Genesis End

By Spinning Demon (Topman) and Gauntlet (Shadowman)

Chapter Nine - Soul-Searching

It felt like we were still waiting deep into the night. I couldn't be sure, though. Something was interfering with my internal clock and I couldn't sync it up to any online network to check. As the wait began to weigh on us, I could practically feel Shadow Man seething. His impatience was quite uncharacteristic of him, but I chalked it up to his contempt for working with someone as untrustworthy as he'd deemed Ha'Khael to be. Gemini was reading some of Ha'Khael's books, although I couldn't be sure if he was genuinely interested or just putting on airs. I don't think his pride had fully recovered from Ha'Khael's quips. The demon himself seemed to pass the time contentedly wrapped up in his work. Being in the same room as him was unnerving at first after all I'd heard about him, but he didn't same dangerous at all, in fact he ignored us for the most part.

"All right, I think that should do it," said the aforementioned demon as he set the repaired gem into the repaired gold setting. He looped it through small chain and placed the charm on his wrist. "Now I am free to leave without my enemies seeking me out."

All of us groaned faintly. It was long past time to leave. Any serious investigating would have to wait until morning. Our night was basically wasted.

"Not so fast, Ha'Khael," Shadow said. "We're not leaving with you just so you can cut and run with your new toy. I want your assurance you're not up to anything first."

Ha'Khael blinked back at us. "I'm not 'up to' anything."

"So then you can promise me you have no plans. That you're not going to attempt to escape with the charm, that you're going to give it back once the investigation is over."

Ha'Khael chuckled. "It's all about the semantics, isn't it? I can't honestly say I have no plans at all. Even a recluse demon has his day to day plans. But no, I will not attempt to escape with the charm, and once you have solved the murders, I will return the charm to you."

I could see Shadow repeating the words in his mind, mulling them over. "You won't try to betray us, either," he added. Good call.

The demon's murky eyes glinted with reverie. He enjoyed this, I bet, watching people squirm and struggle to craft the perfect phrasing that would seal him to his word. "I won't betray you, no."

It seemed airtight, but you never know. After a minute Shadow gave a resigned sigh. What could they do? They needed his help and that was that. In short order the group made their way out of Ha'Khael's domain, back to the point where the cavern lost its smooth and sculpted features and the rough, damp rock prevailed. My internal clock switched back on and I was surprised to see that only two hours had passed. It was well into the evening now, but it seemed as if we could make some headway in our investigation after all.

****

The guards at the hospital hesitated before letting us all in. We really should have stopped by RPD HQ before coming here; Ha'Khael wasn't exactly inconspicuous in his getup. There was a tense conversation and a clearly irritated Shadow Man threatened to call Crorq (and let's see how the guards liked that), but the guards eventually relented to giving us an escort down. We were similarly delayed at the coroner, who refused to let any unauthorized personnel see the bodies. Without knowing how virulently KADE could spread, they weren't taking any precautions. Eventually, we talked her into letting Ha'Khael at least inspect the victims who had died of fright, since they had tested negative for KADE during the autopsies. The pale figure placed his hands on the body of the first victim, muttering something to himself. He then placed two fingers on the victim's now-shut eyes, still muttering in his own, strange language. He then opened the victim's dead eyes, leaned in, and inhaled deeply.

It was thoroughly creepy.

Ha'Khael closed the cadaver's eyes and moved on to the next victim, repeating the process. Gemini affected a look of annoyance, but I could tell his curiosity was piqued. While his long-lost interest in the supernatural was only recently rekindled, he was genuinely interested in finding out what Ha'Khael was doing. I was much less so and stifled a yawn, or rather the electronic simulation of a yawn, its impulse being programmed to make us appear more dynamic and relatable.

"Have you picked up on anything?" Shadow Man asked.

"I have some idea on what's going on here, yes. There's obviously no physical signs of distress, as I'm sure you've already deduced, and I'm a little pained to admit that our shining knight was perfectly on point when he determined they weren't attacked mystically... at least not in the traditional sense."

"What do you mean?" my crystalline companion asked. He was looking a little less dejected and a little more cooperative, his ego inflated by Ha'Khael's admission of him being right.

"The key to detecting mystical energy, as I'm sure you know, is by intuiting intent. If a spell was cast whose intent was to harm an individual, then someone well-versed enough in magicks could detect such a spell. If that's what they're looking for. Similarly, if one was narrowing their focus to detect a teleportation spell, one would try to intuit the intent to enter, or leave. You intuited no intent to harm on any of these victims. Just because these people weren't attacked, that doesn't mean no spell was cast, it simply means you must cast a wider net, search for other forms of intent."

"I don't understand," I said, "what kind of spell would kill somebody without the caster meaning to?"

He didn't break his concentration on examining the bodies as he spoke. "Well, to find that out we must look to what is different about these bodies. Or, in this case, what is missing. Are you familiar with the concept of animism? That every thing, living and inanimate, has its own soul? Living beings are simply born with souls, of course. Most religions get that part right, at least. This man would live and die bearing a soul, and his hair," he said plucking a hair off a cadaver's head, "though not living, would keep a small trace of the soul it was connected to. And you can do all manner of sinister things through that connection with the right spells."

Gemini frowned at this. He had recently discovered someone doing exactly that to him and the Mechs.

"The souls of objects, on the other hand, are trickier to explain. Typically they become imbued with souls during their creation, or by forging a bond by being meaningful to an individual. You, for example, were imbued with a soul by your inventor... and this table-"

He started to run his pale hand across the smooth metal of the workstation, and then stopped short. "How unsettling. This room, the objects within it... there is very little here that gives off any aura at all. What could cause this?"

I smirked, the answer occurring to me pretty easily. "Mass production. Machines, not humans, built this table... and maybe hundreds identical to it."

"Objects building objects," Ha'Khael frowned at this. "How disturbing." A thought seemed to cross his mind. "Is all of your world built like this?"

"Increasingly so, yeah," Shadow replied.

"Interesting, indeed." he seemed to ponder out loud. "In any case, I can only assume you've not gone so far as to mass-produce cadavers yet, which returns me to my previous point. This residual trace doesn't just disappear when the vessel expires, no more than it goes away when a hair is removed from the head. Anything once living is imbued with a soul, or at least a trace of one. But he," the demon gestured to the corpse in front of him, "is not. In point of fact, none of them are."

Gemini folded his arms across his chest. "So you're saying someone killed these people and stole their souls?"

"Oh no, young knight. I'm saying someone stole their souls, and that killed them."