-CHAPTER ONE-

The city of Old Castle rose from the wasteland like an abscess swelling on the festering skin of a diseased world. Across its neighbourhoods and districts a siren called, lifting and falling with an ominous wail that sent citizens scurrying for their homes. Hiding like monsters in burrows, they prayed that this latest threat from the wastes would pass the city by, while fearing that this time, judgement had come to demand penance for their crimes. The people of Old Castle were rank with guilt. The city was populated by murderers. 

And it was my home. 

Through the chill of evening shadows, I made my way to the outskirts of Old Castle. No breeze disturbed the air, no sound accompanied the siren’s wail; light from a setting red sun did little to warm a tense ambience. Beyond the last of the buildings, I began crossing a stretch of open ground, heading towards the city wall. But it wasn’t me walking, not really, not any more. I could see through my eyes, hear through my ears, smell the stench of the city, but I had no control over my direction. My footsteps weren’t made of my own volition. 

I neared the city wall, a sturdy construction, thick and high, unbreakable, but at that moment it seemed merely a thin veil constructed for the illusion of safety. The huge turrets rising atop it housed the mighty ether-cannons which protected the citizens from the horrors of the wastes. But not from me. 

‘He’s close.’

These words gurgled from an oily mass slithering over cracked, stony ground ahead of me: a ghoul, wheezing wet breaths, hissing with anger. This thing had been a woman in life, a simple soul; but in death, an oozing puddle fuelled by injustice, out for revenge. Caring nothing for the danger approaching Old Castle, the ghoul sang her Song, a Song of obsession and need, and I couldn’t deny her plea for vengeance.

Whirring. 

Rattling machinery. 

Up on the wall, the turrets were turning, sweeping the aim of their long, fat cannons left and right. A low, familiar drone came next, baritone beneath the undulating siren, rumbling through the empty streets behind me. From the centre of Old Castle, a great beam of energy shot towards the cloudless pink sky like a waterspout. The city had activated its ether shield. High above the buildings, the energy gathered into a monumental ball of clear, wavering magic before dispersing, smearing, spreading across the length and breadth of Old Castle, forming a barrier between the city and the sky. 

Above me, the edge of the shield curved downwards, creating an umbrella that descended liquidly to the ruined ground outside the wall. In a matter of moments, this hive of guilt-ridden souls was secured within a dome of ether power like a city in a snow globe. Sunlight refracted, the siren changed its pitch, the breeze dropped and the air became stifled. The bitter taste of ether dried the inside of my mouth. But it wasn’t really my mouth now.

‘Closer,’ the ghoul hissed.

Cannons tracked the movements of whatever monstrosity was coming from the wastes as I followed the ghoul along the line of the wall. With no choice in the matter, I was led to a set of stone stairs rising to a pot-bellied watch post nestled between two turrets. The ghoul slithered up the stairs and I climbed after her like the dutiful puppet I had become. 

No sign of movement came from beyond the watch post’s darkened doorway, but I knew a man hid there, a murderer who had nowhere left to run. He had taken sanctuary in the watch post in a vain attempt to hide from death. His subconscious understood what was coming for him, and why. The dead deserved vengeance. 

Reeking of sewage, the ghoul hissed in anticipation, gurgled with longing. Like a snake, her darkness oozed up around the doorway to form an oily frame. I stared into the gloom beyond. 

‘Your sins have returned to you.’ My Mouth, using my voice, but it wasn’t me speaking. ‘Won’t you come out and atone with dignity?’

No reply. 

The man in the watch post was by no means the first murderer I had tracked that day, and he wouldn’t be the last. I’d been leaving a trail of blood behind me for two days now, and there was an endless river’s worth waiting to be spilled yet. 

Whatever will remained to me, I tried to force it into my legs, to make myself turn around and walk away, but I no longer had the strength or presence to make a difference to my actions. I stepped through the ghoul’s stench, entered the watch post, and the man attacked immediately. 

He came out of the gloom, big and strong, a blur of motion in the dim light shining through the viewing slit in the back wall. With one arm, he pulled me into a tight embrace, spitting a curse into my ear as his free hand thrust a knife into my side. The blade couldn’t penetrate my ribs and sliced over bone before its tip ripped out of the skin beneath my chest. I was too far gone to feel the damage inflicted upon my body and pushed the man away with force enough to send him sprawling. 

‘Kill him,’ the ghoul hissed from the doorway.

The murderer sat on the floor, staring up at me. He was no Magician; he couldn’t see the ghoul of his victim. His expression became stunned when I pulled the knife from my body and showed no distress at the hot blood soaking my shirt and trousers. Panic filled the man’s eyes when I used the blade to point at him.

‘The dead call me Sycamore. I am their Shepherd.’

With another curse, he jumped to his feet, fists clenched and ready to fight. I stepped close to him, dodged a clumsy punch and drove the knife into the side of his neck, down to the hilt. Such a simple and fluid act. I wished I could have turned away and covered my ears as the man dropped to his knees, choking, clawing at the knife’s handle with fingers slicked in arterial blood. Desperate, struggling to breathe, his eyes pleaded with me. He looked to be approaching twenty, the prime of life but not yet old enough to have seen the horrors of war.   

When he toppled, falling face down and dead, the ghoul gave a peaceful sigh and slithered across the floor. The oily darkness mingled with the pool of blood spreading around the corpse of her murderer. As though in a show of gratitude, a single tendril reached out to touch my boot before the ghoul faded and disappeared. Finding peace through vengeance, she journeyed on to the other side.

The city siren continued to wail. I continued to drown inside myself. 

Stepping over the corpse, I peered through the watch post’s viewing slit to gaze upon the desolation outside Old Castle. The sun was about to kiss the horizon, a sinking red orb quivering through the watery magic of the city shield, shedding the last of its rays upon a broken landscape. Shadows stretched and pointed at the city; the glassy summits of hillocks reflected light with majestic starbursts of rainbow colours. Millennia of humanity’s bad choices had been trampled down into a plain of scorched rock and rusty metal. This was the wasteland. This was the world now called Urdezha, ruined beyond recognition, just like its people.

It looked as though a dust storm was blowing in. A bank of debris rolled across the plain like fog on the sea, hued red by the sun’s backdrop. But this was no act of nature. The storm had been kicked into the air by the hundreds of feet galloping towards Old Castle. A herd of beasts. A stampede of monsters. They were too far away to see in great detail, but these creatures were as big as houses, thundering along on four legs, too many to bother counting. With stocky bodies covered in bony spikes and long horns protruding from great heads, the herd’s charge looked unstoppable. Was this an act of war? Had the herd been driven this way by Old Castle’s enemies? It didn’t matter. The creatures of the wasteland were never a match for the might of a city.

Along the city wall, ether-cannons took aim and fired with oddly subdued whumps. Ether knew ether, they said, and the shield allowed the lethal bursts of magic to pass through its energy and race across the wasteland trailing streamers of displaced air. The first wave of shots smashed into the herd’s front line, punching the life from monsters. The cannons fired again – and again – and the charge faltered under their fury. 

Through the sound of the siren, the drone of the shield and the whumps of ether, distant roars reached my ears. The cannons spat so many bursts of magic that the enemy was soon obscured by dust and debris. Whether or not the remaining monsters had turned tail and fled, leaving their fallen as carrion on the wastes, not one of them emerged from the storm. The abscess of Old Castle wouldn’t be lanced today, but . . . ‘Soon,’ said a voice inside me.

I placed a hand on the wall to steady a sudden flush of fatigue weakening my legs. The knife wound in my side wasn’t critical, but it was bleeding freely. I needed medical attention, food, sleep, but none of them would be given to me. As long as I could draw breath, my body would continue this rampage, while my spirit, my essence, me, slowly spiralled down into the oblivion of Nothing. 

The moment of weakness passed, and a voice gurgled from behind me. 

‘Sycamore.’

Another ghoul had materialised. It stood in the watch post’s doorway, formed into the rough approximation of a human shape. It held no discernible features and oily shadows dripped from its outstretched arms. The ghoul’s presence came as no surprise; it was simply the next victim of murder to find me. And in this city, on this world, there would always be a next victim.

-CHAPTER TWO-

Every person carried with them into death the final moments of their life like memorials grieving for the last spark of corporeal existence. The Song of the Dead, it was called, a lament that was not designed to endure. It faded from memory until a spirit learned to let go and achieve true freedom. Most moved on to the unknown of the other side; others chose to remain as peaceful ghosts to haunt the places where they had lived. And then there were ghouls, those who refused to stop singing the Song of the Dead because they could not accept the manner in which they died.

‘Help me, Sycamore,’ said the ghoul in the doorway.

Sycamore, Shepherd of the Dead, spirit of vengeance. I struggled to remember who I was within his possession. Wendal Finn, I told myself. I am Wendal Finn. My mantra, my last rock of salvation, surrounded by the endless depths of an unforgiving sea. 

‘Little ghoul,’ Sycamore said, and he made me step over the corpse on the watch post floor. ‘Can you tell me your name?’

He asked this because if a ghoul couldn’t remember its name then its murderer was unobtainable, perhaps already dead. In such cases, there was nothing to be done and Sycamore would banish the ghoul from his sight. But, to my dismay, this one remembered.

‘Clay Hysan.’ The name was spoken with an urgent hiss, and with its uttering changed an it into a he.

‘Sing me your Song, Clay Hysan. Show me how you died.’

I knew what happened next. Without words or melody, Hysan’s Song came as a drab monochrome vision, a preternatural glimpse into the recent past which broke down the walls of the watch post and superimposed itself over the environment. The vision muted the voice of the city and delivered me to a sparse room somewhere in any one of Old Castle’s many hidden corners; a room without windows and steeped in the flickering shadows of candlelight. Wax dripped onto bare floorboards. Dirty smoke drifted.

Hysan appeared in his Song as he would have in life. A wretch of a human, his grey beard and hair long and greasy. His naked body, brittle and grubby, had been strapped on its back to a wooden table into which words of magic had been carved. It was easy to assume that Hysan had been stolen off the streets where he lived, chosen to be a subject in the rites of the woman standing over him. 

Of indeterminate age, the woman was dressed in a dusky gown that covered her from neck to foot. Sweat beaded on a head shaved smooth. With the look of a predator, face masked by concentration, she used a medical scalpel with the thinnest of blades to slice a symbol into the skin of Hysan’s stomach. This woman was a Magician. Her touch was so delicate that she drew no blood. An adept, then, casting a spell. She was saying something, either talking to her captive or reciting an incantation – it was impossible to tell for her lips moved without sound. It was always the same in these visions: the Song of the Dead came in near-total silence.

Clay Hysan was looking at me, and his voice I could hear, speaking to Sycamore.

‘I never learned her name.’ A dry and close rustle, whispered in a vacuum, narrating his moment of death, his Song. Hysan expressed dispassion, detached from the cruelties being inflicted upon him. ‘She never explained why she did this to me.’

And why would she? The Magicians of Old Castle were like fleas riding on the backs of the vermin who ruled the cities of Urdezha. Some would call them the bane of the Scientists; others, a necessary counterpart. They were secretive, hidden, keeping their purpose and reasons close to their chests. Magicians answered to their own kind only, but this woman would be answering to Sycamore.

‘She promised a hot meal and a contract of employment,’ Hysan explained as the woman completed the spell on his stomach and stepped back to admire her handiwork. ‘Said the Magicians had need of someone like me.’

‘Indeed,’ said Sycamore.

The homeless made excellent spies. They understood how to manoeuvre through the city’s every shadow and unseen space, and the Magicians paid them well for their services, especially when they needed to spy on the Scientists. Of course Clay Hysan would have jumped at this Magician’s offer. Unfortunately for him, her intent had clearly not lived up to her promise.

‘I never got my meal,’ Hysan said as though reading my thoughts. ‘And no, the contract wasn’t what I thought it’d be.’

The woman’s breath misted as she spoke into her hand and then released the words onto Hysan’s stomach with a flourish. They settled on him like wisps of smoke. Blood rose from the thin cuts, just enough to detail the spell in lines and swirls of red. A barren tree, I thought the symbol resembled. The Magician blew upon the blood and it congealed, hardened, turned to scabs. 

‘The spell’s purpose?’ Sycamore thought to me. I didn’t know. Perhaps an experiment to further magical prowess, or maybe part of a clandestine plan – it didn’t matter. Whatever the purpose, its casting had resulted in murder. 

Hysan said, ‘It didn’t hurt. I just felt more and more tired, and then I wasn’t alive any more.’

With further words of magic and a deft hand, the Magician sliced a circle around the scabs before gently cutting under them. With care and infinite patience, she worked the scalpel until the complete spell separated from Hysan’s body and floated up several inches, carried on a gossamer leaf of skin. Crimson steam began to rise from it. The magical script carved into the tabletop beneath Hysan glowed with a dim radiance. The Magician dropped the scalpel and raised her arms, chanting the crescendo of her incantation silently to my ears.

‘Find her, Sycamore.’ Hysan’s monochrome eyes darkened with fury. ‘I want my vengeance.’

And in the Song, he died. His body shrank, dried, withered, and his spirit left him. Black with the anger of injustice, it oozed over the table, stretching before slapping to the floor in oily drops. The vision faded. The final image was of the Magician staring at her spell, a red symbol on a leaf of skin thinner than a sheet of paper now resting on her open hands.

The wail of the siren returned to me; candlelight died, replaced by the gloom inside the watch post at the city wall. The ether-cannons had stopped firing. Hysan’s ghoul loitered in the doorway, once again in the dark and featureless shape of a human. His stink offended my nostrils. The Song of the Dead had been sung. It was now mine to avenge.

‘Come, then, Clay Hysan,’ Sycamore said, retrieving the knife. It made a sucking sound as it slid free of the corpse’s neck. I thrust it into my jacket pocket without cleaning the blade. ‘Lead me to your murderer.’

-CHAPTER THREE-

Falling, dwindling inside my own body, but still dregs of happiness remained to me, lingering memories of laughter, of a love and hope that once held back fear of an uncertain future. There was belief, too; an innocent confidence that the walls of Old Castle would always stand between the citizens and the wars and monsters of the wasteland. But details, specifics, who I had shared these dregs with, were fading fast. I was desperately clinging to the dying ideals of the man I once was, the man who could no longer recall what events had led him to this point. 

Sycamore cared nothing for what I had been through or what it had lost me – and I had lost . . . more than I could remember, something important. 

For two days straight, he had been running my body into the ground, I recalled that much. The face of every victim who had died on this killing spree remained as clear fragments in my shattered memory, along with every desperate word that had begged me to stop. Two days, and now with a fresh knife wound in my side – that I was still walking at all impressed Sycamore; he saw it as a kind of strength not to be wasted. So here I was, a host for a monster, traipsing after a vengeful ghoul, heading towards my next victim.

By the time Clay Hysan had led me to edge of Old Castle’s western region, the siren had stopped and the shield had been deactivated. Night was falling and the air was fresh again with the chill of winter. Now the danger from the wastes had gone, a few citizens were braving the outdoors. Dressed in shirts and trousers and dresses of inexpensive fashion, they couldn’t see the ghoul leading me, couldn’t meet the eye of the bedraggled and blood-spattered vision of Wendal Finn, but they feared what I hosted. 

Driven by instinct, they gave me a wide berth on the street, recognising deep down that an animal higher than them on the food chain was on the hunt. As I passed them, downcast expressions and defensive body language revealed the way Sycamore’s presence affected their thoughts; perhaps, after all, it would be safer to return home for the night and wait for the sanctuary of morning.

Hysan’s ghoul led me down a main street which ran alongside a high wall, signifying the beginning of a district known as the Fusion. Sycamore was slowly devouring my being, my essence, but he was also absorbing my generic knowledge of Urdezha, of this city, and his curiosity was piqued by the wall. He wanted to know what lay on the other side. 

He was fascinated to learn that the Fusion was a small and forbidden inner district, where only the highest-ranking Scientists were allowed to go. It was home to the city’s main reactor, a feat of magical engineering which tapped into the ether-growth far beneath Old Castle. The reactor drew up power for the shield generators and ether-cannons; it provided the energy by which the populace survived. Without ether, this city would crumble and blow away into the wasteland, meaning that security in the Fusion was permanently high. 

Sycamore pondered this.

As Hysan’s oily ghoul led me away from the Fusion’s wall and into a narrow side lane flanked by dirty lodging houses, my feet felt less sure on the stone paving. Strength was draining from my legs. I could hear Sycamore’s thoughts, feel what he was thinking. Perhaps it was time to possess a new host. I would have to die before he could free himself from my body; a simple enough task, but he worried because I had shown him how some humans were harder to possess than others. How long had we been together? Sycamore decided that he had neither the time nor the patience to disrupt his work unnecessarily. Better to use his current host until the very end – an end which had to come. 

By now, the city watch were likely discovering the bodies I’d been leaving behind. It was only a matter of time before they followed the trail and caught up with me. Sycamore would select a new host then, someone from the Scientists’ hierarchy with access to the Fusion. There, he could meddle with the ether reactor, disable the shield and cannons, allow the monsters of the wasteland to wreak carnage on Old Castle’s streets. With access to the Fusion, he could cause a city-wide catastrophe that dealt with every murderer at once instead of one at a time. 

The citizens had no idea what I had brought to their world.

Venturing deeper into the west, we skirted the Tinman District, not a particularly nice part of Old Castle. The Scientists ruled, but the north and south were their main territories, so that was where the bulk of the wealth went. East and west were home to the larger population, the drones of society’s hive, and the streets were not so clean there, the houses not so luxurious. I was vaguely aware that I had lodgings in the Tinman District, but did I live there alone? Was anyone missing me? What had I lost?

Something important . . . something I had once sworn I’d never forget.

The banality of life in this region was advantageous to the Magicians; it helped them avoid the unwanted attentions of the ruling caste. So when the ghoul led me down a stinking alley, where darkness stalked and even the filth kept old secrets, to the back door of a decrepit building, I assumed that we had arrived at one of the many Magicians’ dens in the area. But the words burned into the chipped and worn wood of the door told a different story. 

Dark as charcoal, the words were a simplified form of an ancient alphabet, not unlike magical script. Salabese, the language of the Gardeners. Loosely translated, the words read: Cleanse your spirit. But to Sycamore, they might as well have said: Purchase empty promises. 

Clay Hysan gave a gurgle of encouragement and his ghoul collapsed to a black puddle which oozed through the gap under the door. Sycamore had me draw the knife from my pocket and push the door open. It swung closed behind me.

-CHAPTER FOUR-

A Vestibule of Aktuaht, a place of spiritual well-being. It was a smallish room, square, no more than twenty feet in length and width, the ceiling low and dirty. The alley door was the only way in or out, and the Vestibule was empty. 

‘Strange,’ thought Sycamore. 

Wall-mounted candles flickered light onto a floor of hard-packed earth, grey and dusty. The staleness of old smoke hung in the air, along with the kind of stillness that suggested only spiders and insects were watching me. No citizens sat on the single rickety pew, which was positioned before a worn stretch of floor flanked by two rows of four wooden pillars and which led to a large brazier atop a stone pedestal. The ghoul of Clay Hysan was nowhere to be seen, but I could feel he was close, detect his stench. 

Intrigued, Sycamore steered me between the pillars towards the brazier. Salabese script had been carved into each one, no doubt telling the fables of the afterlife which my possessor found so ludicrous. The black metal dish of the brazier held a layer of ash. Behind it, a faded and flaking picture had been painted on the wall. It depicted a golden sun in a blue sky, shining down onto a thick and lush forest: a representation of the peace and spiritual harmony that supposedly waited on the other side.

On the floor beside the brazier, a wicker basket had been filled with the little brown wings of sycamore seeds. I dug into them with the knife’s blade, unable to prevent Sycamore’s scoff escaping my mouth. Uncertainty was a key factor in faith, and many believed that these seeds provided nourishment for the dead, food for a spirit when it entered the afterlife and journeyed to Aktuaht.   

This offended Sycamore.

Aktuaht: a Salabese word which meant judicature or trial. It was the name of the spiritual realm that lay between the land of the living and the other side. A court, of a kind, where the dead received final judgement from three eternal Gardeners: Truth, Mercy and Wrath, the last knights from the Order of Glass and Words, an ancient sect whose calling was to protect the weak and defend justice. 

The three Judges of Aktuaht decided whether a spirit deserved condemnation to Nothing or passage to a paradise they called the Garden in the Sky. I prayed now to the Order of Glass and Words, whispered apologies for my atrocities, begged Truth, Mercy and Wrath to put me on trial. If they could save the last of my spirit from Sycamore, then I’d take my chances that Aktuaht would witness a good soul worthy of heaven, where the sky was blue, the sun golden and the land was not a ruined waste. 

‘Aktuaht is a lie,’ Sycamore thought to me. ‘Death is death, the other side is freedom, and there is no judgement in between. As for the Knights of Glass and Words, the truth about their Order is better left unsaid.’

I tried not to listen, but his discourse came through feelings that bled into my drowning consciousness, demanding that I comprehend a stark reality of human existence before my death: false faith was easier than no faith, and the magicians were very good at providing the lies that made life easier to live. They ran the Vestibules of Aktuaht, where, for a single coin, citizens could buy a blessing, burn a handful of seeds and earn the kind of favour that offered peaceful nights of sleep and promises of the Garden in the Sky. 

The ash in the brazier was dead and cold. No seeds had been burned for at least a day or more. The candles were lit but the light shone for no one but me. Why was the Vestibule empty?

Hissing, Clay Hysan materialised between the wooden pillars. His darkness rose from the floor to form a human shape, oozing and dripping shadows. Something about the stance of his featureless ghoul relayed mournfulness rather than vengeful anger. 

‘Well?’ Sycamore said, joining him between the pillars. He shrugged my shoulders. ‘You led me here?’

‘Help me,’ Hysan gurgled. ‘I don’t know what I want.’

An odd thing for him to say, given that if there was anything a ghoul knew, then it was definitely what it wanted. 

‘Where is your murderer, Clay Hysan?’

‘This isn’t fair!’ The ghoul made a sound like a man screaming underwater. ‘I deserve my peace!’

To Sycamore’s surprise, Hysan’s darkness split, shredded into oily curls that burst and dissipated like puffs of smoke until all that remained where he had stood was a circular leaf of skin upon which thin lines of scabs formed a magical symbol resembling a barren tree. 

‘What is this?’

The leaf burned to dust with a blaze of quick fire. The symbol became wisps of crimson mist and flew at me with such speed that Sycamore had no time to dodge them. Each wisp hit me in the chest, one after the other, but there was no sensation of impact as the crimson magic sank through my clothes and pricked at my skin. Sycamore ripped my shirt open, popping buttons, and discovered that the symbol had re-formed on my bloodied and scarred chest, smoking, reeking, searing my flesh as though I had been branded. And that was when I saw it: the thing I had lost and forgotten.

From a chain around my neck hung two wedding bands. One was mine. The other was my wife’s. I had lost her. She was dead.

The door to the Vestibule opened and Clay Hysan’s murderer entered.

Head bald and dressed in a Magician’s gown, the woman from the vision took a few steps before stopping to consider me with the calculating eyes of a hunter. A beast of a man entered after her. Broad, shaggy-haired, almost seven feet tall, he closed the door and stood guard, his cold expression alive with the threat of violence in the candlelight.

Sycamore considered this an interesting turn of events. I tried in vain to recall my wife’s name.

The woman stepped further into the Vestibule. ‘They say a messenger has come to Old Castle from Aktuaht.’ She spoke in Salabese, her voice smooth with confidence. ‘The dead are calling him Sycamore.’ She stopped where the pillars began and gave me a triumphant smile. Her pupils were dilated; there was magic ready at her fingertips. ‘They say you are eternal, inexorable, but I say you are as weak as the blood and bones you wear.’

A Magician’s trap, and Sycamore had blindly walked into it. A situation that was easily remedied, he decided. I lifted the knife, intending to cut my own throat so the spirit of vengeance could release himself from his host, but the Magician said, ‘No you don’t,’ and cast the spell she was holding. 

On the pillars, hiding amidst the Salabese script, small words of magic glowed with rose-coloured radiance. The light scratched at the symbol on my chest and fatigue beset every inch of my body. My fingers opened and the knife thudded to the earthy floor. Sycamore dared not let me take a single step lest I fall over, and had me glare at the Magician instead. 

‘Oh.’ She pouted mockingly. ‘Have your sins returned to you?’

Behind her, the beast of a man snorted his amusement.

I swayed on my feet. Sycamore wondered if he had underestimated the humans of this city. 

Offended, he said, ‘Who are you to dare cast your spells on me?’

The Magician shook her bald head. ‘I’m led to believe that a name in your hands will result in dire consequences.’

‘That depends on who introduces me to you. What have you done with the ghoul of Clay Hysan?’

‘He is . . . safely hidden from you.’

My lip curled into a snarl. ‘You are a child playing a dangerous game, Magician.’

‘Ah, but it’s a game that I’m winning nonetheless.’

The words of magic on the pillars flared brightly. The spell on my chest grew, the red lines searing out to cover my stomach and snaking around to my back. There was sensation then, a deep, dull ache that didn’t just belong to me but also to my possessor. I felt stronger, my being more intact. And Sycamore . . . I felt his incredulity as his control faltered. His consciousness began sinking. Mine rose, piecing its shattered parts back together. Sycamore could do nothing as the spell overcame his possession and I reclaimed my body. 

The sudden release from subjugation forced a bellow from my mouth, aimed at the Magician in rage and confusion and heartache. She stepped back from me as though wary of a wild animal. 

Instinctively, my hand gripped the wedding bands hanging from my neck and I remembered the name of my wife. ‘Eden!’ I shouted; and then, ‘Fuck!’ as pain from my wounds hit me, mixed with my fatigue, and drove me to my knees.

Hot tears ran down my cheeks. Sycamore despaired as he sank deeper inside me, clutching uselessly for a hold that might allow him to clamber back up and into control. But he couldn’t prevent the Magician’s spell from pushing him down and down until we had switched places and he became the helpless observer, trapped in a flesh prison.

The Magician was breathing heavily, both anxious and excited, surprised that her trap had worked. 

‘Let’s get him to the old monster,’ she said to her henchman. ‘Quickly.’

Without a word, the man came for me. He grabbed my collar and yanked me up. I barely had the strength to keep my feet on the floor and hung limp and hopeless . . . until he prised my hand away from the wedding bands. Until he tried to pull the chain from my neck. Then I closed my eyes and summoned a primal fury. Thrashing, screeching, my teeth clamped on the first thing they could find and bit down, hard. A roar of pain preceded the taste of blood in my mouth and I chewed on something tough and difficult to swallow.

The Magician shouted, ‘Tamara, no!’ but couldn’t prevent me from being punched so hard that nothing mattered any more.  New paragraph