The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy)

by Krista Gossett

  Chapter 12: Into the Void

  Pierait was content in being a loner— he was never quite sure how people would receive him. This wasn’t a world full of people with yellow eyes or pale blue hair and many assumed it was glamour or magic. Pierait had great difficulty explaining things because his head was blank when it came time to guess. He always had to speak in sureties, he had no head whatsoever for predictions and he couldn’t comfort anyone very well. Most people could say, “Just stay positive, things might get better.” Pierait knew the words, knew the platitudes but couldn’t make sense of them or mimic them. “That’s awful. It couldn’t be helped” was the best he could do and those sucked as platitudes. He knew what something was in a moment and he knew that time could not be rewound— most of whatever else transpired in life eluded his perception. He did not particularly want a soul, desire wasn’t in his nature, but he had to get one. He did know that not getting one was bad. He remembered that he had felt terror at that thought— it was as close to imagination as he could come but it wasn’t his own. Shallay, the Soulless Shaman, had told him the conditions of failing and he had been told what it would feel like. It did not take imagination to connect the two. Being a tormented being trapped in a torrent of the worst emotions possible needed no imagination to determine it was not desired. Soulless, even when emotions didn’t linger, they avoided that fate at all costs.

  Pierait watched what transpired below the crow’s nest but he was truly detached from it. They would remember him if the waters roughed up because humans with souls made connections like that. Pierait had even been close to being shocked that Krose had remembered to offer him some fish. Krose even climbed up to hand it to him. Truth be told, he only stuck with them because they were heading south and south is not a place he had searched for souls. He knew that that continent was more magic-heavy, that magic and souls had a lot in common and it was easy to connect that where magic gathered, so did the answers he sought. Pierait knew that they were unsure of him and that his single-minded mission was his only priority but they tolerated him well enough and he was at least content that they did not badger him or show their distrust. That wasn’t entirely fair. Even though he made them uneasy, Rienna at least had shown she cared about him. Friends, she had said—and yes, that includes you too, Pierait…

  Alone, gnawing on the flaky filet of fish pitted on a stick, Pierait visited his memories. It was a thing the Soulless didn’t do, but Pierait… he didn’t seem to tread a straight path. He was in good company.

  Pierait had been born on the outskirts of Morgaze, right around the time that Soulless were gradually being accepted into society. It was a thing in its infancy and his mother, a pretty healer named Harra, had been a nervous young girl. Poorer residents of Morgaze often became healers because it needed no elaborate formal education— they could gather their own herbs and the spells were simple and straightforward. They weren’t denied entrance into the schools, of course; there was no tuition, they were funded through private donors and their contribution to commerce. No, the poor often spent most of their time striving to feed their families so that education was a strain on time that needed to be spent keeping a roof and sustenance. The school offered ‘scholarships’ to lessen the problem—practically paid poor students to attend to reduce poverty, but there was only so much money to go around. Harra’s family was able to send her brothers due to their acquisitions of a coveted scholarship, but she hadn’t been so lucky and was left to help with the family’s herbal shoppe.

  When she had met Pierait’s father, the handsome elite wizard took her aback; Veylic was tall and dark and had the most stunning eyes that reflected light in the strangest way, much like a cat’s. Harra had asked her mother about his eyes, and Ghesta had scoffed and announced he was tainted with Felis blood. Whatever else Harra’s family was, she was always reminded her lines were PURE. When she looked at Veylic, she didn’t really care. What she felt was pure too.

  Harra never imagined Veylic would give her the time of day, but fate had it that Veylic was wounded in a spell demonstration in the college and needed a healer. His wounds were pretty nasty and Harra’s family’s shoppe just happened to be nearest (they had saved up decades of earnings to buy a prime spot across from the Academy), so she watched as her brothers helped him in and pulled the eldest aside. She begged Atram not to tell their mother or father that Veylic was brought in. Their mother knew she had a crush on Veylic and if she knew that he had come in on a day that Harra ran the shop alone, she would storm in and send her home. Atram had always been true to his word and he assured her he wouldn’t.

  Harra had treated Veylic and he had been impressed by how adept she was at the healing arts. She told him the spell that had caught him would still make him feel sick to his stomach and he might grow pink fur on his hands but she gave him a small sachet of herbs and told him to send for more in a day or so— that was the last of them and she would need to gather more.

  That wasn’t entirely true; they always had plenty but Harra desperately wanted more excuses to see him again. Harra was nervous around Veylic, especially with his peers sneering down at her, but she tried her very best to be kind and witty around him. After two visits, he started sending his friends away with the excuse that she was treating a rather embarrassing side effect and wanted his privacy.

  Harra felt as if she were in paradise as Veylic would find excuses to touch her and it wasn’t long before touching was a full-blown sexual fling. He would use his spells to heighten the experience and she had hoped it would never end.

  After a couple of stolen months, Veylic told her that he needed to take a trip to the Stoneweld continent and was leaving later in the week. When she came to say goodbye, his sneering friends were in attendance and he did not send them away. It left her with a sinking feeling.

  It was not long after he left that Harra started feeling violently ill and knew on pure instinct that it was morning sickness and she was pregnant. She knew she could use herbs to abort the baby or she could use herbs to curb the morning sickness and she would hide it for as long as she could. Harra was only 15 and terrified so she made to swallow the herbs for abortion but her heart was despairing killing a lump of cells that her and Veylic had made together. Like most foolish teenagers, she even thought that maybe Veylic would come to his senses and marry her.

  She made herself puke up the herbs and she felt very ill that day but did not miscarry. She started to write Veylic a letter to tell him the “good news”. She wrote him a letter every day throughout the pregnancy but she never heard back. Harra never gave up— she even told herself that Veylic must be extremely busy or the letters were getting lost, surely he was not avoiding her.

  Harra had to deal with her mother’s wrath when she started to show but she had stayed brave for her baby and scrounged up her unspent money to lived alone in a rental. Harra made what money she could practicing from the market and she still held hope that Veylic would return.

  When Pierait was born, she named the baby boy on her own. She had been terrified to discover this pale yellow-eyed child was Soulless but still she loved and cared for the boy. Pierait, so close to pyrite, fool’s gold, the glinting gold of his eyes and a product of her own foolish love. Pierait, so close to pirate, the product this boy was of a man who stole her heart. She moved even further into the center of town, despite how much closer she moved to her estranged mother, since attitudes were more progressive about the Soulless. She would carry the babe with her while she worked and she stayed positive.

  The day she first saw Veylic again, her heart had soared— she thought surely he had died or been too hurt to find her. She made to run towards him and jump into his arms when an elite witch she knew as Omnira had rounded him and placed a kiss upon his lips. She had to search behind her for her stool for her legs were suddenly weak. She asked the neighboring vendor, Summer, who she was to him and her world became a tunnel as Summer went on about how the marriage had been arranged… She heard little e
lse as her world caved in around her.

  Harra worked hard to raise her baby; she had no time for grief. Pierait had to be her world now. Harra would feel so isolated and it was only the visits from her brothers that kept her grounded. Pierait was not like other babies; he did not giggle, he did not drool, he smiled sometimes, but he was not lively. She didn’t know much about the Soulless but she was punishing herself with negative thoughts— she thought maybe those abortive herbs might have been the thing to abort his soul. It had been Shallay she had turned to for help, but the Soulless always unnerved her. At the very least, she had been relieved to know he wasn’t sickly—the Soulless all had an unsettling solemnity of being.

  Nonetheless, she had learned about Purposes, and Antimatter, and the Void. He could feel but he did not commit. He would not do anything unnecessary other than react until he had a purpose and while he could not use magic, the Void and Antimatter was his to control. (She had no way of knowing, pre-Purpose, that Pierait did not have such control.) She learned to her horror that the Soulless were the end cycle of magicians to cleanse magic and erase them from existence. She did not want her baby to be erased on death— she wanted to see him in the afterlife. She was curious about the Purpose. Who gave the Purpose? What did it mean to have one?

  Shallay had told Harra that only the Shaman could assign the purpose, that she would use the Void to resonate with her staff and it would echo into the body of the Soulless, sealing their goals. A Soulless with a Purpose would stop at nothing to see it done. When a Soulless met their Purpose, they could pass on uneventfully, keep living under its ideals in the meantime. They did not operate on right or wrong and often the purpose followed the same rule. Purposes were often as simple as protecting a city or not using the Void, something that was instantly possible and maintainable to avoid becoming Furies, but in the past, the Soulless were often manipulated to become exclusive lovers or assassins, sometimes with little hope of maintaining that Purpose.

  Harra would steal into the libraries of the Soulless to look up more— she didn’t want to arouse any suspicions on her motives. Pierait was growing more by the year, a beautiful paper shell of a boy and her heart ached to help him but so far she found nothing. As he neared his 14th birthday, the day he would receive his Purpose from the Shaman, Harra was frantic. Finally, she had found her way into a dusty forgotten alcove and found what she had needed.

  Anyone could call the Void and assign a Purpose; the crystal on the staff was called Wyrsite and it could channel the Void. The penalty would be that the user would lose their magic to the Void.

  Harra had made it her mission to find Wyrsite, and her zealous quest over the years had alienated her to all but loyal Atram. Atram would watch the boy and watch sense leave his eccentric sister. When she found the Wyrsite, she had hurried back to Morgaze and journeyed for days with Pierait to find a secluded spot in the wild to carry out her plan. It wasn’t as far as she had hoped, but she was running out of time.

  Obviously, the purpose was for Pierait to search for a soul so she could meet him in the afterlife. She had been so singleminded in her quest that she had never bothered to learn the terrible fate she was laying on her son. He would wander ceaselessly in search of a thing no one could help him find and in the end, he would become a Fury. She also never realized just what her fate had been. Her magic was pure indeed and when it fled, her life was forfeit. Pure magic-born are linked directly to their soul through magic. Pierait had cried out as he watched her soul enter the void, as cruelly as her son’s fate would have been. Every trace of his mother was gone and he cried a few tears, and then stood up to go back the way he came.

  Pierait went back to Morgaze then and spent years poring through every book in the city. As a Soulless, he was not limited to access of any book or place and he had always had full access and scholarship to the elite academy his own father had attended. He knew he couldn’t stay long— knowing that once his purpose was discovered he would be shunned or exiled. Shallay would be able to know he had been given a purpose but not what it was or who gave it to him. He could lie—it wasn’t in their nature, but his mother had told him that, when asked, he would say his Purpose was to learn all he could about magic. It gave him time to study, but it might not hold up without suspicion forever. Pierait did not comprehend ‘might’, but knew he would leave when the research was done. He knew he wouldn’t be killed either, because that would only release him as the thing they feared, but he could very well be imprisoned somewhere far from any other humans, to die away from where he could not harm them. The Furies were said to be drawn to the far south of the world, but not much was known about that place.

  He found his mother’s diary, the only book he had not yet read and found out who his father was. He found Veylic and told him. The man said nothing and Pierait had said what his mother had not been able to so he left not even knowing his father’s voice. He had expected nothing, but he could tell that his father had been stunned.

  Harra had no way of knowing that Omnira had been intercepting his letters from Harra, no way of knowing he wasn’t being deliberately cold, that his own wife was that cold. Veylic had no way of knowing she died after a life of devotion to a man who never had the nerve to see how she was doing. It was tragic and it was done.

  Before he left Morgaze to search more, he had been forced to call his Void and that is where he met his current companions. It was not good that he was unable to research more, but as fate would have it, the cities were meant to be destroyed, so more cities he must find. The ocean gave him comfort. It was almost as endless as the Void. The Void did not ask questions— it knew all and gave purpose. Somewhere inside of him, he could swear his mother still remained.

  Three days they had spent crossing the ocean before them; Echoing Ocean, Pierait had heard them call it, and it was a name he could understand. When they talked in normal voices, it wasn’t apparent but when a voice was raised (like when he called down to let them know there was land in sight or ships in the distance), you could hear a distinct echo mocking you. The waters had always stayed the same; choppy and difficult by day and smooth as silk at night. Neither was ideal for sailboats (and they imagined that was why the boat they used now didn’t seem so popularly used), so Melchior had explained that they often used galleys with modified larger cargo holds to cross the ocean quickly at night. Krose, not to be outdone, explained that mostly only pirates did that since the noise of the industrial ships was risky— the cough of an engine could give them up from miles away, especially over the Echoing Ocean. Pierait had caught Rienna rolling her eyes over their posturing and laughed quietly.

  Pierait knew why it took them three days rather than the day or night trip the traders would take; they had followed the Vieran shoreline half of the first day, along the rocky shoals to the east (the way that Rienna and her group had traveled to meet them in Xanias) to avoid traffic; the road itself was foot traffic only so it wasn’t used for caravans trading to the Bryfolk. The hovering vehicles they would use in the bigger cities would be risky even. Either way, it wasn’t traveled very often so they hoped it wouldn’t raise curiosity to pass by ship so close to the road. The shoals were far enough from shore that no one could really make out faces anyway. After swinging wide of the trade route to Xanias, they planned a wide curved route that would deposit them on the true east edge of the Stoneweld continent. They thought that the direct way might be littered with wreckage from the carnage of the night before anyway since the docks had been barren on departure. Either way, he knew that Rienna’s sense of urgency to leave wasn’t just about leaving the ghost city; she was eager to avoid any surviving traders who would question what had happened. She figured they had a window of departure between the ones who had been wiped out and the ones that would set out. The receiving cities might hastily send out scout ships; a few old intuitive sailors might be hesitant to take their routes at all. It was experience that taught them to be cautious and it wasn’t above the old salty dogs to still
rattle off tales of monsters in the deep.

  For the time being, the group had mutually agreed to avoid any port cities on landing the east side of the continent and were able to find a beach with no signs of use and a lot of natural terrain to hide them well enough. Krose had spent the days catching fish and salting them in a barrel they had found below decks so they had plenty of salted fish to travel with. As long as they were avoiding main roads and cities, they were sure to find good hunting and wild plants to scavenge. Rienna had grown up in Ersenais, just outside of Merschenez Castle, and had not left it often at all. Again, she was feeling a bit singled-out when she admitted she was probably the only one among them that had never gone the survivalist route. Merschenez had its technologies but it was mostly a place where people still worked manually even if they could afford otherwise. All the same, basic needs had always been served to the commander’s daughter. Pierait knew they forgot about him again as they were discussing this on departing the ship. Pierait had stood in front of Rienna and attempted a smile. A charming smile for a Soulless; it wasn’t his fault he didn’t often have a use for them.

  “You’re not alone at that, Rienna. Morgaze was my only home and I never left it but for the day my mother had given me my Purpose and then I returned. The day we met, fate had directed me to go with you. This is not my field of experience either,” Pierait said, making an attempt to console.

  “Would you be able to make this trip alone?” Rienna wondered and he saw that she felt ashamed for blurting it out. No one looked at him and thought he was built for survival.

  Pierait nodded unperturbed, playing with the braid as he tilted his head. “I wouldn’t be eating this well, but I know how to attend to my basic needs. I know the Soulless appear programmed to most people, but you should think of it as a survival program. Shallay, the Soulless Shaman, worked with the heads of the Society for Soulless Sensitivity programs and they helped us learn how to explain the things we cannot. It’s… a complicated program we run on, but it equips us for more than people suspect.”