Wish upon the Stars chapter 945

The ghosts fell on me like a pack of rabid hyenas. Probably. I wasn’t sure if hyenas retained the necessary presence of mind to form a pack after contracting rabies, but in a general sense, they were a group of very angry barely lucid monsters who definitely wanted to do me harm, so it was close enough.

They weren’t the strongest ghosts here. These were C-rank ghosts, not B-rank. I suspected the wish had somehow tweaked things to allow me to end up here, otherwise I’d have definitely met some of the original owners of this place. Still, they fell on me with tooth and claw, and as their hands and weapons sank into my body, I felt icy shards of pain radiate from the impact sites.

It was agonizing, but ultimately not more than I could handle. More than that though, I felt something…deeper. Soul strain. Not from draining power or my own effort, but an actual attack on my spirit in a way I’d never really experienced before. With each burst of pain and damage, the green life energy in me flared, Zagan acting as protection and renewal all at once as it attempted to repair the damage even as it was happening.

My staff whirled, trying to deflect and distance them from me, but I ran into an issue I hadn’t expected. Ghosts weren’t solid, but my Ten Demons Tree was a soul based item. It could do all sorts of amazing things, including, apparently, physically interacting with ghosts.

While that might have seemed like a good thing under other circumstances, it was definitely NOT in these. My staff couldn’t get enough room to maneuver, and the crowd of ghosts was too dense for me to even use Double Trouble to get out of. I couldn’t see the edges, and if I appeared behind one of the interior spirits I’d just end up in the middle of the crowd.

So…I dropped the staff. Or at least, returned it to my soul. I needed room to move, and more importantly, I needed to commit. I was letting myself get bogged down in choice paralysis. My C-ranked Zagan form was keeping me from taking TOO much damage, but the bit that was getting through was starting to mount. If I sat around panicking, I was going to get dragged down and killed.

In a situation like this, when I was surrounded and had no way out, I only had one real option. Make a breakout point. Pick a specific ghost and tear into it, then do it again.

I let them all slash and snap and tear, feeling the pain as they tried their best to eat away at my soul. It was horrible, well beyond most of the pain I’d been through even in my trials for the Lady. Most.

But finally, I spotted one that would work. He was…small. I thought he was a kid at first, albeit a tall one, but upon closer inspection, I was pretty sure he was just malnourished and sporting a baby face. I triggered Dantalion as I grabbed him, then focused and started to pour green fire into his spirit.

He froze, then screamed, trying to get away, but I ignored it, holding him like iron as the others tore into me. Dantalion was necessary here. It taught me how to interpret what I was doing, because my next move was something I had never tried before.

Ghosts, by dint of the stories I’d heard, were people who had unfinished business. Spirits of Ascendants left behind when they died. They were NOT human beings. You couldn’t leave behind a part of a soul beneath Mirror. If a soul broke, the person it belonged to ceased to exist. Mirror souls were the ONLY exception to that rule. No resurrection, no healing, no last minute save. That was the end. At least for the sentient parts of a soul. People like Benny and my dad could access certain aspects of a soul separate from the part with a will and consciousness, though the how was a little complicated, but their “bound souls” weren’t thinking beings with emotions like these ghosts.

Because of this, it could be understood that ghosts were not broken souls. What they WERE, as far as I could tell, were more like…stuck souls. Still complete, but wedged into reality in the wrong way and jammed outside of a body. Ghosts weren’t exactly controllable. They were more…confused. Spirits so lost they couldn’t leave, and by virtue of that, too confused to resist simple commands as given by necromancers. You could even command your OWN ghost if you did it right, essentially using a ritual or ability to wedge yourself into reality ahead of time with FAKE unfinished business.

Regardless, this process was damaging. In order to get stuck, ghosts needed to be twisted in just the right way. Not many abilities could do it, because souls were tough to interact with, so not everyone understood the process, but I’d looked into it.

Which was where my current plan came from. I focused all my information from Dantalion in this particular spirit. On understanding him. On gaining a grasp of him. “Tyler,” I breathed out, staring into his screaming face. “Tyler Reubens.” He froze, the flames pouring into him quicker. As they dug in deeper, I gained more information. I learned more about him. The first thing I did was erase any artificial compulsions from necromancy, cleansing his spirit so that if he was being kept stuck it was only by his own will and unfinished business.

Then, once that was done, I started another process. Genesis Burst had been developed to heal my cousin from long term soul damage. The process her father had used to train her willpower to resist recursion had actually shared some similarities with making a ghost, and that gave me a place to start. I focused on the most recent problem plaguing him, the most recent pain of the soul I could find with Dantalion, and then I released a Genesis Burst.

The cleansing fire melted away the pain, easing the hurt and pacifying that part of the unquiet mind. Then I found the next one. I repeated the process. Tyler had gone still, the screaming stopped, and was staring into my eyes, tears trailing down his spectral face. I liked to think that I saw a flash of ease at the end, a split second of relief and gratitude as he began to burn in earnest, and his spectral form was cleansed from the world around it by the flames of Zagan.

After that, it was a blur. Grab a ghost, cleanse a ghost. My head…my head hurt. So badly. I hadn’t felt soul strain like that since I was first starting out. Zagan helped with that too, actually, restoring a bit of the damage as I went. About halfway through, I felt another spirit enter the equation. A steady, soothing presence that was always there with me, stepping forward to shield me from harm as Callie interposed herself between the strain of using Dantalion.

She couldn’t do much for Zagan. It was a C-ranked skill used through the staff, and she didn’t have a Chronicle, so she wasn’t capable of holding up under that weight. But she was there. She helped. 

When I finally finished, when the last ghost was gone, cleansed from the hill I stood on, I wobbled and started to fall. But I didn’t hit the ground. Callie caught me. Her embrace soft and comforting as she lowered us to the ground. I groaned, my head pounding, and looked around for any sign of the Void Vessel. I saw nothing. He was gone, as was the Void taint. The fog left behind had thinned noticeably at least at the edges.

Bethy and Abel appeared beside us, looking tense when they saw my condition. When I waved them off though, they nodded, then took off to help the others. Callie just held me, letting my rest my head in her lap, and rubbed my temples, humming softly as I recovered.

It took me about five minutes of that to realize she’d removed my mask to do it, and another five to realize why the sky above me was so blurry. She didn’t speak, didn’t even look directly at me. Just sat and hummed and rubbed my head as I cried. Over the tragically short life of Tyler Ruebens, and Daniel Godwin, and Sally Caruthers, and a dozen other people that I’d never met, but whose tragedies I had learned far too much about during that hellish and bizarre panoply of overstimulation and agonizing torment.

I thought I’d known torment. Had understood it. I’d thought nothing could hurt me anymore. But I still had the capacity for taking pains. As I wept there, in the shadow of that haunted castle, a part of me was glad for it. I’d come so far, changed so much, and I was getting farther and farther from the person I had been. Sometimes I relished that growth. Sometimes not so much.

It was hard not to think about my own tragedies. Not the pain they inspired, because I had slowly burned that part of myself away. I had cleansed the scars and the petty poison of weakness from myself, built myself up like I’d needed to in order to become more than I was. I’d Ascended, and left so much behind, just like Zeke had warned me years ago at the beginning of all this.

And just because I was already hurting, was already broken down. I allowed myself the smallest amount of self pity. I allowed myself to cry for one more lost soul. For Shane Wyndham, a shy boy from a backwater city on a backwater mining planet, who I had essentially killed on the path to becoming the man I was today. Because no one else was ever going to know about his sacrifice, or care about his loss.

My maudlin pity party was cut off by a soft pair of lips pressing to mine, and I refocused to find Callie smiling down at me sadly. Tears in her own eyes. “You didn’t kill him,” she said firmly. I realized I must have been thinking that loudly into the bond for her to pick it up. Probably a side effect of how fragged my head was. “We all grow up. We all change.” She nodded at the spot where I’d been standing.

“You saved those people. Strangers you’d never met.” She said firmly. “You hurt yourself to lay them to rest and set them free. Not because you didn’t have another way, not because you were afraid. Because you cared. Because it was the right thing to do.

Her voice was almost angry in its intensity. “You are every bit the hero you were when we first met. Your heart is every bit as kind. You’ve come so far. Done so much. And it’s been painful, and scary, and hard. You’ve sacrificed, and lost, and come up short. You protected the people you loved. Brought us with you out into the universe and helped us flourish. You never let go of who you were. Not for a second. Benny can attest to that.”

“Is that really a good thing?” I asked hoarsely. “Am I doing that for him? Or am I just clinging to the past pointlessly?”

She grinned at me. “So are you a sentimental idiot who can’t let go, or are you a heartless monster who buried all your human emotions in a shallow grave? Can’t have it both ways, babe. I think we’re going to have to face the fact that you’re a flawed, stupid person who sometimes does contradictory things because you can’t help but get in your own way. Just like you were the day I met you.” 

She leaned down to kiss me again. “That boy is still in there, I see him every day. And if you lose sight of him, just ask me, and I’ll smack him upside the head so can figure out where he is.” I started laughing at that, and I didn’t stop. Not even when it broke down into more crying. Of course, Callie was watching out for me. She had us under Murmur. By the time the others came looking, I was back in my mask and perfectly stoic. But I felt lighter somehow. I didn’t realize until we had already set off for the nearest Void outpost to try to snag a few more points that my head didn’t hurt anymore. How interesting.