Ashkor Soulbinder's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Ashkor Soulbinder counted his dead each dawn, and each dawn the count was short. He stood at the black edge of the Demonicwoods with souls circling his shoulders like slow gray moths, each one a warrior he had pulled from a battlefield and chained to his service. His fire arms threw light on the trees. His flame eye, the gift of a warlord who once hurled a dying sun at his face, saw heat where his green eye saw only bark. He was building an army from the fallen, soul by soul, and something in these woods was eating them before he could close the chain. The leash at his hip twitched. On its end drifted the bound soul of the Ashkor who had died, the older self he kept as a watchman over the others. The dead Ashkor pointed deeper into the trees. One soul in the ring around him, the one that clawed at its binding every night, hissed and tried to drift the other way. Ashkor walked where his dead self pointed. He found the clearing at the second hour. A shape stood there in the shape of a burning house, taller than three men, its walls made of roaring fire and jet-black hollow. Chains poured out of its sides. Lesser spirits spiraled along the chains toward the dark mouth at its center, and the mouth swallowed them, and a single long scream came out of it that did not belong to any one of them. At the tree line lay what was left of the ones already taken: torn silhouettes with hollow chests, legs gone to smoke, white eyes still open. Evidence. Receipts for a theft. Ashkor did not bargain with thieves. He cut the leash and let the dead Ashkor loose into the burning house. His older soul went in screaming his own name. The fire-house bucked. Chains snapped backward into its walls. Ashkor stepped into the shadow mouth with both fire arms forward and seized the hungry thing inside by what passed for its throat. A binding broke somewhere on his ring; his left hand flared white and two fingers fell off as ash. He did not look. He spoke the binding words into the dark until the scream inside the house became one voice, and the voice was his. The fire went out. The chains fell. The torn shades at the tree line did not return. They were gone for good, and his army was smaller by every spirit the house had swallowed. But the thing that had eaten them now circled his shoulders with the rest, heavy and obedient, and his lost fingers were already pushing back through the ash. He turned toward the deeper woods. The one soul that still clawed at its binding clawed harder now. It had seen what he was willing to do.