The Will and the Wilds by Holmberg Charlie N

Author:Holmberg, Charlie N.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542005005
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

A vuldor is an unintelligent mysting of canine make that lives exclusively in the monster realm. That is to say, neither I nor my source have ever seen its kind on the mortal plane.

Maekallus stands in the center of a descent circle. Although mystings don’t need a circle to return to the Deep, and the binding spell won’t allow such a circle to work in its intended manner, he’s discovered this rune opens the space between realms just enough to let him suck up a little power. Before his fight with the grinlers, he hadn’t realized how powerless he’s become, how . . . mortalesque. He isn’t as fast or as strong. He can’t remove his horn. And gods below, he’s lost his tail. It’s as though the growing soul inside him clashes with his immortal body, and as compromise, his form becomes more and more . . . human.

Maekallus closes his eyes as the circle lights, drawing upon the energy it emits. He will need the boost to find Attaby.

“But you don’t mind if we use the basement. Of course you don’t mind.”

He rears back. The man doesn’t even bother to offer him a bribe. The glint in his eye and the knife beneath his coat is enough.

Maekallus grits his teeth against the strange . . . what, memory? . . . surfacing in his head.

Enna’s voice follows it. “Maybe, you are the bastard?”

So what if he is? He was made from a human. From the murder of one. Thus his humanoid form. He’s always known that. He’d been born a fully formed adult—there are no infant mystings. They don’t generate the way humans do. He isn’t the bastard who died to create him.

So why is it that, somewhere in a dark pit inside him where the pieces of Enna’s soul nest, he wants her speculation to be true?

The bit of power snuffs out. Maekallus opens his eyes. Feels the tendrils of energy dancing through his black-mottled fingertips. No. Humans—mortals—are weak. Pathetic. He wants nothing to do with them. He certainly doesn’t wish to be one.

“Maekallus?”

He looks up at Enna’s voice. The fragmented soul stirs within him.

Would it be so terrible, to be like her?

He knows now why he hadn’t consumed her inner being with that first kiss; the Will Stone explains as much. He’d realized it after the grinlers’ attack, when they stood there in the forest, surrounded by the bodies of the fallen grinlers, Enna covered in his blood. It’s simple.

She doesn’t want to lose her soul, so she wills it to stay.

The magic of his kind pulls, and the stone resists. The conflicting forces reached this strange compromise, just like the way his physical form changes to accommodate the newfound soul within.

Is that the reason why the soul inside him continues to live so fiercely? Because she wills it not to lose its vigor? To stay alive? To possibly, one day, return to her?

Is this newest piece of soul the reason why, when Enna had

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