Empires of Flux & Anchor

4 SOUL RIDER

It was a totally unexpected thing, unprecedented in all my long experience and in the experience of any of my brethren. We, the Spirits of Flux and Anchor that men call Soul Riders, join with and reside inside human beings, sharing what they share and seeing what they see. We have no choice as to whom we ride; that is determined by the unseen master of our fates whose identity and, indeed, very nature is shielded from us.

It is our mission to foil those who would open the Gates of Hell; to track down current members of the Seven Who Come Before, known also as the Seven Who Wait, and destroy them if possible. As we have no corporeal existence, our knowledge of the power of Flux and the laws of Anchor must be of use only when fed to a living being within. All of my hosts have eventually crossed paths with one or more of the Seven. How our unseen controller can know this so well in advance is incomprehensible, but it is always so.

It is possible that our hosts are chosen for their inherent power or intellect, since it is true that we cannot use more than what our hosts have to offer themselves and true that those hosts are then pushed or compelled, even as we, into the way of the Seven, but that is not something we can know.

Still, every host I have had I have stayed with for a long period of time. Usually they die, unnaturally and prematurely, but sometimes they become major figures themselves, and I remain for decades, even after the apparent mission is accomplished, perhaps to guard the host or make certain he or she accomplishes great things.

Certainly I expected this with my host Cass of Anchor Logh, whose Flux power is enormous and who has become the most important figure of political and military power on World in all my long memory. And yet, for the first time, the pattern was not to repeat but to change in a most radical way, one which I am at a loss even now to understand.

I was irresistibly drawn to Cass when she was but eighteen and an innocent farm girl, fearing that she might be chosen to be sold to a stringer and cast out into Flux in the Church’s ancient method of keeping Anchor populations stable. I was with her when she inadvertently discovered how corrupt that lottery was, and she was included in it, being thrown, naked and abandoned, into captivity in Flux. I rode her soul as the forces of Hell attacked the train and dragged her off into captivity, and because of this I was able to use her inborn Flux powers to effect an escape. Through her own impressive adaptability, intelligence, and resourcefulness, she managed to unmask the evil wizard Haldayne, one of the Seven who would open the gates of Hell, and obtain freedom and a position with Matson’s stringer train. Together we participated in the attack on Persellus, which Haldayne controlled, as part of an unprecedented force of Flux and Anchor led by three of the most powerful wizards of the Nine, an attack which was difficult indeed, and together we witnessed Matson fall from his great horse, a gaping wound in his chest, her employer and only lover lost before her eyes.

And yet I was able to turn her shock and grief into power, unleashing the full force of her abilities against Haldayne, for strong emotion is the greatest of all amplifiers, so that she alone took on Haldayne and routed him, once again foiling Hell’s plots and revealing the safe back way to the gates through the temples of Anchor.

Emotionally powerful and with a strong sense of duty, I was in her when she joined the priesthood as the leader of a true and needed Reformation. In the ruins of Persellus she established her new Church in Flux and called the place Hope. And so revolution came to World.

But her tryst with Matson had produced one unexpected and unanticipated result, one which complicated things and produced the wonder which still awes and confuses me.

My host had a girl child in Anchor, and I underwent with her the pain and agony attending such births, although I had been through it many times before and could sublimate the most unpleasant aspects. It was different this time, as I felt the message come, the mathematical command which drove me to alter my present state. Even as the child entered the world, I was drawn to her and inside her, so that she and I were in a sense born together.

This was a totally new experience for me, and one that I still find both fascinating and chilling, for it proves as little comfort to be born as to give birth. During the boring first years I took the time to reflect on this whole unprecedented incident and to try and understand the logic of it, although I confess that I have never understood the logic of any host assigned until the crisis actually came to reveal the reason. Still, to experience the joys and pains of human childhood proved, after the first years, to be endlessly fascinating, although hauntingly familiar, as if, some time in the remote past, I, too, had been born and had grown up this way. If, indeed, we are the spirits of cleansed warriors at the temporal apex of reincarnation, then this makes some sense.

Those early years also allowed me the luxury of probing the entire body of the new host, cell by cell, even molecule by molecule. Never have I understood a host so well, either physically or psychologically. Never have I had such an opportunity to suppress the negative and accelerate the positive where possible. I could cleanse build-ups in the blood flow, divert and eliminate toxins, and exercise some measure of mental control. Not that I ran her life, or wished to, but I could protect, inhibit some destructive behavior, and by very mild stimulation of pleasure and pain centers condition certain activities.

Nor, in fact, was she unaware of my presence, although she never really thought about it. It simply never occurred to her that everyone did not have such a duality of spirit, an internal guardian, although she theorized that few were aware of it. She has never resented me, but considered me a part of her, for she has never known my lack.

Now she is in most ways a woman, young and fresh and beautiful. We have been together these many years, and while I suspected a guardian role, there has been no need up to now to do anything at all. I have no idea of her Flux potential, as she has never been permitted out of Anchor where she was bom, but her father was a strong false wizard and her mother has the most power I have ever seen within one person of so normal a lifespan, so it is possible that my host is strong indeed, if untrained. Certainly her mother has had no more need of me, such is her current power, that power trained and honed under the tutelage of the master wizard Mervyn of Pericles.

Certainly the start of the true mission is at hand, for I feel in the very air a changed energy, a tension that builds towards a nearly unbearable point. The ancient struggle continues, and perhaps, this time, the answers to all my questions may lie at the end of it.