Monsters All The Same
An anti-hero's hunger, a vow betrayed, and souls damned for vengeance. When does a beast become a monster?
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Author’s Note
Set in the world of Thaldra in the divided land of Inesvaer, there are territories enshrouded in eternal night under the domain of Vesaryss god of Death. Spirits refusing to cross into the afterlife due to tragedy or unfinished business tend to remain and be drawn toward these darklands. And so the Soul Shepherd paladin order was formed to guide these tormented souls to rest.
Being surrounded by the pain and tragedy of those murdered, broken, and lost with lives left unfulfilled can wear on those tasked with giving these spirits peace. The wrongs that cannot be righted, only soothed enough for the souls to move on. But the paladins remain, heavy with the burden of all they know and all they cannot fix in a world whose darkness they know far too well.
And so, sometimes one will make a different choice.
Monsters All The Same
A Tale of Thaldra
Souls have a scent.
They don’t tell you that in the Order when they’re training you to hunt the lost and departed—the ones left wandering with unfulfilled desire. They don’t even acknowledge it when you’re face to face with an enraged spirit cut short before they could matter, and told to help guide them to eternal rest. Perhaps the Order doesn’t know. Levad never noticed at first either. Not, that is, until he did the unthinkable.
One would assume a soul’s scent would reflect its tragedy—the one that kept it from departing the world its body already left behind. Bitters for regret and anguish. Salt for sorrow. A cloying sweetness half rotted for longing, and sour for desires left unfinished. But it doesn’t. Lingering souls have an electric scent—charged and sharp, metallic like the air after a lightning strike. Bright and stinging in the way the atmosphere sizzles when mages do battle, the air itself charred by the energy released through it. The after burn of power.
Forbidden fruit.
It’s no wonder they burn the entire way down.
“Levad, did you release that lost spirit?”
Paladin Kayne pokes his golden helmed head through the ruin’s doorway. Levad breathes in the last of the spirit’s essence, the teal glow of the smoke snaking down his throat before the other man’s eyes can adjust to the dark. A moment sooner and Kayne would have asked him a very different question.
The soul burns Levad’s throat as it goes down. Hot as a coal plucked fresh from the fire, it drips thick and slow as molten iron to his core. They never go down easy. A punishment designed by the gods or one final retaliation by the life devoured, he doesn’t know. The pain is blinding in its unforgiveness and yet Levad might as well be a man dying of thirst stumbling upon a glass of iced water. It hits his system like a shot of morphine and even though the pain is still there, it invigorates him in a way nothing else in the world could compare. Warmth rushes through his blood and his skin dances with a pleasant shiver that settles into a charged static at his fingertips. Raw power.
The other paladin holds up his soul lantern to better see Levad quiet in the dark. The cold white light lit not in this world, but the one beyond, flickers behind its arcane glass cage and calls to the life devoured within Levad. This spirit can no longer answer, but molten fingers scratch behind his sternum anyways, begging for release.
The white light’s harsh glow illuminates the empty space where Levad stands, its sharpness diffused only by the frost forming inside the glass that contains it. Though the light can brighten any space to a point where the eyes water with hurt, the destroyed room remains dark despite the lantern’s beacon—though not by shadow.
Black smoke paints the walls deep as ink, the soot so thick it hides the dead fire’s charred path in burnt shadow. Everything within the room is either ash or husk. Even the bodies coiled on the floor can barely be recognized as such. Above, the fire consumed roof opens up to the eternally night skies of the darklands. The home’s bones stretch blackened fingers for the heavens it never did obtain. And outside, an entire village bows to the same cruel fate.
“Levad?”
Levad’s eyes flick to the green glow of the arcane canister hung from Kayne’s hip. Spirit flame dancing defeated within the soul siphon while Levad’s own remains dark and empty.
“Mine went willing,” he finally answers. “She wanted forgiveness, so I gave it.”
The woman actually wanted it all to end, her sins too much for even her to live with forever. He’d done her a favor devouring all that was left to linger.
Kayne gave him an absent nod, “You got lucky. Most lingering spirits need more guidance before they can let go of this life and meet Vesaryss for one last story.” He touches the glowing soul siphon with the gentleness of a man closing a casket. A Soul Shepherd through and true. Kayne would never know the taste of souls. “Did you record her final words?”
“Of course,” Levad mumbles, recalling how the woman screamed ‘wait’ when she realized exactly how he intended to release her. She’d dissolved in his hands like mist before the storm before she could say a word more.
Levad tilts his chin at the lantern, “Did it draw out any more or are we finished here?”
He didn’t want to wander this desecrated village any longer. His stomach was already sick with the stench of death and residue of black smoke.
Kayne regards the cold light with old sorrow and reflected duty, “The flame still flickers, a few more must have come through. Let us bring them rest.”
It took a few more hours for the two paladins to clear the small village’s ruins of its haunted residents. Levad even let a few make it into his soul siphon lest suspicions be raised. As it was, his fingers still itched like frozen hands thawing beside a fire, the nerves unable to interpret the sensation of power beyond his natural means. Faintly glowing hairline cracks parted the skin around his nails and made the lines of his palm sore with the promise of breaking. He knew he would not be able to indulge much more without consequence. Until his body could handle the additional life energy, he would need to abstain. But walking through the burnt husk of a once thriving village whose only crime was daring to exist too close to the sunland’s borders left a smoldering pit in Levad’s gut.
These people were not soldiers or spies, yet the sun-touched wretches slipped past the dusk sun and slaughtered them anyways. A soot covered pig wanders past Levad, chewing on a small ragdoll with a child’s hand still grasping it—the body nowhere to be seen. The young girl’s cries whimper softly from the glowing siphon at Levad’s hip. Bile bites the back of his throat, sharp as venom, and he slaughters the swine, ripping the doll from its filthy mouth.
With teeth grit together until his jaw threatens to break, the little doll rolls limply in Levad’s hand. Small broken fingers half melted to the charred creature cling to what must have been the girl’s last hope as her world burned. The breastplate guarding Levad’s chest suddenly doesn’t feel like it’s big enough to contain him and his ribs refuse to let his lungs breathe lest he scream.
Levad isn’t yet strong enough to make the sunlands pay, but he will be. Every soul he’s taken within himself changes him in ways no amount of training or study ever could. He can feel it deep in his blood awakening the arcane inside him, see it in the mirror and the way his muscles have expanded and chiseled into something stronger. The way it breaks him to grow him. A hot coal swallowed to melt the throat and set aflame the heart, yet his body survives. Levad’s nerves thrum at their edges and a blossoming sun at his core burns so violently it is simply pain now. But the power is there and it has not destroyed him yet. A power forbidden, but only to those who cannot withstand the pain and the remnant rage of the forsaken.
Kayne’s hand settles heavy on Levad’s shoulder.
“Even if they did not know this village was civilian when they looked upon their maps and planned, they knew when their boots stood at its edge,” Levad snarls. “They knew when they unsheathed their swords on the unarmed. They knew. And they did it anyways.”
Kayne’s fingers whiten against Levad’s pauldron, but his voice remains steady, “I know.”
“Why?” Levad seethes.
He did not expect an answer. But he wanted the gods to hear.
Kayne only shook his head, face unnaturally pale in the cold ghost light. “I can’t answer that. But there’s nothing you or I can do. We are not soldiers, our place is in guiding the ones left desecrated into a peace they could not otherwise find without the aid of shepherds like us. The retribution is best left to our Sovereign and his army.”
“He wasn’t here for them.”
“Neither were we.”
The words landed like a slap.
“He cannot be everywhere, Levad. That is the curse of every man,” Kayne continues. “And this is war. We help our people in the ways that we can, not in the ways we cannot. I know you want to track those sun-drenched and make them pay, but if we do that and die beneath their blades, who will carry these souls to their peace?” He touches the soul siphon on Levad’s hip and the girl’s soft whimpering settles. “Who will carry their last words and memories to the ones who can keep them? This is how we fight, Levad. By making sure the ones lost here are remembered and given their rest. By making sure the ones who did this do not succeed in denying our people their afterlife.”
The screams of the souls mingled with Levad’s own rage tell him a different story. One of vengeance yet undelivered. He’d swallowed the souls of every spirit in this village demanding justice, every spirit too broken to be saved by a few well meaning words trying to offer enough peace to grant them rest they might never achieve. It is they who ignite the blood in him. They who press against his bones and cry out for more than eternal peace, but for retribution for all that’s been done.
Levad knows they curse him too, but he will give them what the Soul Shepherd Order cannot.
Blood on his hands.
Levad almost tells Kayne they can dare to do more, but the words die before they even leave his throat. The lantern’s ghost light that had settled to a peaceful glow when the last spirit was cleared from the ruined village suddenly flickers wildly as if trying snuff itself out. The hairs on the back of Levad’s neck raise and his breath clouds in a sudden drop of air of cold. A low growl rumbles through his bones as the stone behind them cracks beneath a great weight.
The calistyx raises its snout, slitted nostrils flaring as it breathes in the scent of its prey. A hell beast fed a diet of souls until it has a taste for them, the monster is modified then sent out to gather for the Daemon Princes and their warring kingdoms below. Levad has only ever heard of calistyx in warnings from those who’d never seen one themselves, but all Soul Shepherds know of the soul eaters.
All along the engineered monstrosity’s muscled back, rows of stolen soul siphons bristle like spines clinking softly with each movement of the large creature. The head of each canister sits embedded into the thick black hide with crude surgical precision leaving puckered scars that have mostly grown around the devices made permanent by devilish hands. Any soul it eats will fill them instead, leaving just enough behind for the monstrosity to keep hunting.
Levad only realizes the creature is a juvenile still adjusting to its soul fueled power when the beast swipes Kayne across the village square as easily as a cat batting a crumpled piece of paper. The fully armored, two hundred pound man crashes loudly across the cobblestones before coming to a hard stop against a charred home’s foundation.
He doesn’t get back up.
The calistyx’s eyes glint in the reflected green glow of Levad’s soul siphon with a salivating hunger, its teeth clicking in excitement. He understood this beast, felt his own hunger for souls growing each day since the first time he dared taste. It was an addiction, and though he’d never before had the opportunity to feast as he had today in this death shrouded village, it still wasn’t enough. Even as his muscles expand and his skin breaks in hairline cracks filled with needle thin light—a mirror of the very monster before him—he wants more. In that moment, the monster became the excuse, but Levad knew he would always find one to justify his hunger.
The cap of the soul siphon unlatches so smoothly he wonders why he ever let it hold him back. Levad throws open the metal top and breathes in the misty spirits—grins even as they burn his throat with bellow’s flame. The calistyx howls such a strange pained cry, Levad could have mistaken it for a dog denied its precious table scraps. The monstrosity presses its clawed paw atop the ghost lantern that likely drew the beast to them, and crushes it in one swift step. The lantern’s arcane glass shatters and smokes, the metal skeleton bowing beneath the weight until the unnatural light it once protected is sputtering and hissing against the cobblestones before finally going silent. No more spirits would be drawn forth.
Levad isn’t certain how many souls he devoured in that flash of a moment. But the skin of his body breaks open into fissures that vein up his arms and crawl down his throat, glowing and bleeding in equal measure. His bones ache beneath an unseen pressure and he’s certain a few may have broken. Muscles that once sat snug beneath the weight of his armor now pinch and press. It hurts—everything hurts. Every nerve and vein aflame with far more energy than a no one, magic-less mortal like him was ever meant to contain.
But the power is electrifying, addicting, intoxicating.
When the calistyx lunged, he catches the beast’s snapping jaws in his hands and laughs. The elongated muscled neck writhes and twists, trying to free its large head, but all it can do is screech in starved fury. Levad shoves the beast back before its claws rake across him and withdraws his blade. Soul Shepherds are taught to defend against the risen undead and vengeful spirits, but Levad supposes he can’t be called a Soul Shepherd anymore. He desecrated those vows too many times. Driven by the same hunger Levad knew, the calistyx bristles its spines of glass soul siphons and snaps at the air. Teal smoke pours out of its mouth and nostrils as if it’s been fed.
One of the soul siphons goes dark.
The beast strikes again, shoving Levad back several feet. Snapping jaws wide enough to easily swallow his head wrap around Levad’s blade. The razor fangs scrape along the forged steel with an ear piercing screech before the metal buckles and fractures like a broken mirror between its teeth. Levad raises an arm to fend off the swiping claws and they cut through the metal of his armor like it’s fire warmed butter. The beast flattens him to the ground before his body can register the wound and he instinctively coils up his legs to keep from being crushed. Feet planted squarely against the broad muscled chest of the calistyx, he kicks it off before it can tear open his throat. Hot saliva sears his face and smokes across the cold cobblestones as the beast flies into a nearby home, chasing through the weakened structure’s walls.
Levad scrambles across the charred ground to Kayne’s prone form and reaches for the still full soul siphon on the paladin’s belt. The metal cap pops off so easily and the soul smoke fills his lungs like he was always meant to breathe it. Half the souls scream and cry as they whip past his face in a desperate escape, and he roars that he didn’t get them all. Levad’s insides burn so sweetly he can almost convince himself he was made to feast on them. He was made for this power.
“What have you done?”
The dark blood pouring past Kayne’s open green eyes make them seem all the brighter.
Levad never got to answer before the calistyx sinks its teeth into his leg and throws him across the town square. The dead fountain’s stone spire breaks Levad’s arc and shatters beneath him. The beast is in the air, claws out and bleeding maw roaring after him before he even finishes falling. Its dark mouth is bright red now, freshly burned and bleeding from tasting Levad’s own blood, but its spines of soul siphons still glow brightly—its supply undiminished and unconquerable while Levad’s is gone. The creature comes at him with the aggravation of beast intending to put an end to the fight it knows Levad cannot win.
Deep indignation fills Levad then. It settles deep in his gut with the weight of an anchor. Aggravation that he could be cut down like this so easily. Irritation that he damned himself for nothing. Fury that just like the helpless souls he devoured, he will have failed to accomplish anything in the end. It was Levad’s rage, but the emotion compounded seven fold by the lives he took within himself. Lives he stole for power and promised vengeance. Even if the spirits hated him, they would not let their cursed existences be destroyed for nothing.
When the calistyx’s teeth wrap around Levad’s throat, he explodes into an inferno of flame and light that lights up the dark valley like the eternal shadowlands never have before. Levad imagines this is what the sunlands must look like during their blazing days as the creature’s flesh chars and withers into a burnt husk. The glass of the soul siphons crack and shatter, spirits fleeing all across the mountain as the light collapses and returns to the night.
Levad only knows pain now. There is no longer any distinction of the kind, only that it is endless. His skin fissures and cracks with molten glow across his entire body, the skin shifting too tightly with each movement. His muscles bleed through the open wounds that are both alight with power and sealed by it into a new form that is one wrong move away from shattering. Levad knows his body is being unmade by the sun in his chest. And if his hunger dared him to taste one more soul, he would break like a pot shattering in the heat of the kiln.
A brightness tinges his vision telling Levad his eyes must glow with unnatural power. And though every shaking breath seems to release a mist of soul smoke, he feels none leave him. Their spirits are fused with his own now. Only the gods could separate them.
It’ll take time and restraint, but he can survive this.
Levad only remembers he is not alone when Kayne stumbles to his feet and withdraws his sword. The older paladin plants the pointed blade in the ground and leans as heavily on it as a walking stick though it is too short to steady the man well. Kayne’s leg bends out at an unnatural angle beneath him, the bone breaking through the skin. But the worst part is how the senior paladin looks at Levad with the same horror as the beast now curled into a charred husk at Levad’s feet. In the shepherds eyes they are the same kind of monster. The only difference that Levad had a choice to become something else.
It didn’t matter now. His choices took away any possibility of them leaving as friends.
Levad tears the only unbroken soul siphon from the smoking calistyx’s back and tosses it at the feet of Kayne before his hunger can unseal the cap and destroy him permanently. The enchanted glass container rolls loudly across the silent square casting its low teal glow through the returned dark. The souls within are none of the ones they rescued today, but they are still lives Kayne would save. Levad turns his back on Kayne and the good life the paladin order offered not because they are wrong, but because he wants to do more than comfort the slaughtered victims of evil men.
“I can’t let you leave.”
Kayne’s voice is solid and hard, but his raised hand ignited in spell flame shakes.
Levad keeps his back to the man he still respects.
“You can’t stop me,” he answers softly.
Levad waits for the spell to hit, but it never comes.
“Where will you go?”
The two of them were born beneath the forever dark skies of Umbrael, but the night opens up before Levad’s new eyes like never before and the possibility feels infinite.
“I’m going to give this village the vengeance it deserves.”
“And after?”
“We’re at war with the sunlands. There will always be more retribution to deliver.”
There was a quiet contemplation then, a reminder of all the times before that they’d had this conversation. Levad never felt Kayne’s way was enough and Kayne always saw Levad’s as too much.
“The Order will hunt you for what you’ve done. I will hunt you.”
“I know.”
Levad didn’t let himself look back, “Goodbye, old friend.”
“May Vesaryss have mercy on your soul, Levad.”
Levad left the ruins of the village and entered the forest. The sunland’s trail was easy to find, their sunblind eyes unaccustomed to the dark and leaving far too easy a path for him to follow. The nightlands never lacked for predators and normally he would have to be alert for them, but even beasts recognize a monster when they see one and so Levad’s path is left undisturbed.
The small infiltrator group nearly made it to the Dusk Ring border between their lands when Levad finds them. So close to their precious unshrouded sun, yet they died in the dark. He could not force their souls to remain, but he could wait. Perhaps one or two would refuse to move on to the afterlife and then he’d be there to snatch them away for another day when he could dare to eat again.
They’d called him ‘monster’ with their dying breath, the same accusation in Kayne’s eyes as for the calistyx. Levad wondered if in the end, we’re all just monsters all the same.
Parting Thoughts
I created Thaldra to be a playable world for a group of D&D friends, and as I explore the world in my own imaginings to build it not only for me, but for them, I find small stories such as this one. The world is far from complete, but I discover it again and again both at the table and on the page.
I intend to create many stories set in this world, revealing plenty of secrets to add to the playable version I am building. In the future, I hope to create a Patreon where I will craft usable documents for locations, magic items, creatures, spells, and so forth. If you’d like to follow the building of this world, consider following me on Substack or on any other social platform.
And if you’d like to contribute a one time donation, consider Tossing a Coin to Your Writer on ko-fi.