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That one’s about collecting real souls and keeping them together, he had said. If you do what you just did, it’ll be impossible for all the pieces to attach back together. That’s what the shape is—it makes it difficult for the remnants to rearrange themselves. It’s also too big for a soul, and… you’ll see.

I kept thinking about those things—collecting souls and keeping them together. Then, rearranging them.

I studied those runes for hours until I thought my head would crack, and then I finally understood what it was telling me to do—

—it wanted me to collect millions of soul fragments to make a working soul.

Worse, I had to patch them together into a whole soul.

It was a joke. An actual joke.

But it made sense. What good would it do to put something’s consciousness and memories and emotions into a blender and then throw them into a random object? There wouldn’t be one. So, a huge part of the picture was to break apart the souls and put them back together, which required someone to stretch a soul into a general shape to limit the amount of space it took to break something apart or put it together.

I studied the Soul Channel Visualization spell I unlocked in my legacy tab and then walked to the first statue to see what was under the hood. What I found was fascinating.

The area in the stick that accepted the soul was thinner than cheap dental floss.

Confused, I summoned a soul remnant ball and then released it, watching it snap together into a tiny line. I cocked my head and summoned another ball, and tried to compress it. It wouldn’t snap together if I pressed it, so I did the compression spell and figured it out.

So that’s how it works… I thought, watching the soul spin. The remnants repel the wrong fragments, so the compression spell is actually organizing the pieces.

It was like Legos—they take up vastly more space when they’re loose than when they’re connected.

And if you just release them… I thought as I released the ball. The remnants swirled around and snapped together like magnets. Then, they floated away to the edge of my soul-repellent space. Once they hit the fog, the soul line exploded. It was entropy.

So that’s the trick. If you just let ’em go, they’ll rearrange themselves, but there must be limits. I looked over at the second statue with its strange shape. Maybe they don’t go up or down or diagonal or just get clogged.

I walked up to the statue and activated the channel visualization spell and laughed out loud.

"No wonder it attracts everything!" I cried.

Kyro woke up from my outcry and groaned. "What’s wrong?"

"This statue… it’s not just big. It’s massive."

"Yeah… you like that?" he asked weakly. "It’d take a colossus to fit in that abomination, so you gotta make an amalgamation and stretch it to fill it. It’s a lot easier than you think cause remnants naturally attract—"

"Wait. Amalgamation? Like Yakana?"

Kyro unscrewed his flask listlessly. "Yeah. I told you—Yakana’s amalgamation’s not special. I mean, he is, but it’s not ’cause he’s all stitched together. That happens naturally, just like the Bramble. That fucker Brindle was just a genius ’bout how he designed him." He took a drink and coughed twice. "Anyway, you’ve already created an amalgamation. The only thing that’s asking you to do is collect a lot of remnants and keep ’em together in an area where the souls can’t rearrange themselves. So you gotta stretch it with… telekinesis. Though you already got that typea skill. Still… there’s obviously a lot more to learn from it than simply stretching, breaking, and binding souls. Cause that…" He pointed to the plant monster. "That makes you stitch together full souls. That’s why the second statue teaches you to summon a real soul even though you don’t need it."

I studied the plant monster. "So… Let’s run through this. When I touch the second ball, it’s going to call an extravagant number of souls into the area and alert the forest. Then, once I complete it, the Bramble will open up, luring things to kill me."

"Ye~p."

"And once I touch the monster’s ball, it’ll summon the whole damn forest and tell them to attack."

"Close enough."

"So what I needa do is say fuck number two and learn the runes on three first."

"Correct. Well, you had to learn it first… obviously."

"Yeah…"

I drank some water and fed Kline and then sat in front of the statue, studying the intimidating script on the podium. There were twenty-five runes on the last statue and over a hundred lines on the current. It looked like a section of the walls in some far-off Egyptian pyramid.

I prepared and took a deep breath. It was time to bring my first object to life.

2.

Brindle watched Mira from his throne as Telgan, who had melded into the tree behind him, wrapped her arms around his back for comfort when watching. The trial had grown tense, and they hadn’t slept in the last day.

Mira continued to exceed Brindle’s expectations, and the current trials proved that Yakana wasn’t the sole reason for her success. She had a soul affinity, as some people naturally do, and Yakana’s aid had made the process of manipulating souls effortless. But the real trial had yet to begin.

"You’re not going to help her?" Telgan asked.

He shook his head. "She’s capable."

"But… Can she really do it this fast? I think you’re overestimating her."

"Really?"

"Yeah. That would require soul stitching right? You think she could do that… on a timeline? There’s no way. Not without Yakana."

Brindle watched Mira connect the soul runes with a relaxed body. It was similar to the effects of psychomancy, like when Mira bonded with Yakana the night Brindle taught her to make the Teelia elixir. It was the only reason that she succeeded that night, and with her callasp damaged, that was out of the question. Now, she had a week to solve this problem—but could she?

Brindle couldn’t remember how long he spent on the problem. He left the crypt and returned about a century later—but he didn’t practice the problem for a long time. He had to improve his core and learn to cleanse and make pacts before he could approach the problem—but Mira already had that and some. She had centuries of shortcuts between Yakana and the Oracle and his legacy.

So, it was difficult to gauge.

"Let’s watch," Brindle said.

"Okay," Telgan said.

Suddenly, Mira cried out and hit the ground, shutting her eyes and ears as Kline yowled and paced around her.

"See? She can’t even process the stitching."

"She’s just overwhelmed. Give her time." The soul runes were burning the anatomy of souls into her mind so she could understand what was necessary to bring soul creatures to life. It wasn’t a skill—she would be fine once she understood it.

And she was.

Mira was nine days from the Harvest when she started, and it was seven by the time she processed the soul anatomy. She spent most of that time focused on the runes or learning spells from her Guide or eating on the ground, exhausted, but she didn’t give up.

It was miserable work, but things got easier a week before the harvest. He could tell she understood soul anatomy because she collected souls and stretched them, compressing and releasing them, breaking them down, and moving their individual parts. Then, she would sit down before the runes once more.

Time was running out, but she pressed on.

With only five days to go, she suddenly got up from the runes and stood before the Omoxilian—the plant amalgamation.

"You need to stop her," Telgan said. "She’s way too valuable to let her die for nothing."

Brindle watched Mira speak to Kline and Kyro, and the latter faced the soul forest. Then she asked Kyro a question, and he shrugged his shoulders and said something, and she returned to the third statue instead of the second, understanding that the benefit of leaving and practicing the spell later was returning when the Bramble was closed and they didn’t need to activate it.

Brindle knew because it was that very crypt that taught him about creating soul forests and guardians, two lessons that later translated to creating the Bramble.

Mira reached for the ball.

"Brindle," Telgan said with uncharacteristic firmness.

Brindle acted, opening up his Guide. It was too slow, and Mira touched the ball, but before she activated it, she froze and looked around her, calling out to something in the mist.

Yakana… he thought. Or…

"Hurry up," Telgan said.

"No… she’s speaking to—"

"Hurry up. The last thing she needs is for some spirit to tell her to go through with it."

Brindle took a deep breath and then finished accepting her request. Mira checked her Guide with wide eyes and looked to the sky and clasped her palms together and said something with the most thankful expression Brindle thought he had ever seen.

Seeing that look… those mannerisms… It reminded him a lot of Yakana.

Suddenly, he got a lecture request that read As Soon as Possible.

I waited for the thirty-second countdown for Brindle to arrive, muscles stiff, letting my back crash against the podium—taking deep, stressed breaths. I barely noticed when the druid appeared in the fog and walked out like a sinister necromancer, footsteps leaving steam trails on the ground.

"Why did you stop?" Brindle asked in his hollow voice.

"The trial?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Oh…" I looked into the mist, heart pumping with a galloping rhythm. "Yakana stopped me… I think. If it was him, he used the most freakish proxy to yell, Stop! I thought a killer clown was gonna fly out with a chainsaw."

Brindle stared at me blankly. "What’s a chainsaw?"

I closed my mouth and looked away. "Nothing… So. You here to tell me it’s worthless?"

"No. You’re just not ready." Brindle put his hand on the crystal ball and activated it. All the soul fog in the area blasted down in a tornado, and distant beasts screeched in all directions as the area around Brindle warped.

"What are you doing?" I cried.

"It’s an illusion," Brindle said apathetically. "I’m just showing what will happen."

The cries of beasts got louder as they ran to the tornado warping the sky, and the trees groaned and cracked and a few minutes later, a few of the beasts flew into the Bramble, which made them cry out and die.

"The Bramble’s protecting you," Brindle said. "But it’ll only last about twenty minutes."

"Why that long?"

"Because the beasts will eventually rip through the soul forest. And…" A booming cry rang out in the distance. It was a goliath, destructive like a titan from Greek mythology. "There’s a guardian here, too."

I looked between the direction of the sound and then at the plant monster, which was maybe ten by ten feet—three meters squared. The size of a bedroom. The thing in the distance—it was breaking through trees.

"How’s this supposed to kill that?" I cried.

"It’s not. If the guardian sees the Omoxilian moving, the guardian will protect you instead of killing you."

"I see…"

Brindle snapped his fingers, and the sound disappeared—but the massive soul ball, which had grown to the size of a statue, remained. "You have twenty minutes to accomplish something that looks like this."

He lifted his hands, and the soul ball broke apart into billions of pieces and arranged itself, snapping itself together in a hypnotizing display before creating dozens of full souls and a large mass of soul remnants. He then used the loose remnants like thread to stitch together the souls into one lump and then compressed them. It created a spiraling sphere the size of a soccer ball in the sky and then expanded radically, developing hundreds of limbs like spaghetti strings in the general size of the monster.

"You gotta be fucking kidding me," I said.

Brindle waved his hand, and the soul mass entered the statue. Then he walked up to it and put his hands on it, activating the magic circles inside it. The beast’s brown exterior turned green and brown and yellow, coming to life as its vines and roots twisted and coiled like an octopus.

And that was the beginning.

The dirt beneath me buckled, and the Bramble’s plants sucked underground, leaving leaves bunching up on the surface, and the Omoxilian increased in size, creating the most surreal scene imaginable. Roots grew from the earth, creating massive legs for the beast, multiplying its size.

"That’s even worse," I yelled. "How the fuck am I supposed to do that?"

"You practice."

"I don’t have the time to practice. I don’t have anything to practice with."

"Then let me give you something." Brindle motioned to the area before my feet. "Sit."

I did.

"Now chant."

I did, following along with his words. As I did, I could feel the power of those crystal balls flowing right into me. Souls whisked from the air.

"Find the souls… the whole souls," Brindle said. "Identify them. Seek them out. It’s difficult but in this place… where only souls reside… it’s possible."

I followed his voice and his chant and thought of Separation, and along the lines of Separation, I identified certain souls and repelled the rest. It took over an hour for me to find one but I managed to collect it, bringing it down in my hypnotic state. Then I manipulated it, stretched it, separated it, and tried my best to create little spaghetti legs but failed.

"Picture the image in your mind," Brindle said. "Any image. Things that you know better than any."

I thought of Kline.

"Now repeat after me."

I followed his chants, and the soul took another shape, forming like clay. Things became far simpler, and I gained control and created a general shape of a cat. I was excited—but that was only a fraction of what I needed. But Brindle had more patience than anyone I had ever known. He sat down and helped me with exercises for the next two days. I did exercises pulling souls from the air and stitching them together with the spell I was given, taking teachings from the soul runes, my guide, and Brindle’s guidance to stitch them together before making shapes.

On the second day, Brindle took me to the bushes that almost killed me and had me identify their soul channels and practice with them under the threat of necrosis and death. I learned quickly. And when I woke up on the third day, planning to start my final set of training, I found that Brindle was gone.

I got up in a panic and looked around, but I was only met with Kline meowing, confirming he was gone. I was nervous and scared. It took two days to truly understand how pathetically underprepared I was, but…

I looked at Kyro and saw his body turning slightly blue. His breathing was ragged and his flask was on the ground instead of in his arms like a stuffed animal like it usually was when he slept.

I looked at the crystal ball before the Omoxilian and swallowed hard. It was finally time.