Soulbound

Avery never saw the truck. One second, They were stepping off the curb, coffee in hand, the city buzzing around them. The light had just flicked green. She’d been half-thinking about the late email they needed to send, half-listening to the hum of a busker’s guitar at the corner. Ordinary. Distracted. Alive. Then came the horn. Too close. Too fast. Headlights flooded their vision, and the world snapped to black before the sound of impact could even reach them. Avery gasped. They stood in the street, heart hammering—or at least they thought it was. No pain, no blood, no body. Just… stillness. The city around them was frozen. A spray of raindrops hung suspended in the air, tiny glass beads glittering without falling. Shattered coffee from their dropped cup was stuck mid-splash, suspended inches from the pavement. Cars sat unmoving, drivers locked in place like mannequins. “What the hell—” Avery whispered, their voice small in the silence. “You’re dead.” The voice came from behi

Avery stumbled through the Veil, the black fire sigil burning faintly in their palm. Kael followed silently, scythe slung over their shoulder like it weighed nothing at all. “You still look like you might puke,” Kael muttered. “I’m fine,” Avery snapped, voice cracking anyway. “I’m not—” “Lying doesn’t help,” Kael interrupted. “Council wants to see if you can function under pressure. You failed your first claim—now you fix it.” Avery’s stomach lurched. “Fix it? How?” “You’re going after a Wraith,” Kael said, voice flat. “It’s feeding on a recently lost soul. You stop it before it destroys the cycle, or you don’t come back.” Avery froze. “I—stop it? I barely survived the last one!” Kael’s scythe tapped against the Veil’s cracked floor. “Then pay attention. Hesitation gets you eaten. Follow instructions. Survive. That’s your first lesson today.” The Wraith they were hunting had already begun to stir, its form a mass of jagged shadows licking along the edges of the Veil. T

The rift spat Avery and Kael out into a Veil that seemed alive. The sky above was bruised purple and black, streaked with threads of pale lightning that hummed faintly, like veins of some unseen creature. The ground beneath their feet was uneven, a shifting mosaic of shattered stone, ash, and faintly glowing cracks that pulsed like weak hearts. Shadows stretched long and jagged, moving against the grain of physics, curling toward the air as though reaching for prey. Avery swallowed. Their palms burned with the sigil’s fire. Every line pulsed in time with their heartbeat—or maybe it was their heartbeat. The tether pulled toward something faintly glowing in the distance: their mission target, the corrupted soul. Kael stepped beside them, scythe balanced across their shoulders, eyes scanning the horizon. “Focus,” they muttered. “It’s already drawn attention. Wraiths will smell it. They’ll come, and they’ll come hungry.” Avery nodded, stomach tightening. Their legs trembled, but t

The training ground wasn’t a place Avery expected. She thought it might be a room of stone, echoing like the Council chamber, or a hollow field filled with broken weapons and skeletal reminders of failure. Instead, Kael led her into a place that was neither alive nor dead. The air shimmered with ash-colored light, the ground a fractured plain of pale marble veined with black. Strange pillars jutted from the earth at odd angles, carved with sigils that pulsed faintly like dying stars. Shadows crawled over the marble surface, moving as if alive, waiting for mistakes to feed upon. Above, the sky was a flat canvas of gray, no sun, no moon, only the eternal hum of the Veil. “This is where reapers are forged,” Kael said simply. His voice echoed low and steady, a contrast to the vast emptiness around them. He gestured with his scythe, the weapon catching faint, silvery light as if it fed on the Veil itself. “Here, hesitation gets you burned before you ever set foot in the real hunt aga

The summons came at dusk. Avery felt it before she saw it: a pull at the mark burned into her palm, dragging like an invisible hook through her chest. She jerked upright from where she sat in the training yard, her scythe across her knees. The air shivered with the taste of iron and ash, and the shadows deepened unnaturally. “They’re calling us,” Kael said flatly from the far side of the yard. He didn’t look surprised. His scythe was already in hand, its blade faintly glowing. “On your feet.” The tug grew stronger, a weightless force pulling her toward a place she couldn’t see. Avery scrambled up, her heart hammering. She hated this part—the way her body wasn’t her own, the way she was dragged like a puppet through the corridors of the Veil. The world folded. Shadows unspooled around her, and the ground gave way. She stumbled, and suddenly she was standing at the base of the Council chamber once more. The room was colder than memory, vast and echoing, carved from obsidian st