The spirit of the late Deer Mask made no attempt to speak, sitting there like soone suddenly called on in class when they were very busy doodling swords in the margins.
Its silence wasn’t very dramatic; it was awkward, like public speaking for the first ti, but with the bonus of an audience that could casually peel open your soul like an orange. Like Alex, for example... unfortunately.
Alex didn’t rush. He leaned back in his chair, or he would have if there actually was a chair and enough room to sit. Instead, with the lazy poise of soone who wanted the world to believe he had eternity to burn, he just stood still.
In reality, his patience had the lifespan of a fruit fly. Still, his acting skills were so well-practiced that wearing a mask ca easier than breathing. Dropping the performance would’ve been the actual effort.
He gave the spirit the kind of look you’d give a vending machine that just swallowed your last coin. Not angry. Not desperate. Just that quiet promise of violence.
"Well, that seems to be about damn ti," he said finally, stretching like a man about to start a workout he secretly knew would end in property damage.
"Your soul had enough ti to get itself together," His grin sharpened. Professionalism was technically the rule of the day, but professionalism, for Alex, usually ant keeping the blood off his shoes.
This was going to be fun. The sort of fun you write ho about, except the letter gets confiscated by the authorities and sealed in evidence.
Alex’s grin lingered, but the warmth behind it drained, leaving sothing sharper, sothing deliberate. He let the silence stretch again, this ti not like a lazy pause but a taut rope, tightening strand by strand. The spirit wavered beneath his gaze, ripples of unease distorting its already fragile form.
"Quiet type, are you?" His voice softened, conversational, almost kind. Almost. "That’s fine. Silence is a language too. Unfortunately, I’m fluent."
He moved closer. "Please don’t take this personally."
His presence was a weight, a shadow that pressed against the spirit’s essence like a thumb on brittle glass. With a slow, deliberate gesture, Alex reached into the air as though plucking sothing unseen, and the spirit jolted, convulsing almost violently, its formless chest arching as if strings had been pulled tight inside it.
It opened its mouth to cry, but the sound it made wasn’t a scream, not exactly. It was more like a tearing of cloth, flesh, and mory, all being shredded together.
"See," Alex muttered, tilting his head as though he was studying a specin pinned under glass, "I don’t particularly enjoy this. But that doesn’t an I won’t keep doing it. Again... And again." He continued slowly, deliberately, in the kind of tone that would make one question everything they stood for, "And again until your silence ans nothing at all."
The spirit tried to pull back, but there was nowhere left to retreat. An invisible barrier sealed them in, created by the silver cube that spun rapidly. Alex’s ether coiled through the soul like smoke, sinking deeper, brushing against what little remained of its marrow-deep identity.
Images flickered in the air: fragnts of mory, desperate and unguarded. A field at dusk. A bloodied mask discarded in the dirt. The hollow laugh of a dying comrade. Alex let those mories slowly spill, then clamped them down, cutting the spirit off mid-echo. It sagged, shuddering.
"Your mories," Alex whispered, his tone cold and almost intimate, "are just loose threads. And I can unravel them. Slowly. Until you’re nothing but a knot of pain without a single thought left intact."
The silence now was different. It wasn’t awkward. It was suffocating, heavy with the weight of inevitability. The kind of silence that begged to be broken, even with lies.
Alex waited, his patience no longer feigned but cruelly real.
"Now tell ," he stared at the soul intensely.
The face it wore was more of a suggestion than an actual shape, an echo of features half-rembered. The nose seed undecided, wavering between hooked and flat like it couldn’t commit.
The jaw was sharper than it had any right to be, as though the man had spent his mortal life chewing rocks.
The skin tone was a blur, hazy and shifting in the white light of a luminous soul, but Alex guessed him to be a shade of brown. A desert elf, maybe.
But this guy probably left that life, or was just trying out new fashion choices. He couldn’t just figure out since this guy wore a jacket with long sleeves, yellow leather gloves, and that ridiculous mask like he had been born allergic to air.
Alex hadn’t bothered peeling back the man’s corpse to confirm. Soul-callings were delicate things, fragile as glass threads, and jostling the body risked snapping them. If that happened, the backlash would slam into him. His soul would take the hit. And Alex’s soul... well, it wasn’t exactly in pristine condition to begin with... and so was his wife.
They were like an old mirror, cracked and glued back together; you could still see yourself in it, but not without the fractures, and it was more fragile than ever.
"Start with your na," He commanded.
"Daren."
The na cracked from the spirit’s mouth like a stone against glass, jagged and reluctant. Its lips didn’t move so much as tremble, shaping the syllables with visible effort.
Alex’s gaze didn’t soften. "Good. Keep going."
The spirit’s eyes, dim and liquid, flickered. "Lara," it rasped, the word torn out like a confession under a very sharp blade. "She... she gave the order."
Then silence. The kind of silence that felt stubborn, almost proud.
Alex exhaled, long and asured, as though he’d been hoping for resistance. "You’ve mistaken for a rciful man."
His hand cut through the chest, and Daren convulsed. Alex’s grip wasn’t on the body—it was on the mories, dragging them up raw and jagged like barbed wire. They tore loose one after another, unspooling in front of him.
A campfire, the warmth of stew passed between hands. A scarred man laughing with his mouth too wide—Rovik. A quiet woman who stitched her comrades’ gloves with surprising gentleness—Elya. The tall one, shoulders hunched from carrying more than his share—Torren. They were not grand figures, not villains nor saints. Just a family born from kinship. They were simply people.
Each fragnt pulled free left the spirit thinner, his features hollowing. Alex pressed harder. The mories splintered faster. Screams now, blood, the sudden shattering of comradeship. The sound of boots crunching over gravel in the dead of night.
And finally—
A woman’s face. Sharp purple eyes, lips pressed as though she held entire storms behind them. And two black eyes behind her, sothing that resembled the abyss.
The na the spirit had spoken trembled in Alex’s mind, Lara, but it warped, bending into sothing else.
Maya...
The vision snapped like a cord pulled too tight. The spirit’s mouth opened soundlessly, then shut, its form quivering on the edge of collapse.
Alex watched calmly as the spirit dissipated.
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