The night went by without anything exciting happening. We took turns napping until the rising sun painted the horizon red and golden, then accepted that our bait didn’t work out as we planned. We went out to get something to eat after this long night of anticipation, excitement, and tension. The moment I stepped into the small hallway, I immediately got the feeling that something was off, and when we entered the inn’s main hall, the reason for that was staring us straight in the eyes.

  I was still standing in the doorway when I noticed her, sitting at the table next to the entrance where we sat yesterday. A few other guests were seated at the tables, but none of them dared to look in her direction. She had put her feet up on the table, with her hood covering most of her face and her black coat hanging down loosely. The air in the hall seemed to thin, as if a draft of winter had slipped in unnoticed. A chair leg somewhere creaked, then went silent. Once she noticed me, her yellow eyes locked onto my face, and her body tensed up visibly.

  “There you are, boy. I told you we’d meet again. Can’t keep your little hands out of our business, can you? Sit down, there’s something we gotta talk about.”

  Before I could even find any words, Shizuka sprinted towards her, drew her dagger, and attacked. Her face was a twisted grimace of rage and grief, and her movements were uncoordinated and full of emotion. She shouted at the Soul Eater, her voice made of nothing but pure hatred and contempt.

  “What did you do to my mother!? Where is she!? Where did you bring her!?”

  The Soul Eater sprang into action faster than my eyes could perceive. The air seemed to crack as she moved. She jumped to her feet, grabbed the chair, and smashed it into Shizuka’s side, sending her flying against the wall. The impact rattled a half-empty mug on the nearest table; its owner flinched, eyes dropping to the floor instantly. She stepped onto Shizuka’s hand and forced her to let go of the dagger.

  “Listen, girl. I’m not here to fight this time, but if you want to die, I can arrange that. Your mother is fine, for now. If she decides to be a good girl and give us what we want, we might even let her go.”

  I summoned a gust of wind to knock her away from my friend, but she just dismissed it with a flick of her wrist. Her eyes focused on mine again and seemed to cut straight into me. My stomach lurched as if I’d stepped too close to a cliff, and the rest of the room blurred into the background.

  “You don’t have anything of value for me this time, so don’t think I’ll hold back again.”

  I clenched my hands into fists, knowing there was nothing I could do. My wind magic was useless against her, fire magic was too dangerous inside a building filled with people, and I didn’t have any earth for earth magic. Not that it would have mattered anyway. I’d been fooling myself, thinking I could take her on just because I survived our first encounter and got stronger since then.

  When I noticed Ryu and Hina move next to me, I immediately reached out to hold them back.

  “Wait! We can’t win against her. Let’s hear what she has to say.”

  A chuckle escaped from under the Soul Eater’s hood.

  “It seems you understand that you don’t stand a chance here. It would be foolish to endanger yourself and the other guests so recklessly.”

  The other guests she mentioned had all retreated to the other side of the room to avoid getting caught up in our brawl, fear etched on their faces. Most of them weren’t even adventurers but regular travelers.

  “Fine, get off her”, I pointed at Shizuka, “then we can talk.”

  The Soul Eater kicked the dagger away, reluctantly stepped off Shizuka’s hand, put the chair back where it had been, and sat down. I rushed to Shizuka’s side, making sure she was okay. After I checked her for any injuries, I helped her up and reluctantly sat down with the others at the opposite side of the table, trying to keep as much distance as possible.

  “Good, then let’s talk about the reason I’m here. First of all, you should not get any dumb ideas that I’m helping you or anything.”

  “Help from you? I’d hardly expect that.”, I let out before thinking. She just dismissed it with an angry glance at me, which was enough to make cold sweat run down my back.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  “I’ll merely use you to get rid of an annoyance for me. It seems we have… a common enemy, is what I’d call it.”

  Ryu leaned in closer to her, keeping his voice quiet as he spoke.

  “You’re talking about the culprit who’s behind the disappearances? Why should we trust you?”

  Shizuka and Hina quietly voiced their approval of Ryu’s concerns.

  “It’s easy. You don’t have a choice. Tonight, your innkeeper got taken. And next night, or maybe the night after, it’s your turn. You think you’re so clever, setting yourself up as bait, but it’s a stupid plan, if even a plan at all.”

  “Oh yeah? Would you enlighten us as to why it’s such a bad idea then?”

  Ryu couldn’t hold back and blurted into her speech, but he didn’t seem to be worth any reaction from her.

  “You don’t have a clue what you’re up against. This predator has been hunting for thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Thinking you could lure Morghast into a trap was… naive.”

  Before I got the chance to ask, Hina already blurted out what all of us were wondering.

  “What is Morghast? Is that the one behind all of this? Why does he kidnap people?”

  “So many questions. Let’s start at the beginning. Have you ever heard of unique skills?”

  All of us, except me, shook our heads; I nodded.

  “They are rare”, she went on, “and only one person can hold each at a time. When the old bearer dies, it automatically selects the next newborn as its new host. No choice, no ritual, no ceremony.”

  Her gaze wandered across all of our faces, then came to a halt on mine.

  “Some of those skills are… hungrier than others. They are known as devourer skills. Mine is the Soul Eater.”

  Hina’s voice cracked, and I could hear that she had the same lump in her throat as I did.

  “And Morghast bears another one of these skills?”

  The Soul Eater leaned forward and lowered her voice.

  “The Flesh Eater,” she said as if she was tasting the words on her tongue. “The oldest of our kind. That bastard is too smart to die, even if he’s not a strong fighter.”

  Her voice dropped into something slow and deliberate. Somewhere in the corner, a chair scraped faintly as one of the inn’s guests edged deeper into the shadows.

  “He doesn’t win fair fights; he just avoids them. He hides, he waits. Always has, for as long as he’s alive.”

  “Then why… why did he take the innkeeper instead of us? Was it because we prepared for him?” My voice was hoarse, and my throat felt a bit sore.

  The soul eater shrugged her shoulders and started drawing circles on the table using her fingers.

  “Opportunity. Coincidental, maybe. Useful, definitely. It’s an easy way to humiliate you, by taking her in front of your nose.”

  I was shocked at her willingness to reveal so much information to us, and I had to keep my jaw from dropping the whole time.

  “So if he’s that smart and always hiding away… Where do we have to look for him?”

  Despair, the Soul Eater, pushed herself up from the table and strode towards the exit.

  “I don’t know where he is exactly, but if I were you, I’d check the wells in this village. Also, don’t expect any further help from me. I only told you this because I want him gone, and he’s drawing too much of the wrong kind of attention. I guess most of his victims are still alive, as he likes to take his time when he feeds, so you'd better be fast. You should strike tonight, if you want to rescue any of the victims alive.”

  She opened the door and took one step outside, then she turned back and looked at me one last time. The space between us felt like a taut thread ready to snap if either of us moved.

  “Kuro. This is not over. I will have your soul eventually, and I’m more than capable of finding you as you see.”

  With that, she took her final step out and let the door fall shut behind her. The thread broke, and the room seemed to breathe again. As soon as she was out, the inn’s guests at the other side of the room jumped up and ran towards the hallway, either to hide away in their rooms or grab their stuff and flee as quickly as possible. That had to be the effect of the Soul Eaters' gaze, which I had felt in the Greenwood Forest not too long ago. If the Flesh Eater had similar aces up his sleeves, a fight against him might end fatally. Hina’s voice pulled me out of my trance.

  “What do we do now? Can we trust her?”

  I got up from the table and didn’t answer immediately. It was hard to categorize and take in what despair had told us. Why would she so willingly tell us about the devourer skills? Why was she giving away an advantage to tell us about Morghast? Why didn’t she kill him herself if he bothered her so much? She was a lot stronger than we were.

  “Kuro’s stuck in his head, let him be. I’m sure he’ll come up with a plan. We got the whole day until this Morghast or whatever his name was starts his hunt again, so we'd better recover and prepare now, then proceed to strike around afternoon.”

  I had been so caught up in my thoughts that I had forgotten Hina’s question one second after she asked it, but Ryu knew precisely what we should do now. We went to our room and assessed our equipment.

  If Morghast were even only half as dangerous as Despair, our coats would not help us against an attack. Maybe if I took a look at my book for magic, and if the spells weren’t too complicated, I could enchant our coats to be a bit sturdier. There was something more important I had to do before, though.

  “I think I need to get some rest for one or two hours to find some answers. If anything happens, wake me up.”

  With the approval of the others, I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes. I tried to banish all thoughts from my mind until there was only a blank black space left. Then I imagined the castle room with the large table, which I had visited twice already. The noise of my friends arguing, as well as the feeling of the bed beneath my back, seemed to vanish, and I found myself in the place that I had imagined.

  Instead of the soft sheets of the bed, I now lay on a hard floor made from polished marble, and instead of my friends, there was only one other person in the room. It was a person whom I had never seen before.