Chương 165: The Soul

Every recorded Flesh-Shaper, with a single exception, awakened with an affinity for the soul. This was not a coincidence, but merely a prerequisite — the soul, the only door narrow enough, delicate enough, terrible enough to let a mortal reach past their own flesh and mold it like clay. Of course, with sufficient magics or birth-given traits, some were able to polymorph into another form. However, their birth traits and their source applications were merely... surface level.

Every recorded Flesh-Shaper, without exception, eventually stopped being a person upon receiving their powers; the weak were turned into mindless monsters, and the ones who were fortunate enough for their lucky stars to align would gain abilities that fell into a god's domain. Myths and children's tales alike called them monsters, as if monstrousness were the cause and not the symptom. A soul, mishandled by mortal hands and minds, forgets how to hold a shape.

The body, ever loyal, mirrors whatever shape is left, and the mind quickly follows. In his time, Mortimer had buried several friends who made that mistake, some who tried to awaken Flesh-shaping through effort, and others who were unfortunate enough to awaken as one. He intended, God willing, not to bury another one… The old man felt a paternal kinship to June, maybe like an uncle, perhaps even viewing himself as the young man's surrogate grandfather.

Mortimer knew better than anyone how talented a Flesh-shaper June was, despite the boy's aversion to his own prowess. June was an oddity, with each day making that fact harder and harder to ignore. Mortimer was old enough to know that oddities compounded. One anomaly was a pity. Two was misfortune. Three would be a tragedy. By the time you reached five, six, or God knew how many, you stopped calling it luck and started calling it a warning nobody had thought to write down yet.

He just hoped the warning wasn't about how the boy's fate would end. For all he knew, June's prowess… and anomalies could have been shoved onto him for a god's cruel amusement. Mortimer still remembered the first revenant, an application of Will that had never even occurred to him. Shortly after June and Mortimer first met, the old man asked an innocent question out of curiosity: "What bones is your bracelet made of?"

He remembered June going pale, the shame that permeated his face, like a child recognizing their wrongdoings. A piece of a dead man's bones possessed as his own and Flesh-shaped into a loop, threaded onto his own wrist.

"I hate it…" June repeatedly said when asked, beating himself up and condemning his morbid, yet ingenious discovery at every moment he could. Mortimer hadn't slept well that night. Not because it was wrong, exactly — the Nightrealm had never been squeamish about wrong — but because the boy had invented it. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Nobody taught him that. Nobody could have.

Mortimer briskly strided through the wrecked parterre, stepping over the corpses of people he knew hurriedly without looking back; in his hand, he clutched an enchanted scarf that June had made for Lilia before they started their relationship. The old man didn't remember the exact enchantments, but he could feel June's Will deeply ingrained in it with the desire to protect. The rest of the Harths had been safely evacuated, but through the king's order, Mortimer had been sent out to find Lilia and June…

and kill anyone who stood in his way. His shoes clacked against the chiselled stone with a quickening pace. While Lilia could use large-scale destructive magic capable of wiping out hundreds in a single spell, her repertoire remained as such; she lacked the proper experience to fine-tune her magic on the fly and reduce the power and strain that it subjected her to, a skill only capable of growing sufficiently through active combat.

Worst case, her magic could kill a few innocents along with her foes, but Mortimer wasn't as worried about her as he was about June. The young man was more than capable of fending off even lower-class Nightmares on his own; however, he, unlike every other recorded Flesh-Shaper, had a body affinity. June did not enjoy the same benefits that other Flesh-Shapers have; a soul affinity, among other boons, let someone have an acute awareness of their being, and so, Flesh-Shaping became a rewindable power.

Once you grew wings, you could always simply revert your body back to its original form with a vivid image of one's soul held firmly within a shaper's mind; June, on the other hand, lived with no backup. His affinity was not the mind, which could have aided him, but the body, a crude affinity that provided blatant boons, but nothing special among Dreamers. Superhuman strength, sight, and scent meant nothing to a Flesh-Shaper; muscle could be grown, eyes, ears, and noses could be iterated on and improved.

The fact that he continued to hold a human shape was astonishing, and terrifying… The idea that a single bad day could gently sway June's mind into suddenly transforming into an incoherent mass or becoming a mindless monster by accident terrified him. The boy had instinctively awakened a flaw nonetheless, a burden that could suddenly press on him... and possibly be his downfall. Mortimer wrapped the scarf around his neck and tossed his arms to the side, like he was embracing the sky.

His old arms began to shudder; his straight and towering height began to lean forward slightly, making room for cascading feathers to form under his arms. The process was… majestic… nothing like how June transformed. The old man ground his teeth and bent his knees before leaping up hundreds of feet, sending a colossal crack through the stone-tiled floor with bloodied, chiseled murals, sending out a small shockwave that further pulverized his takeoff point's surroundings.

His old legs were beginning to ache, so he took to the skies in search of the two.