Ashkor Soulbinder's Arc

Chapter 3 of 8

Ashkor moved his procession deeper into the Demonicwoods before the fire-house spirit could grow hungry again. Eleven warriors circled him in a tight ring. His older self walked at his hip on its leash. The trees here grew close and black, and the ground muffled his steps. He felt the eleven press in toward his shoulders without being told. They had learned the pit lesson. Now something else was teaching them a new fear. The small bone charm at his throat began to keen. He had stripped it years ago from a screaming spirit and bound the cry inside it. It only sang when a hunter closed in unseen. Its wail cut through the trees, low and thin, then climbed. Ashkor stopped and listened past it. He heard nothing. That was the warning. The woods around a depleted procession should never go silent. He backtracked a dozen paces and found the sign. A tree as thick as a wagon had been split open at chest height, the bark peeled back in four long strips. Sap ran black down the trunk. Pawprints pressed deep into the dirt below it, each one wider than his hand. He had seen the like once before, on a one-eyed grizzly that hunted his old camps. Something bigger than that walked these trees now. The charm at his throat kept screaming. The eleven souls flickered and tried to drift outward. He pulled them back with a word. He could not run. A scattered ring would be eaten one by one. He drove his fire arms into the dirt and spoke the binding words he used on stone and root. The ground answered. Four ancient trunks tore up around him in a square, their roots still trailing soil. Iron rose with them, plate and chain bolted through the wood, locking the trunks together into a cage with the procession inside. He sealed the last seam and turned outward, fire arms raised. The bone charm went quiet for one breath, then shrieked again, closer. It came through the trees at a run. A grizzly's body, a wolf's head, a snake's tail lashing behind it. Runes burned red along its ribs. It hit the cage and the cage held. The beast bit the iron and broke two teeth. It clawed the trunks and tore bark but not through. Ashkor stood inside the ring of his eleven and watched it work itself bloody against the bars. When it tired, he spoke the binding words forward this time, slow and clean. The runes on its hide answered his. The creature sank to its belly. He opened one seam of the cage, walked out, and laid his burning hand on its skull. It became his. Twelve now circled him again, and one of the twelve had claws. The fire-house spirit stirred on his shoulder and pulled at the ring. It had smelled the new soul. It was already hungry.