The First Confessor: The Legend of Magda Searus

Chapter 77

“What do you mean, the half people are worse?” Merritt asked. “How are they worse?”

“They were actually created to control and guide the dead. They are living people who are stripped of their souls, so the dead and the half people share certain things in common.”

“Things in common?” Merritt asked. “Like what?”

“They are not alive, at least not in the accepted sense.”

Merritt let out an angry breath. “What do you mean by accepted sense?”

“The accepted sense of life means having a soul. That is part of existence as we understand it, part of what it means for us to be in the world of life.”

Naja reached out and lifted his hand with his ring and with her finger tapped the Grace on it. “Creation, life, death, with the Light of Creation running through it all. The half people are a perversion of the Grace. They are separated from that spark of the gift that is their soul, that spark they are supposed to carry through life and then after death into the spirit world.

“But these souls from the half people did not pass through the veil in the normal manner, didn’t carry that spark through the veil themselves. They have been ripped asunder. They are neither dead, nor alive. Though they are alive in the sense that they breathe, eat, even talk some, they are not really alive because they have no soul, no connection to Creation and the Grace. It is a living body that is just a vessel that has been torn away from the conventional sense of the Grace.

“If Emperor Sulachan dies before he can complete his grand scheme, he will be reanimated to be an extension of his soul in the spirit world. But the emperor is hoping that when the method is perfected, if he is still alive, his soul can be sent on to the underworld, while his living form remains here to rule the world of life as one of the half people, or should I say, what is left of the world of life. It is his way of achieving a form of immortality.”

“How can that make him immortal?” Merritt asked, his impatience growing by the moment.

“He wants to create a race of half people, with him as their ruler. He would no longer have to fear being old, fear being sickly, fear dying. His soul would be safe in the spirit world, leaving his temporal form to carry out his wishes in this world, thereby uniting the world of life and death in purpose.

“He and his race of half people would live indefinitely, largely unaffected by the afflictions of the living because they aren’t living people. They are, to an extent, animated in the way the dead have been animated, with magic having quickening their corporeal form.

“And, of course, the world of the dead is eternal, so there is no such thing as death for spirits. Spirits are by definition dead. Some of the spirits he has stripped from both the living and the dead still haunt this world. Having lost their connection they are unable to pass through the veil.

“The half people wouldn’t live forever, but through the process of sending their souls to the underworld and investing this vitalizing magic in their bodies, they also alter the way the body that is left behind would age. Changing the Grace changes the way time passes for them. Time doesn’t touch them in the same way it does us. Without the soul and with what they do to the husk of the living person, that person ages very slowly. I don’t know much of the details. I’m not sure anyone does, yet.

“Emperor Sulachan wants to convert as many people as possible into this new race of humans, these half people, living in this altered timeline. He plans to eliminate any opposition to his grand scheme by first eliminating the gifted who would oppose him—that would be you here in the New World—so that there will be no one with the ability to stop his plans.”

“That’s what the war is about,” Magda said out loud as the full realization came to her. “He wants to unite everyone under the rule of the People’s Alliance, but his main goal in attacking the New World is to first eliminate magic so that he and his followers are the only ones with the power of the gift.”

“That’s right,” Naja said. “He never says that, though. He promotes his goal as ‘eliminate the tyranny of magic from mankind.’ He makes people think that magic is their oppressor, and he is fighting for them by fighting to eliminate magic from the world of life.”

“But in reality,” Merritt said, “by eliminating the magic we have, he is eliminating the potential for opposition.”

Naja nodded. “Then he plans on eliminating life itself.”

Merritt’s arms came unfolded and dropped to his sides. “What?”

“He seeks to destroy the world of life as we know it, purging it of those people with souls. That would leave only the dead which he can control and the half people, who, as I said, aren’t really alive in the conventional sense. Then, the lifeless half people would rule a lifeless world.

“With his soul safely in the underworld, Emperor Sulachan would be the ruler of the world of life, but the world of life would no longer contain life as we know it now. There would be plants and birds and beasts, but the people here would no longer be the race of man as we are now. The people would be nothing more than animals, really.

“The world of life, as we know it, would no longer exist. There would no longer be any purpose in life, no ambition, no initiative, no accomplishment. No joy. No love.”

Magda and Merritt shared a look. She could see in his eyes what he was thinking: the boxes of Orden. In wordless confirmation, a private message to Magda, he lifted the Sword of Truth a few inches and let it drop back into its scabbard.

“That’s insanity,” Merritt finally said. “There is no other word for it. It’s hard to even grasp the very idea of it.”

“Whether you can grasp it or not, whether you believe it will work or not, whether you think he has a chance to succeed or not, what matters is that he intends to try to carry out his plan, insane as it is. He intends to try to destroy the world of life in order to create this vision of a perfect world where people do not think for themselves.

“That is why I defected. That is why I want to join your cause of stopping him. I, too, think it is insanity. I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to live in his idealistic version of an ideal world. I don’t want to be a slave to his purpose, to his deluded vision. It’s my life to live, not his to take for his ends.”

Merritt smiled for the first time in a while. “Then you have come to the right side. That is our feeling as well. That is what we believe in and what we are fighting for. The right to the joy of life. The right to our own life. The right to love.”

“The problem is,” Naja said, “I believe that even if he doesn’t succeed at his plan for the perfect world, he very well may succeed at destroying the world of life in the attempt. He is a technically intelligent, resourceful, and determined man and he is tampering with the very nature of what the Grace represents. Even if what he believes he can accomplish is utterly impossible and he doesn’t succeed with his ultimate plan, he will kill untold numbers trying. Even if he doesn’t succeed, even if he is insane and he fails to do what he thinks he can do, I fear that he may very well accidentally destroy the world of life in the process.

“Either way, the result is the same. Everyone is dead in the end.”

“Are you certain about all this,” Merritt asked in a careful tone. “Were you close enough to him to know this to all be true? To really believe all this half people talk?”

Naja Moon lifted an eyebrow over a cold blue eye. This was the dangerous sorceress Magda had recognized from the first moment she had seen her.

“I know how the half people were created because I helped create them. I am a spiritist. I speak with the dead. I also manipulated the spirits of the dead in the underworld to create for Emperor Sulachan an army of the dead. I helped show him how it could be done.”

Even though she had defected, Magda suddenly wanted to strangle the woman. “Why would you do such a thing? How could you do such a thing? How could you help put all the innocent lives everywhere in such mortal peril?”

Naja leveled a grim look at Magda. “What was being done to me down in your dungeon is a fate I would have prayed for, had I not done as Sulachan commanded. You could not begin to understand what life is like in the Old World, and especially in the halls of power there.

“Though he may be old and sickly, Emperor Sulachan is still a wizard of great power. Defying his wishes earns a person unimaginable torture. He keeps those he tortures alive for a very long time to serve as a reminder to others of the fate that awaits them should they, too, disobey his wishes. You would be surprised what you would do when living every day of your life in such terror.”

“If he is so powerful, then how did you manage to escape?” Merritt asked.

Naja let out a deep breath as her gaze drifted away. “There was a brief window of opportunity created by an unexpected calamity. While people were distracted, I saw my chance and was able to slip away. I ran and I kept running. I didn’t want Sulachan’s vision to come to pass. I didn’t want people to die to fulfill his plans. I didn’t want innocent people to be visited by such horror as I knew was coming. I hated that I’d had a part in it all. I was ashamed that I hadn’t been brave enough to have chosen torture and death instead of the things I did to help him.

“I thought that maybe this was my chance to do something to try to stop the world from falling into such darkness. After all, if not me, then who? What was my life to mean, if I did nothing and let this happen? What kind of person was I, knowing what was coming, if I stood by and didn’t try to stop it?

“I saw my chance and chose to act. Because I am gifted, I was able to fight my way through some of our forces standing between me and the free parts of the New World, and because I am a spiritist I understood how the dead and the half dead function, so I was able to avoid them along the way.”

Magda laid a hand on Naja’s arm. “Thank you for being brave enough to take up the cause of life.”

“Yes, we appreciate it, Naja,” Merritt said. “Your help will be invaluable. So what was the calamity you mentioned?”

“An unexpected complexity developed in the emperor’s plan. The half people he created took to eating humans.”

Merritt and Magda both leaned in together and together they both said, “What?”

“At first, there was no evidence of the behavior, but then without warning the half people began attacking and eating the living. I had warned the emperor of that possibility, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. He wouldn’t listen to any warning that went against what he wanted.”

“Why would they start eating people?” Magda asked. “What would make them do such a thing?”

“I believe that the half people crave the soul they no longer have. That emptiness drives them with a form of insanity that compels them to eat living people in a futile effort to try to pull a soul into themselves. It doesn’t work that way, of course, but you can’t exactly talk sense into the half people. It rapidly became a kind of madness infecting all of them, an obsession, that overrode everything else.

“They tear living people open, believing the soul they crave is inside. They eat the insides first, where they think the soul resides. They drink the blood, fearing the soul might leak away. When they aren’t satisfied because they haven’t gotten what they want, they strip all the meat from the bones, devouring it, trying to find and consume the soul in the still warm flesh.

“If a group of them catches a living person, they will all tear into them, competing for the soul. A cluster of half people will reduce a living person to bones in short order. It’s horrifying. The dead are not even able to be identified because the half people will use their teeth to peel the face right off the skull and eat it. They even suck the brains out of the skull.”

“And no one anticipated this?” Merritt asked.

“I did, but like I said, no one would listen. When it didn’t happen at first, and everything seemed fine, they were all the more convinced that I was wrong.

“The evolution in their nature took a little time, but when it happened, it happened quickly. They attacked people in the palace, feeding like wolves off the living who were trying desperately to control them. It was chaos for a time.

“That was when I saw my chance and escaped. For all I know, those in charge may believe that I was eaten, as were a number of the gifted involved in the project. It was a terrifying and very bloody time.”

“And this is still going on?” Merritt asked.

“Yes, but I think they’ve managed to gain some degree of control over the situation. They would have been able to do that, to some extent at least, because they have altered the Grace in order to use the spirits of these people.”

Merritt frowned. “Use their spirits? How can they control spirits in the underworld beyond the veil?”

“When they take the souls of living people to create the half people, those souls are not allowed to go to the spirit world. The spirits of the dead they also use are pulled back from the world of the dead as well.

“These spirits are kept trapped between realms. Unable to get back to the underworld, they sometimes drift back in this direction and haunt this plane of existence.

“When I left, the gifted were attempting to channel the need to eat the living into the need to instead eat the flesh of the enemy. That way, rather than having to try to find a way to counter such a powerful drive, they instead redirected it to serve their objective. That makes them an even more terrifying weapon. The half people are hard to put down, and if they get near your people and get the chance, they will rip them open, eating them from the inside out, trying to consume their souls.”

“Why are they hard to put down?” Merritt asked.

“Because they still have a functioning brain. They can think, plan, scheme, plot, hide, evade, and then attack.”

Merritt let out a sigh. “Great. Just great.”

Naja spread her hands. She was starting to look worse again.

“I hate to sound ungrateful to you both, and I want to help—that’s why I’m here—but I think that you need to get me to a place where you can finish healing me.”

Magda looked up at Merritt. “She’s right. We need to get out of here. We can talk more later.”

Merritt circled an arm around Naja’s waist as she started sagging. “I know just the place.”