Shift of Shadow and Soul (SoulShifter Book 1)

by Hilary Thompson

  The morning went quickly, and so did the days that followed. Each day, Coren grew in leaps of magical power, impressing even Damren herself, although the old woman never complimented her. Coren pushed away fatigue and injury and the despair Sy had seen those first nights and focused like the noon sun on the task of learning to control her power.

  And each night, he knew she sat in bed for hours, reading by candlelight. He expected her to tire, or get frustrated, or her enthusiasm to wane, but using her magic seemed to energize her. She learned weapons far beyond her whip, which Sy was grateful for. If that whip did indeed have anything to do with Umbren blood magic, it was probably better that she didn’t use it.

  He wondered if the whip itself could have sparked her to kill that guard in Weshen City, and if that were true, what else could it whisper to her?

  The morning of the fourth day, Coren stood in the training room, demonstrating for Damren as though it were the final test in school.

  “SourceShifting,” she announced, pulling water from a bucket and separating it into droplets. Then she fused the drops into a spiral that wound around her body and up to the ceiling, like the spiral stairs of the library. She moved the stream of water much like a whip, striking out at a punching bag. The bag swayed gently with the force, but Damren only grunted.

  Coren dumped the snakka of water back in the bucket and glared.

  Turning to the wall of weapons, she chose a club of wood and iron. Disintegrating it into piles of sources, she swirled the dust together on the floor, using the training mat as a canvas and the dust as paint.

  “That’s beautiful,” Sy said, and Coren smiled. But Damren only sighed and tapped her foot.

  Coren squared her shoulders, and Sy knew she was near the end of her patience. She began to fuse the sources back together, forming the weapon again in seconds and hurling it at a wooden target. The target cracked in half, its pieces falling to the floor with the club. Damren nodded slightly.

  Sy pressed back a smile as he saw Coren’s jaw clench. Damren had always been the same to him, but he was used to it.

  “SelfShifting,” Coren bit out and closed her eyes. Sy watched, wide-eyed, as she shrank again to a girl of no more than ten, clutching her too-large clothes around her tightly.

  She held the form for nearly two minutes before her body began to shimmer and stretch back to its normal size. Sy could see the weariness around her eyes - using this much magic at once was exhausting. He tossed her a skin of lemondrine water, and she nodded in thanks.

  “Is that all?” Damren asked, yawning as Coren lowered the skin.

  “It wouldn’t be all if you’d teach me more!” Coren finally exploded. “I have spent every hour working for your approval.”

  “And I will never give it,” Damren answered, grinning. “It’s pointless to work for the approval of others. Work only for the approval of yourself. That is power. That is true magic.”

  Coren clenched her fingers into fists and opened her mouth, then closed it. Instead, she stalked from the room, slamming the door behind her.

  “You shouldn’t tease her like that, Damren,” Sy said, smiling but shaking his head.

  “It’s not teasing. It’s the truth. She wants to impress me, but I’ve seen too many arrogant magi in my time. Trying to impress others only brings the darkness of jealousy.”

  “She’s already as capable with her magic as me, and in only four days,” Sy pointed out. Her progress was almost unbelievable.

  “True. But she still has much to learn - much of her shifting is that of an artist rather than a warrior. And her stamina is weak. She must learn to ration her power and not be so dependent on the tonic. It will be difficult to find lemondrines in Riata.”

  “So she can come with me tomorrow?” Sy asked, surprised.

  “Of course not. I’m talking about when you return from your mission. By then, I hope to have trained her enough to resist Shadow.”

  “So it’s possible to resist?”

  Damren shrugged. “Anything is possible. But Shadow has just awakened from long decades of sleep. It will be hungry.”

  “Which means it will be weak,” Sy reasoned.

  “Which means it will be desperate,” Damren returned. “Shadow is an ancient, used to waiting. But anything magical that has been denied its magic for so long will be desperate to gain what power it can.”

  Sy crossed his arms, feeling she wasn’t only speaking of Shadow, but also of Corentine and himself.

  Coren stalked down the hallway, wishing with all her heart that she was back on Weshen Isle, running the sunlit upper plains.

  In that moment, she hated Damren more than the Restless King, and she felt she might do anything to be free of the old woman. What was the purpose in rationing out her training and only teaching her a useless bit at a time?

  Coren had heard Damren’s comments to Sy, and they made her blood nearly boil because she knew the woman was withholding knowledge. Of course her skills weren’t that of a warrior - she’d never been in a battle, had never trained like Sy at the boys’ school, and was certainly not learning any of that here, except what Sy was teaching her.

  The old woman had no idea what life was like outside of her hole in the mountain.

  Her room seemed too hot, as though the air itself were angry, and the entire hallway stunk of stagnant air. The kitchen was no better, and even the library held no interest for her, with its jumbled shelves. She needed to be alone, and she needed to see the sky and the sun. Not from a sliver of skylight.

  She needed the sky vast and ever-reaching above her.

  So with Sy and Damren holed up in the training room, likely discussing how else they could hold her back, Coren strode to the entryway and the solid wall she now knew could be shifted to make into a doorway. Patting the rock the way she’d seen Sy do, she felt the sources inside its solidity. She could feel where the thinnest part was, and she began to shift the sources aside to make an exit.

  Soon a glimpse of white snow and a gust of icy air brought a smile to her face, and she shifted faster, ignoring her fatigue.

  A slim opening formed, just enough for her to squeeze through, and she was free. The cold ripped tears from her eyes, and she briefly thought of going back for her cloak.

  But she didn’t need to be out here long. She just needed to see the sky.

  Stepping farther out onto the ledge, Coren spread her arms wide, breathing in the biting air. The sky was immense and white-blue above her, and the forests below were nothing more than a greenish-black smear. Snow swirled around her feet, whipping at her thin training clothes.

  “Corentine!”

  She yelled a curse, refusing to look at Sy.

  “Coren, this is insanity! You know what could be out here!” he called again.

  She sighed, pushing out a puff of white air. “Yes, Sy. The Shadow. Are you afraid to speak its name?” she taunted, turning to look back at him. He was waiting just inside the slit she had created, his shoulders too broad to follow.

  “There are shadows in all of life!” she called, gesturing to the crevices beyond the ledge, the hollow of Damren’s cave home behind him, the dark trees below, and the ocean far in the distance.

  But even as she spoke the words, she felt a creeping sensation behind her own back.

  Turning, she saw nothing but rock and snow and the normal play of sunlight and shadows. The wind seemed to ripple the white and gray and black together, though, almost as though it were capable of shifting the sources too, fusing them to create a new being.

  Coren shivered.

  “Please come back inside,” Sy called again, already moving to shift the rock away enough to join her.

  Her spine slumped as she admitted she couldn’t stay out here. The cold was too much. Her hot anger and pride had frozen, leaving her with regret for how she’d acted. She turned and edged back into the mountain, and the two of them together shifted the rock, shutting out the rest of the wind and snow.

  Inside wa
s darker by comparison to the white world outside, and Coren found herself examining each corner’s worth of shadows to see if there was something innately evil about the fusion of light and dark.

  “I just don’t understand why she keeps so much from me,” she said as she followed Sy into the kitchen.

  “Damren has always held her knowledge close,” he answered, beginning to warm water for tea. “She comes from a generation of superstition, and rightly so.” He turned and pinned her in a serious gaze. “Remember, Damren is old enough to have seen our secrets betray us, and our magic turn from a blessing to a curse.”

  Coren nodded, her regret swiftly congealing into guilt. “I’m sorry. I just…I really need to go with you to EvenFall. I need a purpose beyond learning. I need to help someone besides myself. I can’t have lost everything I love for nothing!” She paced the small kitchen, still too restless.

  “Come on,” Sy said. “Let’s go use some of that energy to train. You need to work on your hand-to-hand, in case your magic and weapons fail.”

  She rolled her shoulders, wishing he weren’t so single-minded. Then again, it would feel nice to throw a punch right now. She nodded. “As long as Damren isn’t there judging me.”

  Sy laughed. “She went to lie down. We’ll be alone.”

  Coren’s stomach flipped at that. They hadn’t been alone since the night they’d kissed. Her imagination spiraled into thoughts of training in hand-to-hand with Sy, all alone in the torchlight. She followed him up the stairs, building little walls around her emotions with each step.

  She couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by curiosity; she needed control.

  When they finished, hours later, Coren felt satisfied. She had kept her eyes from Sy’s muscles, mostly, and had even connected a few punches and kicks. They would both be bruised tomorrow, and that pleased her.

  “I’m going to take a bath,” she announced, and Sy nodded, heading to check on Damren.

  Coren watched him go, granting herself a moment to examine the tangle of thoughts surrounding Sy. She cared for his happiness, wanted him to stay safe, and she was distracted by his body. But something in her still resisted the idea of love or lust growing between them.

  Like a wall of clear ice, something was keeping them from falling where others wished them to fall.

  Her muscles burned from the day’s training, and Coren built the fire high to warm her bath. She relaxed deeply into the water, letting it ease her aches. Rinsing soap from her hair, she evaluated how much more defined her arms were becoming, and looking down, she appreciated the new firmness of her thighs and stomach.

  Coren had always been slimmer than many of the island girls, but here in the mountain she was growing sleek. She smiled, remembering the Cheetana from the tunnel, and how every part of her body was learning a purpose now.

  A purpose that was so much more than attracting a boy in a hunt. Each day, Coren was forming and refining her body into a weapon she could use to save her people.

  The soap was gone and the water cooling around her when she heard a noise, like the door creaking open a few more inches.

  “Sy? Damren?” she called, but the steam was thick in the room, and she could see nothing when she pulled open the curtain. “Sy?” she called again. Surely he wouldn’t come in when he knew she was bathing. She began to shift the water in the air, gathering the steam into spheres and rings of water.

  As the air began to clear, a shadow seemed to slink out the door, as though someone had been standing in the hall, watching.

  Uneasy, Coren drained the bath and dried herself quickly. She hurried into her steam-dampened clothes, thinking how something about the dark and the silence of the mountain had her feeling very, very exposed.

  She pushed the spheres of water droplets still hanging in the air back into the tub, where they broke apart and drained, chilling the room. Coren wrapped her hair in the towel and nearly ran down the hall to her room. She saw nothing and no-one in the hall, and her room was silent and empty. She hung the towel to dry, and quickly braided her hair and tugged on her slippers. Palming a knife, she wrapped her whip around her middle, under the tunic’s cover.

  Although training had finished for the day, an ominous sensation hung in the quiet air. A whisper lingered at her ear, telling her the fight was far from over.

  Sy leaned against the wall of the kitchen, his bare feet propped up by the fire. He had been helping Damren harvest the lemondrine peel from her many hothouse trees, and the kitchen smelled heavenly sour-sweet.

  A pile of peel waited on the table for him to slice and boil, but the water wasn’t quite ready, and for now Sy was content watching Damren’s precise movements as she pulled apart the sections of fruit and squeezed their juice into a shallow silver bowl.

  “It’s lucky the lemondrines were ready to pick,” she said, not lifting her eyes from her task. “Having you two here has depleted nearly everything I’d saved from the last harvest.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sy said, smiling because he knew she loved having them there.

  “Corentine is progressing well with her control, yes?” Damren asked, casting him a sideways glance.

  “Much faster than I ever was able to,” he agreed.

  “Soon we can see about finding you two a MagiCreature to bond with.”

  The words straightened Sy from his lazy pose. “Am I really ready for that?” He’d spent so many boyhood nights poring over the glorious drawings of Weshen men and women with wings, tusks, clawed hands, tails like barbed whips, wanting that power so much his young body had trembled with anticipation.

  Naturally, Damren had told him it would be impossible to complete that stage of magic without the Magi’s reversal of the Sacrifice.

  “What’s changed, Damren? Do you think the reversal has begun?”

  She shrugged. “You’ve changed. And she’s changed. I know nothing of the Magi, for they don’t deign to visit an old woman locked in the mountains. There is indeed magic in the air, but not all of it is Weshen. If the magic of the two dark kingdoms is growing, it can only be in response to the Weshen magic growing. Balance in everything, remember.”

  Sy nodded distractedly, his head filled with the old images he’d once lulled himself to sleep with.

  Damren held a handful of peels out to him. “The water is ready,” she prompted. He obediently began slicing the peel in tiny sections and dropping them in the boiling pot before him. The sharp scent of lemondrine oil permeated the room, spread by the tendrils of white steam.

  “There is a book in my room that I’ve been saving. I think it’s time I shared it with you,” she said, smiling when he caught her eye over the steam. Damren finished the last of the juicing and rinsed her hands in the rock basin that served as her kitchen sink.

  “I’ll fetch it now. You keep working on those peels.”

  “Yes, Damren,” Sy said, grinning in excitement as she bustled out of the room. She’d always been as much of a taskmaster as the General and his teachers in Weshen City, but he’d never minded taking her orders. He hungered for the magic she knew, and he was willing to do anything she asked to get more of that precious knowledge.

  The steam thickened from the boiling pot, and he cranked the chain, raising the pot a few inches. It wouldn’t do for all the water to boil out before the peel cooked through.

  Sy shifted some of the steam away from the fireplace so he could better see his work, and he noticed a dark place in the corner of the kitchen. A shadow where none should be.

  A chill raced up his back, despite the heat at his face.

  “Damren?” he called, standing. She’d been gone a while. He placed his handful of peels on the table, keeping the small knife out. There was another dagger strapped to his belt, and he palmed it as well. Something sinister hung in the very air.

  Silence. Sy shifted more of the steam, and the shadow seemed to dissipate with it, slinking away, out the open door. He left the kitchen and shoved the paring knife in his belt, exchanging
it for the eight-candle sconce from the entryway.

  He had just started down the blackened hall when he heard a hoarse cry.

  “Damren!” he yelled, breaking into a sprint. He burst into Damren’s room.

  “You will not have her!” the old woman shrieked, staring wildly into the darkness. Her arms were up, and Sy felt the magic swirling from her fingers. She was shifting the particles in the air. “Sy! It’s here! Help me find it!”

  Sy felt for something to shift, but all he felt was the chill air of the rock room. He tried shifting the heat of the candle flame, but fire had never been his to control. It was too ethereal - his magic depended on the substance of a source, not the movement of its particles.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said, but even then he began to feel it. The shadows in the corners were growing, fusing together.

  Darkness snuffed out one of the flames, and then another, leaving a single light against the black room.

  Damren shrieked again, waving her arms in a complex shift, but despite her efforts, the last light shrunk into itself, dying a slow, slow death.

  “Sy?” a voice called from the hall. Coren.

  “Stay aw-!” Damren yelled, but her voice ended abruptly in a terrible gurgle, and Sy charged toward where he knew she had been.

  The darkness was thick around him. Palpable. He felt its form as solidly as Damren’s in his arms. She slumped to the ground, heavier than he had prepared for.

  Yelling wordlessly, he charged into the center of the dark, and somehow it burst backward against the wall, exploding into shards of harmless shadow.

  A single candle flame sprung back to life, reviving as the air in the room stilled and returned to normal. Sy chased the bits of shadow around the room, searching for whatever he had just disintegrated, but there was nothing.

  “Corentine!” he yelled, desperate that whatever it was had not found her.

  “I’m here.” Her voice came from the hall, just beyond the door. “I felt it too. Like fingers of ice and despair on my skin.” She entered the room and took the sconce gently from his shaking hand. She lit the other candles one by one, and as each light grew to envelop the room, Sy fell to his knees.