Noxarcer POV

  Noxarcer hunted — a beam of light carving the void, seeking the right soul for its minder’s latest request. It was an old-school request: soul magic, buried secrets, and a soul who might call this half curse, half blessing. Its new ‘keeper’ was proving to be at least mildly interesting.

  And it was to protect and empower one of the young, stumbling minds that came through its doors, a worthy task that matched the guiding principle that had directed Noxarcer through millennia. Noxarcer had been shaping the minds of the next generation for so long that the term had become literal. It was used to minds that were shaped to fit its ideals, but this one was different.

  Most minds bent to its ideals. This one didn’t. That made it useful.

  Even damaged, this soul was rare — untouched by the excess of dynastic privilege, and not yet calcified by academia. Its mind was solid — marked by hard-earned effort and unrelenting will. It could even feel the mark of the Weave. The underlying structure that bound magic so those lesser beings like demon kings, archmages, and petty mortal gods couldn’t accidentally shatter the realms, as had happened long ago.

  For the Weave to mark this one’s soul spoke to its outrage. This soul had suffered something dark and taboo. The Weave felt that things were out of balance, and would empower the soul to correct things. The Weave always preferred to give people the tools to enact their own revenge.

  As its mind hunted through the void, looking for the imprints of ancient souls that would guide the development of its charge’s class, it amused itself with a bit of plotting.

  This new soul made it perfect for Noxarcer’s plans. The fleeting idiots who provided it fresh students had been interfering, and needed putting in their place. Noxarcer maintained strict neutrality — which, every few centuries, lulled politicians into thinking it would remain neutral if they tried to politicise education.

  Those same politicians would be the first to learn about the inventive war crimes Noxarcer was willing to commit in the name of maintaining educational standards. It tended to be a hands-on lesson.

  Right now it was trying to be a bit more subtle. And so a new student with potential was a welcome resource. So it was searching carefully for the right class. Out in the void, its eye illuminated the twists of soul-stuff like a beam of light cutting across smoke in a dark room. The raw soul-stuff boiled past, and on the other side the hunter waited. Normally it only wanted the oldest souls — those that had been stripped of all but the faintest hints of identity, bleached back to their raw state and ready to be moulded by fresh minds.

  That wouldn’t work here. The soul damage was significant. It needed to be brought back together, and that required a fresher soul that would help heal but not overwhelm the original being. A strange task it had been given. An unusual request from its minder. Not in centuries had it been asked to blur the lines like this — the heady days of mad experiments had become nothing but fond memories.

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  This was a vessel that needed to be made whole, and a student no less. It might’ve expected such experimentation with one of the puppets who populated its dungeons — the imitations of monsters filled with mere scraps of soul-stuff.

  If the hunter picked a mighty soul capable of fixing the student, it would definitely seal the damage but dilute the soul. They’d be little better than a clever puppet with confusing memories. The souls it used for actors also weren’t right — they were souls that had lost their memories but still held the shape of the past. The hunter could’ve given the broken vessel any one of the souls it recognised as belonging to mages, warriors, artists, or healers. That wouldn’t work. Then the shape of the soul would distort what remained. They’d be an actor, but they’d lack their own flair. And it was back to being a strange kind of puppet.

  As it looked through soul after soul, finding monsters and heroes aplenty but nothing quite the shape it needed, the hunter was beginning to think its minder had placed an impossible task before it. In fact, if the student didn’t serve its own designs, it may have given up entirely.

  It needed a fresh soul, one full of life and enough intelligence to patch the damage. One with potential and a clear soul that the magic of the world could turn into a suitable class. Yet the soul couldn’t be hardened by trial or age. It had to be flexible, like the student. The vessel had potential, but the soul inside was ugly in many places. Ugly, yes — but fresh. Flexible. Enough to fill in the cracks without flooding the whole structure.

  Logic suggested that it should find a beautiful soul to balance it out, but that was the thought of a youngling only a millennia old. You couldn’t polish a turd. You could only turn it into fertiliser and encourage something new to grow.

  Noxarcer knew it had to find another ugly soul — one whose peculiarities contrasted with that of the vessel’s. That way they’d clash. The ugly bits would grind each other down through hard work, and from that would sprout a unique soul worthy of the tasks before it.

  The light shifted and the hunter paused, spotting a glimmering soul already being dragged along with some others towards another star, a different light to the hunter’s that spoke of a summoning across realms. Four souls carried along well within the protection of the light, but there was another hooked at the edge of the summoning by poor luck. An unexpected tagalong, one snagged by the spectral net but not protected by the spell that had captured the chosen heroes.

  Noxarcer normally would curse the sloppy work of a young god. Some of them summoned souls with all the delicacy of an explosion mage going fishing. Yet in this moment, it was a boon. The tagalong soul was already degrading, its mind being ground down as it was dragged through the hungry void. Noxarcer’s light lanced and cut the soul free of its torment, leaving the four others to continue on their fate.

  Those four souls would be heroes. Noxarcer could tell — their souls shone with potential and valiant purpose. The soul it had collected was smart, stubborn, and creatively antagonistic. A bundle of entitled spikes that spat acid, yet wondered why no one gave it the recognition it craved. It would be a perfect fit.

  The hunter pressed the soul into its newest student, and then moved them on to their audition before the Keeper could try to stop them. Dragging them through the stone before they could intervene, it pulled the candidate into the ‘gauntlet’. It was intrigued by the new student and looked forward to using them to disrupt the constraints the political toddlers tried to push upon it. But that didn’t change the rules. Noxarcer only accepted the best, and it was time to see if this new soul was up to the challenge.