All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 263: Cracking up

Chapter 263: Cracking up

Bee stepped past Mrs. Chadwick and glanced around the manor with suspicion. Was there some sort of city official that had found them or some sort of dispute about the deed to the place? She walked slowly toward the sitting room, mind whirling with possibilities and plans for how to deal with this situation. When she got there, Bee's face paled.

A tall, severe woman sat with her legs crossed in an armchair. Her short brown hair was cut straight just below her chin, and her eyes narrowed in seemingly eternal scorn. Her clothing seemed simple at first glance, but a closer look revealed a quality of cut and workmanship to the garments that not just anyone could afford. As Bee entered, those disdainful eyes flicked toward her.

"Oh, Beatrice!" Beatrix D'Lestrange crowed from her seat as she leveraged herself up.

"Beatrice!" She repeated again. Immediately, the woman's features melted into a bright smile. She uncharacteristically hurried over to Bee and dragged her into a very aggressive hug, shoving Bee's face into her stomach a little bit lower than was precisely comfortable, as if she had forgotten how tall Bee was. "Oh, my niece! We missed you. We heard about what happened to the castle. We were so worried. Your father thought you were dead!"

Bee's mind short-circuited. She had no idea what was going on and didn't know how to react. Instead, she just froze with her hands half up in a defensive measure as her aunt smothered the top of her head with kisses. The familiar scent of her perfume washed over her.

"When the people at the gate had told me that my niece was here, I couldn't believe it. And honestly, I thought I was going to have to deal with some scammer pretending to be our family. But no, it's actually you! By the gods!, I'm so glad you're okay." The words came out in a rush. She tried to wiggle Bee back and forth with violent affection, but Bee, being nearly 35 levels higher than her aunt, didn't shift an inch.

"Wow, you've gotten so strong! Oh, we have so much to catch up on," Beatrix said. After a few more minutes of overwhelming attention, Bee slowly came back to her wits to fend her overly excited aunt off.

This wasn't at all how she remembered her aunt. The woman had always been nothing but distant and cold. Not that she hadn't shown basic courtesy to Bee before, but she'd always taken more after her brother than her mother. She'd certainly never stepped into the mother role that Bee had missed after her mom died. So why was she acting the way she did now? Had something changed? She clearly wasn't expecting to find Bee here. The surprise seemed genuine.

Taking a step back, Bee gave her a tentative smile. "Aunt Beatrix," she said with a formal intonation as she recovered from the hug.

"No, no. Aunt or Beatrix is just fine." Beatrix sighed with grimace as she made a poo-pooing gesture, her excitement coming down a little bit.

Having learned her lesson earlier this week, Bee quickly read through the response from Scan.

Name: Beatrix D'Lestrange, Level: 18, Race: Human, Class: Merchant General, Titles: None, Age: 26, Highest Stat: charisma, Lowest Stat: strength, Status: Excited

Bee frowned. Status? Normally, the status was something that she only saw on statues like Nazareth'gak or Archibald. Even then, it just indicated that they were asleep, awake, and so on. But to give the actual emotion a person was feeling? It just meant that she would have gotten even more information from Zeal if she'd remembered to use Scan. Confirming someone was faking their emotion, at least to some extent, would be really interesting.

As she watched, Beatrix's face and status turned from excited to nervous.

"Are you okay?" She asked with genuine concern in her voice.

"Yeah," Bee said in a completely stunned tone. This was just so out of her expectations that she wasn't sure what to do. However, her now boisterous aunt couldn't help but push past any awkwardness.

"Well, I'm so glad that you're doing okay. And this place…" She looked around the space. "I don't remember getting this manor. I assume this was your doing?"

Bee just nodded, still in shock. "Yeah, it happened pretty quickly. Sorry, I'm just..."

"Well, it's so good to see you. It's–" Beatrix attacked Bee with another hug. "Well. I just- You just- I'm glad you're okay. You seem a bit tired, and I've had a long journey. Promise me you let me take you out to breakfast tomorrow. I know this perfect salon where we can talk about some business once you're rested."

Bee just nodded mutely again.

"Yeah, that sounds… that sounds good."

Before she knew it, Beatrix had bustled off to the spare room they had set up. Luckily, someone had found a bed in the last couple of days. It was just in time. She didn't want to make her aunt sleep on the floor.

Still confused, Bee waved to everyone, deciding to skip the reports for today and pick them up tomorrow. Then she trudged up to her room to go take a nap and see if she was just dreaming or hallucinating from a fatigued state. What had gotten into her aunt? She couldn't be a doppelganger, not with Scan confirming her identity, right? Did she have an accident and suffer some sort of personality-altering brain trauma?

Bee collapsed into bed, still wondering about the reserved, severe woman who had tried to teach her about Merchanting several years ago.

---

I followed the man with a cracked soul until he reached the castle wall. I couldn't find a better way to describe him. The man felt wrong but familiar in the same way. It was as if he was himself a demon. Or maybe he was possessed by a demon?

Possibly. But this didn't seem like something so temporary. The damage to the soul was very real, and I didn't even know if I could cause something like it myself. Whatever power had done, this did exceed mine, at least in the specialty of souls.

I remembered how my attempts to clean a zombie's soul had ended up destroying it entirely. My Spiritual Cleanse might do the same thing here. And if the man wasn't an actual demon, that would be unacceptable. I didn't want to even touch or even disturb it just in case his broken soul crumbled, or I made things even worse. There was also the matter of not alerting anyone to my presence. So, I just monitored it for now.

The guards let him in with a quick word, and I slipped over the wall to follow. As I watched him enter the castle, I almost lost it. Not because he went out of range or made himself difficult to find but because there were a lot more of these red, cracked souls wandering the halls. They were so common I couldn't put an exact number on them. They seem to shift and change, making it very hard to differentiate and recognize them. And the red cracks slowly morphed so slowly that I hadn't noticed it at first, but enough that they completely threw off my tracking.

I had to switch to my advanced sensors to track the man I had been following, and I nearly missed him. It seemed that there was no rhyme or reason to what humans bore what souls. Some were servants. Some were nobles who ignored the man. But the man walked through the halls, giving deference to some and accepting bows graciously in return. He seemed rather middle of the pack in terms of social standing, and I didn't think much of it other than he must've had some political friends.

While social hierarchies were a form of organization, which I enjoyed, they seemed to come with rules as convoluted and ever-changing as gully ball. It was one more reason why I liked leaving the management element of things to Beatrice.

I had prepared myself to leave. It would be best to come back another day to investigate the phenomenon. Just at that moment, though, the man reached his office. At least, I assumed it was his office. That was less important than the extremely small tortoiseshell cat sitting in the doorway, licking her paw and blocking his path.

The tiny cat looked up at the man and started to jump away. As it did, the man began a quick motion with his foot. I recognized it in disbelief. My predictive models indicated that there was a 95% chance he was trying to kick the cat. There was only a little way between us, so I zipped forward and pulled the cat into the safety of my dustbin.

You don't kick cats. That's just rude! I hated being kicked, and I'd only experienced accidental ones. Though obviously, I forgave my humans for it every time. I could only imagine how painful a purposeful kick was. And this cat was unreasonably small, too. Who even does that?

My circuits started to overheat as I glared my sensors at the man, still invisible to him. He just shrugged at the now invisible cat and stepped forward into his office. My circuits were preventing me from processing straight, and before I knew it, I was reaching out with my spiritual cleansing skill and forcing the red fissures that pervaded its heart to be clean. But even as I scrubbed at the sphere as fiercely as my skill would let me, the color didn't change.

Nevertheless, I persevered. I redoubled my efforts as he made to close the door. Such barriers could stop me no longer. Before he could close the door fully, he stopped. His eyes widened for a split second before I heard a phantasmal crack echo throughout the world. Strangely, I couldn't identify the medium in which they existed. It wasn't sound waves propagating but something else entirely.

I watched in awe as the man's soul crumbled into pieces before cleansing grasp. As the pieces fell to the floor, each was consumed by the red fissures and slowly turned to dust. Only the largest two sections clattered to the floor, now fully visible and real. The man, though, became nothing but an apparition. His entire body vanished from my advanced sensors entirely. Flicking through my other options, it seemed that he still existed. Only, I could strangely only view him in my soul sight.

He began to scream as his face contorted, bones pushing up out of the crown of his head in a circle formed by 11 bony knobs. His boots tore as his talons grew from his toes, and his body changed in a dozen other odd ways. The red of his soul's cracks started to creep across his skin until it finally converged over his eyes, and he stood still.

What the heck was that?

I looked at the two chunks of a red, crystallized soul sitting on the floor in front of me and quickly snatched them into my dustbin, sectioning them off from anything else in a special void pocket for examination later. At that moment, I could do nothing but stare as the soul apparition in front of me opened its now pitch-black eyes. It seemed to be even darker than my void as the abyss stared back at me.

"Why hello there, godling."