“Fulfilling the wishes of the spirits,” she said. “Ending this machine. Saving us.”
“You think…that is the machine?” the scholar asked. Though he had no mouth, the shadow of his head moved and distorted as he spoke. “Child. That little thing is not what rules us. It is but a bud compared to the tree.”
Yumi slumped down. A part of her had known, after all. She’d heard them talking before, and could piece it together. There was another machine. The father machine.
“Where?” she asked.
The lead scholar didn’t reply. He stalked forward, joined by the others. Yet she realized she knew.
“It’s in Torio City, isn’t it?” Yumi asked. “The festival. Did you turn it on during the festival?”
Another of the scholars spoke up, tentatively. “One thousand seven hundred and sixty-three years. Yes…festival day. The day we would create power for our people from the spirits themselves.”
“And yet,” another said, “it instead drew power from us. From our souls. From the lives of our people.”
“And thus,” another said, holding up a smoky hand, “we became these.”
Seventeen hundred years? Yumi reeled, trying to comprehend that. “But…where did hion come from?” she whispered. “So much of this is confusing. How much of my world was real, and how much fake? What even are we?”
All four turned to her, as if seeing her anew. Their darkness lengthened, their white eyes glowing. They went from willowy shadows to full nightmares in a smooth transition.
“No!” Yumi said. “Don’t let the machine control you! We can stop it.”
“Why?” the lead scholar asked.
“We created it,” another said.
“It is our purpose.”
“Our energy.”
“Our art.”
As they spoke, their figures blended together, their voices losing individuality. Though she’d been able to tell them apart at first—hearing in their voices the men she’d spied on in the tent—now they just became nightmares.
“It is life.”
“All obey. All souls.”
“All of us.”
“Except…” one said, hesitating.
Again all of them fixated on her.
“Except for the yoki-hijo,” one whispered. “All obey the machine. Except…those who are too powerful. Except those who have been blessed by the spirits. You it cannot control. You, it must keep captive instead.”
Emotion welled up inside Yumi. It meant…it meant she was real. Or had been real, until that day centuries ago when they’d activated the machine. When they’d brought the shroud and hion alike. It meant that she was herself, but somehow centuries old? Still, that daunted her.
“My memories…” she whispered.
“Scrubbed each day,” the nightmares hissed in unison. “You’ve lived nearly two thousand years in the same town, Yumi. Doing the same things. Thinking the same thoughts. You are both incredibly old and eternally naive.”
“And now that you do not accept our treatment—”
“—more extreme measures must be taken.”
Their eyes widened, white bores directly through them. Their forms darkened further. As they rose and began to move toward her purposefully.
Yumi ran.
All right. At this point, some of you might be confused.
If so, you’re in good company. Because all of this confused the hell out of me when it began. Let me go over it again, laying out the threads as I’ve been able to gather them. Together they might present for you a tapestry of understanding.
Seventeen hundred years before our story started, a machine was activated at the great Torish festival of the spirits. Not the tiny machine you’ve seen; that was a prototype. The real machine was something far greater. Scholars had crafted it to stack stones, attract spirits, and then use them as a power source.
They’d miscalculated, however, because the machine saw all souls—not just the spirits that lived beneath the ground—as a viable power source. When first turned on, it was hungry. It needed strength to follow its instructions to stack stones, and it wanted an overwhelming amount of power to jump-start its work. No spirits were available. So it instead reached out and seized the nearest sources it could find: the souls of the people of Torio.
Let this be a lesson. When you Awaken a device like this, be very, very careful what Commands you give it to follow.
This machine immediately began feeding on them, destroying their bodies and harvesting their Investiture. The result was the shroud, sprayed into the air, left to rain down and blanket the land. A dark miasma literally crafted from the dead, everyone’s Identities evaporated and transformed into this dark force. Imagine it like…the tar that decomposed bodies sometimes turn into over many years of incredible pressure. The shroud is that, except souls, left as refuse from the machine’s initial activation.
A soul cannot be destroyed; it can only change forms. The machine, then, didn’t use people up so much as transform them. They lingered as this blackness, a churning soup made of tens of thousands of souls subject to the machine’s domineering will, held in eternal bondage to something they’d created.
Delightful, eh? Progress, it is said, always disrupts one industry or another. Well, in Torio, progress took a running leap—and instead of just disrupting industry, decided to disrupt the entire planet. Permanently.
Before long, the machine burned through the relatively weak souls of humans and moved on to the spirits themselves. Drawn by the machine’s incredible stacking abilities, the spirits were handily trapped by its power. It eventually gathered each and every remaining free spirit in the land. They finally satiated it, providing a more…vigorous power source. That was its purpose, and the thing fulfilled it with excellence.
Unfortunately, there was almost no one left to appreciate it.
Only wandering refugees who survived the machine’s initial activation—nomads from the edge of civilization. Lucky survivors who eventually came across the results of the machine’s efforts: hion stubs provided in some of the former locations of Torish towns. The blood of enslaved spirits, hidden away, the source of this power never understood.
* * *
Painter stepped alone up to the shroud, holding his painter’s bag with sweaty fingers, watching the shifting darkness. This was the west side of town—where the nightmares would come. It was near his patrol route—the place where Yumi had once pushed back the darkness ever so briefly.
When the nightmares arrived, they would find only him. A single painter.
He trembled, knowing how it would play out. A rush of dark things surrounding him. If he worked frantically, perhaps he could lock down one of them before he was killed. Perhaps even two or three. Then they would rip him apart. Leave him in pieces, like in the stories of what had happened to the painters of Futinoro.
After he was dead, the nightmares would descend upon the unsuspecting city. Rampaging. Maybe…maybe the Dreamwatch would recognize what was happening. Maybe they’d resist. But…but after meeting them, he had to acknowledge how frail a hope that was. How many people would die tonight because he hadn’t been able to persuade the Dreamwatch?