The End of the Butcher of Souls

You don't know what to do. You're frozen, knelt in their shadow, staring wide-eyed into the floor. Your breath is caught in your throat, bound there by the strings of fate tightening around your neck. No tears come, no wailing, just empty shock. The mortal mind was not made to bear the weight of a thousand years of brutal, bloody failure.

You finally muster the courage and the presence of mind to look up again, seeing the council of empty tanks hanging over you. How long have they been gone? Had you ever truly saved them? Was their form in the glass always merely an illusion? Did it come from your mind, or somewhere else? And above all else... what now?

You drag yourself to your feet, glancing around your laboratory, dazed. It's as if you've just woken from a stupor a millennia long; a thousand years of mania having simply washed away in the tide of fog that spilled from their tanks. You gave up everything, harvested hundreds of souls, irreparably bloodied your own, all for that aching hope in your chest--that you might someday bask in the warmth of the only love you'd ever known again. You felt that Angel's soul burn in your grip, achieved something that has never been done and will never be repeated in thousands of years, through ten lifetimes of endless toil.

And it was all for nothing. There was no one there to save.

The room is more silent than ever without the buzz of the tanks.

You drag your hand across the edges of a workbench, looking over the tools sprawled across it. Is this truly what you've spent your life on? Testing the limits of the spirit, dissecting the souls of men in a desperate search for those otherworldly colors? Tears finally start to stain your face, the numbness finally giving way to overwhelming guilt. If you had at least seen the eyes of your mother again, maybe you could have said that all of this, as horrifying as it had been, was worth something. But...

Then, among the sprawl of brutal implements, you see it... your journal, thick with pages.

You drag it off the table, tucking it under your arm.

You lift your hand, and in it swells a font of darkness that spills over your fingers and onto the floor. You start to march. The magic creeps over the room in your wake, scaling the legs of workstations and beginning to crawl up the walls as you exit your workshop. Up the stairs and into the labyrinth you go, slick pitch trailing you the whole way.

It's a long and painful tour of the remains of your atrocities and failures. Sorrow soaks every stone, mottled with old blood. You pass the bodies of forgotten adventurers, your guardians lying in wait to be reanimated, and the darkness claims them too. You step over bear traps, pressure plates and jaunt over pitfalls, never breaking your stride. You are a being animated by purpose, and you must seize upon this new purpose before it is too late--in many ways.

This world's spirit is ailing. In your hands are pages and pages anatomizing every inch of the soul from its most basic components to its highest functions, and somewhere within all of that just might be a cure, or at least something that might help. You won't let it go to waste like everything else you've ever done.

You emerge, into a quiet summer dusk. You draw a deep breath as you look up and into the sunset past the wiry canopy of dead trees, withered by the poison you've pumped through this land's heart, and steel yourself. Then, down to the ring of barren dirt circling your catacomb like a blast radius. The time to let go of your family was a thousand years ago, but better late than never. You suppose.

You look back at the mouth of the crypt as it begins to disgorge your magic, spilling over and overtaking every last inch of the stone. The font finally runs dry.

Lifting a hand, you clench it into a tight fist. At once, the catacombs and all of their contents implode, turning into ichor and forming a sinkhole as the hollow spaces in the crypt collapse. It drags waves of dirt into the swirling mass of ichor, swallowing the ground beneath your feet, leaving you floating above the massive pit, the journal still tucked under your arm.

The guards stalking your labyrinth, your tools, the remains of your experiments and the tanks in which you had imagined your family all this time, all to be rewritten as soil and stone. It churns, the bottommost layer beginning to transform. The pit begins to fill in, repairing the land as if the labyrinth had never been there at all... at least, physically. The scars you've inflicted upon this land will not wash away so easily.

The last of it settles into place, leaving no trace of you here other than the dead woods.

All at once you drop out of the air, landing in a crumpled pile on your hands and knees in the dirt, breath ragged and blood dripping from your mouth. Once again, you scoop your journal up and stagger to your feet, taking in the results of your work. At least, by destroying the source of the dark animus that plagued this land, you've given it a chance to recover within a few years or so. It's a start, you hope.

You know there can likely be no atonement for what you've done. That doesn't mean you won't spend every last breath you have left pursuing it for the rest of your life--the only alternative is death, and death would only make everything you've done even more senseless. The least you can do is try to give some kind of purpose to everything you've learned; though born from blood, the knowledge itself should not be shunned.

Although the land is deeply blighted, it will eventually recover. You can only hope the same can be said of your soul.

You take one last glimpse at what remains of the last thousand years: a divet in the ground surrounded by dead forest. With a deep breath, you turn away and start on your journey. There are no roads through these woods, so you just begin... trudging. Where, you're not sure.