Chapter 144: Forgotten Souls
The silence wasn’t empty. It was a held breath. A tension—palpable, vibrating—between the crumbling walls.
Élisa’s hand shot up, fingers pointed like blades: "We move. Now." No sound escaped her lips, but the command was clear in the whiteness of her knuckles.
They moved like a shadow split in three—boots and bare feet treading the dust with unnatural caution, avoiding unstable stones that might betray them. Eyes locked dead ahead, on the path through the ruins. Never on the silhouette. Never.
Yet Dylan’s gaze broke. Like cracking ice, it slipped despite himself toward the frame of a gaping doorway, like a torn-out tooth. There, half-swallowed by shadow: the silhouette of a child. Blurry, translucent, one hand raised as if in farewell. Frozen mid-motion. Behind, slumped against a rotted wall, the trembling form of a woman, her head tilted at an impossible angle. Other apparitions bloomed in his peripheral vision—adults caught mid-stride, elders perched on phantom chairs—all spectral, all unmoving. Not memories of the dead. Souls trapped in glass.
"It’s the Skin Thief."
Maggie’s breath hitched. Her fingers tightened around her weapon, knuckles whitening.
Élisa kept walking, her voice a blade slicing through thick air. "A creature that flays the living. Strips them whole. But the soul..." She stopped near a collapsed beam, her gaze meeting that of a ghostly man reaching for an absent tool. "...the soul stays. Wandering among the living, with no hope of peace."
Dylan couldn’t tear his eyes away from a ghostly boy crouched by a dry trough. His mouth hung open in a silent scream. "Wouldn’t it be better to kill them?" The words tasted of ash.
"It’s eternity in a cage," Maggie growled, finally daring to look. Her face had gone colorless. "No hope of release. They’re forced to wait..."
Élisa halted at the edge of the central courtyard. The silhouette sitting by the well hadn’t moved. Up close, its outlines looked runny, like ink bleeding on wet paper. "Thirty years ago," she murmured, eyes not on the figure but on the now-motionless weathervane, "an expedition hunted it. To wipe out the blight." A dry laugh escaped her. "Maybe they succeeded. Maybe these are just... echoes. Leftovers."
Dylan’s eyes returned to the well. The figure’s edges pulsed—barely. A shadow within a shadow. "Or maybe," he whispered, "it still prowls." His thumb slid along the worn hilt of his blade. "Hungry."