or a demon? But all the realms seem intent on hoarding the stuff. Gathering souls, preserving souls, rescuing souls, judging souls, eating souls, if you wander into the wrong neighborhood.
Let me tell you, from someone with lifelong experience owning one, a soul’s not that shiny on the inside. A grand bother, it is. We spend half our life worried about preserving it, then the rest of it worried that we haven’t spent the currency well enough. Better if we never knew we had one, in my opinion. Life is for the living; leave worrying about souls for the dead.
But there was no chance we’d be that sensibly ignorant. Not in a world so lousy with stories.
Souls: pesky, powerful stuff.
Librarian Fleur Michel, 1784 CE
HUMANS WERE RIDICULOUS CREATURES, in Hero’s expert opinion. They always saw what they wanted to see and ignored the rest. No creature edited its own reality so viciously as a human. After watching a man get sacrificed to oblivion, a rational creature might rebel, decide that three gods and a judgmental bridge were a poor form of moral government. A rational creature might at least consider whether any paradise one has to sacrifice others to get into is worth the price of admission.
But no, not humans. Even in death, they picked and chose a comfortable sort of truth. Humans milled in organic clumps, hesitating at one end, before making the slow progression to the other. It was impossible to walk the bridge quickly. Its sharp incline seemed designed to force a soul to slow down and consider one foot placed in front of the other, the lean of the body against the grade. The glimpses of mist and cinder caught beyond the translucent path.
Hero didn’t allow Rami to hesitate when they reached the point where stone translated to shimmering bridge. He dragged them over the threshold and kept walking. If he was going to pass this damn judgment, he was going to do it his way. Hero preferred having a choice in his dramatics, thank you very much.
They passed under a lacquered arch, and Hero didn’t allow himself to look down until his foot landed, solidly, against the shimmering glass-like substance of the bridge.
It held, souls continued to mill around him, and Hero let out a breath he’d been keeping stoppered in his chest.
Rami stopped at his shoulder, asking a silent question. Yes, Hero would be okay. He could do this. He nodded, still gazing at his feet, and pressed on.
The arch of the bridge was strenuous, and by the time they’d nearly crested the middle, every muscle in Hero’s legs burned, but his hope was rising. The bridge remained, stable and wide, under his feet. Though, nonetheless, Hero stuck precisely to the center of the crowd. The traffic on the bridge was brisk, now that it seemed stable, and if the gazes of the two giant gods shadowing the sky fell on him, he couldn’t feel it.
It was all going perfectly well, so when Rami’s chin jerked up, it was like a siren. “Hero.”
It took an extra second of scrutinizing for Hero to see it. To his right, past Rami’s shoulder and caught in glimpses between souls, the far edge of the bridge had begun to dissolve into sand.
“Maybe it’s someone else,” Rami whispered, and shoved Hero ahead at a faster pace, to place distance between them and the disturbance.
A shiver, like sand cascading over glass, told him the effect was keeping pace. Hero’s stomach dropped. “Or maybe not.”
A cry broke out near the disintegrating edge, and a murmur began to spread. Humans saw what they wanted to see, yes, but when presented with an immediate threat, crowds could turn like lightning. Souls began to jostle behind them, and Rami caught Hero by the arm as someone shoved past.
The disturbance spread. In a blink, Rami had drawn his sword. “We need to move.”
Hero nodded, and they dove through the crowd that had begun to cluster and back away from the edge. A scrabble of feet behind them said that the bridge was melting away from both sides now, and then there was a scream.
Hero looked back just in time to see a bramble of humans fighting near the ledge. “It’s her! It’s got to be her!” another woman shouted with a girl in her grasp. The next moment existed in only two things: a puff of displaced mist, a smothered scream.
“No,” Hero whispered.
“Holy light, she pushed her.” Rami’s voice was hoarse, then hard. “We need to get