Soul Hunger

“Leviathan’s tits, Sage!” Galateya snarled, her human figure elongating and getting covered in black and red scales. “You want to feed Laika’s soul to Shady while she’s distracted with being offered hope of having a home?! That’s your solution to stopping the Sleigh?! Really?!”

“Obviously not. Relax, T-buns.” The fox shook her red mane. “I’ve been examining this whole dream loop in great detail. There’s a reason why Laika’s psyche is trapped in it, why her soul keeps dreaming of this moment when I push her into the moon-hole.”

“Why?” Galateya asked.

“Laika’s death was a sacrifice, it opened the door to the abyss,” Sage explained. “Let entropy in. It made it easier for Saint Nikky or the Sleigh to set this up.”

“Set what up?” Nexxali asked.

“This,” Sage waved her hands at the black and white Soviet cafe. “This isn’t ordinary near-death-PTSD, no mere soul damage as I originally thought. I believe I understand the nature of blood pacts now that I dove into a really potent one. A blood pact is essentially a memetic infection, a living chain, a loop that’s constantly strangling and chewing its host. A Vow… a one sided obedience-aligned Blood Pact… is an Astral mushroom covered in smaller parasites it blooms.”

“A mushroom covered in parasites?” Shady squinted at the fox. “That… doesn’t sound very tasty.”

“Astral parasites have souls too, bruh,” Sage snapped her fox-chompers back at Shady. “Yummy, yummy souls you could terrorise, crunch on. Don’t hate on a meal till you try it. You Frontenachii are feeding on the wrong things. The Astral is full of monsters that actually need to be tormented and devoured.”

“Fine.” Shady said.

-=[Ashcroft Clifford]=-

Laika’s wet, dark nose twitched, drawing in a long breath.

“You smell… honest,” she admitted, relaxing further. “Unexpected. I expected a foreign spy to smell like cheap cologne and fancy hotels. You smell… like pine trees and foxes… and the ocean. Strange.”

“I currently live with a fox close to a forest,” I said. “The scent rubs off.”

“You have a very odd pack… albeit, a strong one unless my nose betrays me,” she murmured after a minute of meat pie chewing and sipping tea.

“That I do,” I agreed. “And they could be your pack too.”

“My… pack,” she repeated with a look of half-suppressed longing. “That does sound nice. Too nice, in fact. The problem is… How can I trust you or your pack? I feel like I’ve been made offers before… although I cannot remember what they were… or maybe what they will be.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, falling silent.

“I don’t even know your real name, Mr. Bond,” she sighed. “How do I know that you won’t use me for some vile Yankee plot?”

“I don’t have vile plots,” I said. “I only have… nice plans. Plans to protect my pack, my home and my friends. Plans to help as many people as possible with a title I made up for myself.”

“What sort of a title?” she wondered.

“I declared myself as everyone’s… leader.” I offered her a soft smile. “When in truth I wasn’t any sort of such. Now everyone does think that I’m their leader and they expect great things from me. It’s kind of annoying really. Far too much responsibility for my liking.”

“Uh-huh, so you lied about being someone important and chained yourself with noble titles?”

“More or less.” I shrugged. “And I just keep piling titles on myself. I can’t help it.”

She snorted, then hid her smile behind her paw.

“From what I understand, Laika… You sense what’s coming because you were… offered a magical pact, a leash that keeps pulling you into this sad moment,” I finally arrived at the right words. “I won’t be offering you any pacts at all. I don’t have binding magic or any magic at all really. I’m not Mephistopheles that’s planning to buy your soul with a handshake. I’m simply offering you my friendship.”

“Why?”

“Because I can see how cold, lonely and miserable you are,” I said.

“There are plenty of other mutts out there on the streets being miserable,” she rebutted. “Are you going to offer them your ‘friendship’ too?”

This was just a dream, the people in the cafe around us weren’t real, weren’t alive… Sadly, I couldn’t tell Laika any of that without the potential threat of waking her up.

“If… They’re someone whom I can help, yes,” I answered. “I would absolutely offer them my friendship too. My goal is to… rescue as many prads as I can from their binding chains.”

“Hrm.” Laika returned to her meal. Both of us sipped our tea in somewhat awkward silence as I waited for her to reach a decision. Occasionally she seemed to sniff at the empty chairs next to us with suspicious glances.

“Could I… meet them too?” She asked finally, setting down her tea. “You’re offering me a… family, not just yourself, right? They smell like they’re close by… maybe one dimensional layer below us?”

“Sage?” I thought. “Is it safe for her to talk to all of you?”“The safest,” the fox replied in my head. “I’ve figured her out. Bringing us back up.”

“Guys?” I spoke into the air, mostly for Laika’s benefit. “Dive out. Also, Shades, no terrorizing my new dog friend please.”

The air around the empty chairs shimmered like heat rising from summer pavement.

Sage faded back into view first, then Galateya. Nexxali materialized next, the red star on her commissar cap glittering bright red. The human-Wendigo manifested last, looking very annoyed, silver eyes boring into the prad mutt.

“Hiiiiiii!” Sage grinned.

“I make no promises regarding my appetite,” Shady stated imperiously. She picked up my fork and skewered a few pierogi. “However, I suppose I can refrain from biting… someone for a bit.” She gave me a poignant look implying that I deserved many bites for my female collection misdeeds as she swallowed the dream-meat.

Laika recoiled slightly against the chair, eyes darting between the four imposing women.

“I was wrong. You don’t smell local at all. You are… Outsiders,” she whispered, “high level ones.”

“Yep. This is my pack,” I told Laika. “Fox, Dragon, Cat. And… Shadow, as you’ve so eloquently judged.”

“I am… Laika,” the prad dog said.

“Charming,” Shady commented.

Laika looked at Shady with concern. “You smell like… the worst kind of nightmare.”

“And you smell like miserable despair and tasty dread,” Shady drawled. “We all have our perfumes.”

“Be nice, Shades,” I warned. “This is important.”

“I am being nice,” Shady countered. “I haven’t thrown her through the window yet.”

Laika looked at me with a small shudder. “How do you even control them if you are a null, powerless human? These… monsters?”

“Nobody controls us,” Nexxali corrected. “We work together! Such is the point of a pack, doggo. Mutual survival. Mutual benefit. Mutual love and warmth.”

The young prad looked down at her tea with a despondent look.

“Love,” she muttered, “there is no genuine love here. Not in Moscow ruled by the Ministry of Magic. The System Wizard promises us a golden age. She says that her Archmages will bring magic to the masses. Autogenesis. Infinite housing, infinite food, free wishes for everyone forever. Safety and shelter for all, so that even if we are targeted by Yankee mag-nukes… we will survive.”

“You do not believe her?” Galateya asked.

“Wizard Revolution is a liar,” Laika spat the words with dark venom. “Gensek Khrushchev stands on the podium and waves his hands. He speaks of corn that grows in winter and apartments that build themselves. Yet I still sleep by the vent. The winters get colder. The bread lines get longer. They say that the wild places are already contaminated, filled with hungry monsters pouring through the shears in reality. They say that Australia vanished off the map, was devoured by a Leviathan-beast from the abyss.”

“Ye. Utopias are often expensive,” Sage noted. “Usually the cost is hidden in the fine print.”

“The cost is us,” Laika said. “The strays. The unwanted. They round us up. They say the relocation leads to the new magical districts. Nobody ever comes back from the GIGA-KRUSH elevators though. Whatever Dr. Kerenski’s Autogenesis is… nobody returns from it to tell the tale. The stars above the Kremlin burn ever brighter with each day too. Everyone who looks at them can’t stop smiling…”

I felt an icy chill crawling up my spine.

“Why?” I asked.

“Forced narrative,” Laika whispered. “Charmchain-bound, false joy. The System Wizard writes a story… A grand epic of Soviet supremacy. And all good stories need conflict in their heart. They need sacrifice. I feel it in my bones. We are just ink on her page. And she particularly enjoys red ink.”

“Predestination,” Galateya murmured. “You feel trapped in a script?”

“It is not a feeling,” Laika insisted. “It is a sound. A ticking clock. A countdown. I hear it when I try to sleep. It tells me that my time is short. That I have a terrible role to play… ”

She rubbed her arms and shivered.

“The ending is already written,” she continued. She stared into her tea. “Fire. Darkness. Pain. Betrayal. I cannot change it. I am a mere stray dog, one who can’t get away from the future, no matter what I do. I feel like I keep waking up on the street day after day, stuck on a track without an end.”

“Scripts can be rewritten,” I said. “You do not have to play the part assigned to you.”

“Easy for you to say, American,” Laika huffed. “You have power. You have a pack of high level monsters at your side. I have nothing!”

“No. You have a choice,” I said. “Right now. You can finish your tea, walk out that door, and wait for the men with the nets to find you. Or you can trust me. Trust us, join our pack. We can take you somewhere ‘the script’ cannot reach.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Away from sacrifices,” I promised.

“To a forest of pines,” Sage added. “A small town by the Pacific Ocean. Where the wild foxes play.”

Laika let out a lamenting sniff-whine.

“To a nice campfire with a guitar under the stars,” Nexxali smiled, humming a catchy tune under her breath.

“To a linear world,” Galateya added. “Where there are no monsters, no Soviet Ministry of Magic, no Charmchain hexagrams looming over cities.”

Laika looked at the door. Then at the dark window. Then at me. Hope fought with fatalism in her expression.

“I…” she started.

The brass bell above the door chimed.

A gust of icy wind blew in.

Laika froze. Her ears swiveled toward the entrance. Her pupils dilated until her eyes looked entirely black.

“No!” she whimpered. “Not now. He is not supposed to find me here. Not inside the café!”

I turned in my chair.

A man stood in the doorway. He wore a heavy gray coat with a fur collar and a thick ushanka hat. He stamped the snow from his boots and pulled his hat off revealing dark hair in the process of balding.

I recognized him from Laika’s dream-show on Sage’s monitors.

“There you are, little one,” Vladimir Yazdovsky said. “I have been looking everywhere for you.”