EPISODE 12: Lost Souls

Our souls bind essence to flesh, and purpose to breath. Without our souls, the body is merely a vessel, drifting without compass or fire. In every heartbeat and choice, the soul is present, animating, remembering, guiding. Life without a soul is no life at all, but a hollow echo of what could be.

Yet souls are not merely personal. On a grand scale, they’re threads in a vast, cosmic weave. Vital conduits, lifeblood of the existence, concentrated forms of power that in part, fuel the Universe. Put into beings, they form a raw force that becomes a spirit. As the being lives and experiences, that spirit grows, matures, giving off a kinetic fuel for the Universe to survive and expand –- sort of in the way cells on a micro level are an important function to life. 

Though unseen, souls are evolving energies, fluid, ancient, and essential. Without them, life would have stagnated long ago. Only progressing by the continual rebirth of souls over and over. Each generation, human, animal, or otherwise, carries within it an old soul, returned. And with each life lived, that soul accrues resonance. Unscathed souls can exist forever, moving through untold lifetimes, becoming refined, wise, and potent, gaining ethereal value.

These seasoned souls gradually ascend, transcending mortal form to become astral entities. Cosmic intelligences that help shape the unseen architecture of the Universe itself. They are the hidden authors of intuition, invention, and insight...whispers from the ether that guide the living toward what was once unknown.

But not all souls endure such a path. Some become fractured. Corrupted. Torn apart by trauma, malice, or manipulation. These broken souls are marked by Death, jettisoned to the depths of the Abyss. It’s there, the dark claims them, tempering the fragments in malevolence, reshaping them to become subservient wretches bound to the will of evil... transformed into demons.

But the Lord of the Flies doesn’t always wait for death to claim these souls. He harvests them in life, through the corruption of man. Mortal sin, his most basic tool, acts of cruelty, betrayal, and destruction that tarnish the soul’s purity. Temptation is another, seducing mortals into ruin, despair, spiritual collapse. But his most cunning method is as old as language itself, a deal. Throughout history, souls have been bought and sold. Bargains struck in desperate hours, trading eternal light for fleeting gain. Power, wealth, love, revenge, no matter the cost, Satan always collects.

Banerjee and his nephew, Veera Sarin, wandered through the endless black of the Abyss...surrounded in the depths by sounds and shifting shadows. Around them, banished souls twisting in agony, being slowly reborn in hatred, as demons. 

No harm would come to them, unless it was invited. As long as they resisted fear and despair, they’d remain safe from the restless spirits that prowled the dark. Light, too, offered protection. Using their supernatural gifts, both Banerjee and Veera summoned illumination from the classic element, cutting through the black. But radiance was a double-edged sword, drawing the attention of greater evils, older demons, lurking, like moths to a flame. 

In the glow they conjured, Banerjee began to sense the weight of what surrounded them. The sheer number of entities beyond the light’s edge was steadily growing. He understood the ancient laws of this place, a wasteland of shattered souls, re-formed into monstrosities. But this...this was something else. This was a legion, being forged in secret.

He recalled an ancient myth, telling of Ammit, the original entity to serve as the Grim Reaper. But Ammit betrayed that duty, devouring the souls meant only to be ferried onward. Ammit's plan was to grow powerful enough to conquer existence itself. The gods intervened. Ammit’s essence was torn from its divine form, transformed into a mortal soul, and buried where it could never be found…The core truth of the tale of the Eater of Soul’s stayed with Banerjee and echoed in the back of his mind like a warning. Perhaps, once again, souls were being hoarded to amass power.

Ammit devouring a soul - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Broderick Zayne was a man struggling to make sense of a life without end. Never egotistical, Zayne didn’t feel that a gift such as unending life was misgiven. He had no family. No home. No purpose. Nothing externally to live for. 

Still, something compelled him onward. He made his way to Vatican City, chasing the name Hui Chen had given to him, a name that might lead to understanding, or at the very least, direction. Surrounded by gold and stone, faith and silence, he spoke the name aloud to the gatekeepers of the Church. He was met with furrowed looks and hesitant fingers. Pointed down corridors. Handed off to others. Through sacred halls and guarded stairwells, Zayne wandered, passed from Cardinals and Bishops, nuns and priests. Doubt crept in, as perhaps the man he sought was a ghost woven into Vatican lore.

It was deep in the labyrinth of the Vatican’s secret archives, beyond the reach of papal authority and far from the eyes of the world, Broderick Zayne finally came face to face with a man, who by all rights should have been long dead.

Gérard Roux, was a relic of flesh and bone. A French knight of the Fifth Crusade, he was part of a battalion that in 1221, survived a particularly bloody battle outside of Cairo, that ended the war. Roux would stop short of revealing any more, only that something in his time away during the war, altered him irrevocably. Like Zayne, Roux had been marked. Changed. Made Eternal. 

Now, Roux served the Church as a living bridge to the forgotten centuries. He spent lifetimes buried in lost tomes, deciphering histories most had never heard of. Time had made him wise, but also weary. He had watched empires rise and fall, families built and buried, civilizations renew and decay. Time had become both his closest companion and heaviest burden.

Zayne and Roux - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Zayne began to understand why Hui Chen had sent him. Roux provided more than context, he offered clarity. A balance between the sacred and the supernatural. And with it, a path forward. He extended an invitation to Zayne, to stay as his guest and learn the Disciplina Arcani.

Passed down to Roux by a holy diviner named Petrus, the Discipline was a mystical theology, an esoteric strain of Christianity steeped in ritual magic and spiritual warfare. It rivaled the darkest spellbooks in depth and power, but rooted itself in divine intent.

Zayne eagerly accepted. Perhaps this was his fight after all, the battle against the rising dark. Despite being a man lost in a sea of time, with no anchor, one constant he could rely on was his faith being a guiding light. And so, Zayne’s education would begin. 

TO BE CONTINUED…