The two soul-eaters stared each other down for a moment. The creature was vaguely humanoid, with arms and legs, but it was covered in a thick pelt of white fur. Its head was bulbous with six small red dots for eyes in two vertical columns of three. Two slits populated the creature’s face where a nose might have been. Its mouth was a gaping maw that opened sideways and was filled with razor-like teeth. The creature’s arms were exceptionally long and nearly reached the ground standing fully erect on its two short legs. That is if you counted the curved claws that extended from the creature’s massive mitts. And the creature was tall. It had a foot and a half on