Body and Soul [Macabre]

[Chaeli Snowsong]

3 Winter, 511

The city had been like a distant star, the only constant in a world of untouchable darkness. But it never set, never twinkled or smiled. She had always hated how unnatural it was, just like the people who inhabited it. Voices like silk and eyes like seduction, even those faces she had met in the dark seemed like distant dreams, without the light of the city to make them real. She had kept away, presumably out of fear. What other excuse was there?

She could always see the light from afar, but not like this. Here, up close, she could see that it was not one light, but many. They reached out to her, reflected from her soulmist and filled her with pale solidity, made her seem whole again. She could not remember how long she watched the undying lights shine on and on, but she could feel herself approaching them. She was closer than she had ever been, because for the first time in years, she was not afraid. She was seeing clearly. They could not hurt her, not like she could hurt them.

But then voices caught her attention, and she started. Wispy, eerie syllables on quick, ebullient tongues tossed like daggers on the black air. As Chaeli’s resolution faded, so did her body. She collapsed and disappeared instantly, a curl of smoke from an extinguished candle. A stifled gasp was all she left for them, and a lingering cold where she dared not move. She could not go back, after coming so far, but neither could she go forward, not while there were people around.

A trembling tune hummed from her invisible lips. The notes drew long and sad without the weakness of breath to interrupt them. Though the melody was far less beautiful without the lyrics, it comforted her to hear it. She had forgotten that other ears could hear the same, and may not think it so cheering.

[Macabre]

“One more, and we’ll go back, that’s what you promised.”

“Fiiiine,” the syllable wallowed in impatience, and even on a language carved in whispering persuasion, the boy managed to coax an aggravated groan from cracking lips. A willowy hand unfurled from its sticky hold on pockmarked rock to give his accomplice a goading push. “But you have to actually go in this time, azo.”

It was dark and gloomy underneath the earth, but their black world was as large as the range of mountains that sat atop it. Neither winter nor summer touched the rock caverns of Kalinor and its worm-eaten labyrinths, though when the heavens opened for the wet season, the air would become thick and damp with the musk smell of roots and dirt.

“I’m going.”

The pendulous stone shack had been abandoned far before either boy had entered the world. At two-and-ten, Vesirio Plicata was the youngest in his Web, a lifetime younger than the bastard half-sister that had raised him. His cousin, Dalorian, lingered beyond the narrow opening in the ceiling, wide reds piercing the darkness with engorged pupils. He had celebrated his sixteenth year this summer past, and was looking forward to his first Harvest at winter’s end.

It was not an uncommon game among youth in Kalinor: travel to the abandoned outskirts, and return with stories and mementos as proof of your bravery. Vesirio and Dalorian had done it a handful of times before, though their most recent excursion had been too boisterous and too sloppy, and they had been caught by a well-meaning set of Eyes.

Vesirio made scarcely a sound as his sandaled feet met the bare floor of the building. Tiptoes scrabbled across time-eaten silk, kicked at rubble, fussed with a collection of silken web that threatened to catch in silver tresses and tickle pale nostrils. “There’s nothing in here,” the boy’s voice emerged from him in a breathy whisper and echoed off of narrow walls. “Just dust.”

“Shut up! I heard something.” Whether it was the chill of abandonment or the crush of the dark that tickled the corners of Dalorian’s eyes, he could not tell. There was a gasp, a flurry of nothingness, an eerie hum. A creature made of darkness, with gnashing daggers for teeth and smoldering green for eyes played across his mind.

Vesirio’s fingers groped for a shelf, carved into the wall of the same, cold stone. His ears were trained on the thump, sshhlk, thump of feet above his head, and then, nothing. “Heard what?”

Vesirio was forgotten in the depths of a forgotten hovel; the unspoken call of Kalinor called Dalorian’s cowardice back to its gloaming embrace.

“Dal—are you there? Hello? Dal? Dal!”

[Chaeli Snowsong]

He was so close, and he did not even know. She could almost reach out and grab him. It was her chance; she knew it when she saw it, but in that moment she could not move. Her own uncertainty paralyzed her. All she knew was to sing, soft and droning notes that seemed more like the whine of derelict webbing than the tune of any voice. She decided that the song meant to attract him as it sated her fear, to keep him curious as it kept her calm.

But there was another voice, stirring like an echo from her recent memory. It spoke from beyond the room, beckoning her prey, distracting him. The intonations sounded so similar to those that wafted from the lips before her eyes, and yet they were wrong. She needed him alone. Two were too many, she thought... Or maybe not. She could not be sure. One was safer, so one was better. She only needed one.

The world seemed eerily quiet, without music to fill it.

“Dal...” She sang, a strange sweet voice that parodied the hard concern in his cousin’s cries. “Dal... Dal... Come here, Dal.” As she spoke, she urged the chill of her soulmist to reach out to him, to pool under his feet and crawl up his legs. She could not touch him, not from this far, but she could lure him. He was only a boy, and she was powerful.

She was ecstatic because she was not afraid, and her delight showed clearly on her mouth as it appeared out of the darkness, followed by a chin, a nose, and the outline of large and hopeful eyes. To his keen senses, her form seemed threaded in happy gold. The color glittered in her eyes like a parody of an aura, charismatic by coincidence. The rest of her body grew beneath her as she rose to the boy’s height, smiling. Her hands floated up from her sides, reaching out to him as if in the promise of an embrace, and finally she found the will to move. It was not to take hold of him, though, not yet. She retreated backward down the hall so that he might be inclined to follow, to abandon his friend.

“Shhh,” Chaeli whistled, careful not to be heard by unwanted ears. She hoped he knew more than his wretched Spider language, but in case he did not, she searched her mind for other words. She stopped in front of a closed door. Just before she disappeared behind it, she repeated a phrase she remembered from before her death, spoken softly but often, syllables trained into her sorrowing mind. “Don’t scream.”

[Macabre]

Dal, come here, Dal.

Vesirio’s voice became a feeble croak in his throat. Whatever his damned cousin had heard, was mocking him. Fear swallowed his rage, and a hot black stone sat heavy in his stomach. Heat rushed through him, drove wetness to his hairline; his palms were cold and clammy, when his fingers reached for them.

A heartbeat-turned-lifetime he was frozen in place, but he managed to turn, to face whatever he had stirred up—that creature of darkness, crawled up from the depths of the cavern’s floor; some murderous foreigner, an escaped surrogate, looking to take revenge on her captors; a trick, schemed up by Dal and his gaggle of walking shyke-for-brains he called friends.

Creature of darkness, indeed.

The whites of Vesirio’s eyes grew around thin rings of vermillion as the gilded face of a woman emerged from the wrap of darkness, only to reach, and pull away, with sweet whispers and a cool smile. He balked, taking a shambling, blind step backward to knock away the shattered remains of a clay pot beneath his sandal-wrapped feet.

She cooed to the boy in Spider-tongue, slipped into nothingness, tempted him to forget about a craven cousin and ebbing terrors; she was no razor-mouthed corpse-feeder from the cavern’s floor, she was a woman, as small as he was, shrouded in mist—or made of it, he could not tell. One foot begrudgingly followed the other, and Vesirio followed in stunned silence.

[Chaeli Snowsong]

His feet fell like soulmist on the ground, silent and soft and slow. She felt as if her breath was a knot in her chest; at least, she had heard herself gasp, and her unfeeling shoulders almost felt tense in the suspense of his pursuit. With his every step he came closer, and so her absent heart climbed to her throat. With his every step she would move away again, and so would the light in the darkness recede that much further. In seconds, or maybe years, his every step lead him out of the white shard beside the door, and into the shadows.

There Chaeli blinked. Her remaining ‘mist flailed a fit at her sudden departure, then calmed again when she returned to it. In the same instant, the doors closed behind Vesirio and left them both in darkness. Chaeli had forgotten how to breathe, and that she did not need to. She had one of them, like she had wanted, and it had been so easy... well, until now. Now, she had forgotten exactly what she intended to do with it. She was silent for a short time, unsure how to act, or what to say. The yellow in her faded like hesitance, but her happiness had not entirely escaped her.

“Do not worry.” Even in whispers, the inherent melody in her voice hung in the small room like echoes on lute strings. “Are you worried? I... ah...”

She could see very little, but the black was familiar enough to her long years of isolation. She hated it, but she had grown accustomed to it. She wondered how much he could see. She reached her cold arms out to him, and the soulmist that felt and moved reached with her. The threads of it tickled his face and shoulders, even pushed against him as she neared, and so she felt him, and wrapped her being around him. The embrace was as cold as it was breakable, but maybe he did not know that.

When she spoke again, her nose was inches from his. She could almost hear his thick flesh absorb and deaden her words. “My name is Chaeli. Who are you?”

[Macabre]

Vesirio balked. Dumbstruck feet scrabbled backward, and unseeing fingers reached for the latch of a closed door, but he was clumsy, and the door may as well have been a league away. Chaeli was on him, in that moment, the tickle of ‘mist on his face pregnant with the chill of death. Her lips, her eyes, her face became clear. As soon as it had, it pushed through him, like a fist through water.

And then she was no more. She surrounded him, froze him, and drew gooseprickles from ashy skin and the breath from his lungs. He was choking, and the futile stumble backward had done little to save him. Whether he wanted to or not, he drew her in; they became one, spirit and Symenestra.

He fought her. “Chaeli!” The ghost-woman’s name escaped his throat in a wail. The boy fell to his knees and tore at his silk shift with angry black claws. His mouth opened and closed, but he did not scream. She had gripped him, permeated his soul and coursed ice through his veins. Vesirio’s fingers became numb, slow, and stupid; his arms were a burden to move, no more than deadened flesh. He had stopped thrashing.

The cold floor pushed against Chaeli’s solid feet. A chest rose and fell, sucked in air that smelled of age and fungus. Hairs stood on end to tug on a clammy neck. Something tangy and metallic teased a dry tongue, and eyes that could pierce darkness as well as a lit candle focused on a myriad of grays and blacks that could be touched, held, and inspected.

She had done it.

[Chaeli Snowsong]

His flesh was addicting. She could not help but touch on the solid warmth, to grip at the slender limbs. It seemed habit, though she had never been close enough to anyone to do it before. She managed to slip her hand into his, like a glove or a warm pocket, but he recoiled from the cold invasion and drew away, leaving the static of their merging on fingers that could not feel it. Her ethereal hand became a fist, and then it exploded in a cloud of soulmist. Invisible, she pressed on him, if only out of instinct. Raw desire fueled her, blinded her to any other option or consequence.

She almost had him, but he pushed her away again, as easily as a hand waves a fly. An ounce of fury swelled in her, wrought from both embarrassment and revenge; she pressed harder. She searched his soul, hewed at it until she found a moment of weakness. Only when she truly inhabited him would she realize that it was not weakness, but a false sense of defeat that had let her in.

She pulled his lips up in a smile without realizing how silly it seemed; she looked around the room with new eyes, seeing for the first time. There was a door. Behind it was a new life, or something. She was so consumed in the door’s unspoken promise that she forgot about revenge. She moved forward.

Chaeli had spent so long without feet that she did not remember to use them. Together they leaned forward, and subsequently fell. Reflex pulled a leg out to save him, but it was not enough; they collided with the ground, and the ghost inside him felt none of his pain. She helped him to his feet, and learned to walk again. She approached the door with heavy, clumsy steps, finally falling against it when she was close enough. There she fumbled with the handle and opened it, stepped into the world beyond.

“Dal!” She cried, pushing the boy’s reluctant voice through his throat. It seemed like the right thing to say, since he had said it before. She did not think to consider that Vesirio might still have some control over himself, or that his soul could press on hers with its intent. She leaned against the wall as she moved down the hall. Her use of his tongue was clumsy, lacking the grace of his learned accent. “Dal, are you there?”

[Macabre]

Dalorean had climbed three-quarters of the way back to the centre of Kalinor before niggling guilt in the back of his mind forced him to turn and stare, squinting through the pitch darkness, past the opalgloams where suspended trails of silk were old, unkempt, and dangerous. Then he heard it, that grating, familiar voice—that which he could not say he’d heard a moment before, but it had to have made him stop in the first place, to quiet the shuffling of fabric and moving limbs. Dal huffed. “Stupid,” he murmured, “can’t even follow me on his own.”


Vesirio inhaled sharply, as if something pained him. Then his shoulders quaked, and he whimpered. Chaeli would feel his tears and the lump in the back of his throat as if they were her own, and they would feel strange, unnatural, because between the occupants in that small body, Ves was the only one who wanted to cry. “It’s cold,” Ves despaired, fighting with the spirit for his voice. “I-i-it hurts.”

He tried to retreat into the stone hovel, to kick his feet and knock the ghost off balance—she couldn’t have been as good at climbing as he was, but then again, she was in his body, so maybe she was. His fingers were useless and his joints ached, as if he had slept through a night of winter on the surface and woke dipped in hoarfrost.

Then, sooner than he’d thought, hope appeared. Dal’s sylphlike body snaked out from the darkness, a look of mixed concern plastered on his pale and sweating face. “Ves, are you alright?” A pause. Vesirio tried to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t even open for him. Dal let go of the old street rope and dropped to the stone house, not an arm’s length from his younger cousin. He kneeled, burgundy eyes wide and a hint of a smile now tugging at his mouth. “The petch is wrong with you?”