Soulwanderer

by Tina Wittendorff Mortensen

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Paranormal; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

”We are called soulwanderers. We belong to someone in the human world. Or more precisely; they belong to us. We can live without them, but they can’t live without us.”

 

Melerina lives in an isolated land in a world hidden under water where magic has longbeen forgotten. Her people fear everything outside their borders, including the burning sun that rises above the surface.

 

Melerina and her best friend, Tahika, encounter three evil spirits from a forgotten time and are brought to a new land far away from their home. They discover that everything they used to believe in is a lie. Melerina is indecisive by nature and would prefer to run and hide from the evil around her, but she has to find her courage to face an army of soulless men, the loss of her loved ones, and the burning sun that threatens to kill her.

 

Everything that is, and everything that once was, leads back to the dark magic that changed the world. Melerina has no idea how important the magic hidden inside her is if the good has to defeat the evil. If she should fail, her people are doomed to lose their souls for eternity and become slaves of the dark creatures that are trying to take over both the underwater world and the world of the burning sun

 

Soulwanderer is a spellbinding story about friendship, lost souls, and love in the middle of a supernatural war.

Release date: August 20, 2021

Sample

Preface

We are called soulwanderers. We belong to someone in the human world. Or more precisely; they belong to us. We can live without them, but they can’t live without us.”

If our time had come, I wouldn’t make this my last move in this fight. I didn’t care how long I’d have to wait in the Underworld for my revenge. Dead people had an eternity of nothingness. I would haunt whomever was strong enough to gather a new army and once again challenge the Undying, and I wouldn’t leave them be until they had killed these demons. I knew I wouldn’t rest in peace until my world was freed from the dark powers. That was my goal. Death wouldn’t stop me from achieving it. It would only delay me, but I would never stop fighting the Undying. I was born to fight them. It was the purpose of my life. No, not my life, my whole existence. Even after I died, I would still exist at some point, and it would still be my purpose…
 

…I didn’t get ready with the other warriors as the full moon slowly rose as the only light in the darkness around us. I had my weapons and armor brought up to my room in the tower. I needed some time alone to feel mentally prepared and ready for the battle. I put on the golden fish scale armor and studied my marble sword. I liked my knife better, but I couldn’t do much fighting with it. Anyway, I put on my belt so I could carry the knife with me. I didn’t like leaving it behind, either. I sensed something moving on my table. The tarot cards were calling for me; they had something to tell me. I realized I hadn’t been using them for quite a while as I picked up the first card in the stack.
Three of Cups. Friendship.

“Have you missed me?” I heard a familiar voice behind me asking.

“Tahika…” I turned around.

There she was – or her ghost, at least. It meant that blood would be spilled tonight, but that didn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

 

Chapter 1 – Curiosity

Life didn’t have to be complicated. It used to be very simple when my world was small and isolated. I couldn’t say if it was a happy life or not. Happiness wasn’t something you expected from life, but it wasn’t unhappy, either. Routine was the keyword that described every little aspect of our world. We didn’t know who decided for us to live this way or why our world was constructed like this. No one ever questioned anything – except for me.

The biggest question I had in life was not who we were but why we existed. Where did we come from? Why did things work the way they did? I knew who we were; we were humans. That was an easy one. But still, there were many things in my life that seemed wrong – like some pieces of my puzzle were missing. We never dared to cross the borders of our land. But why? What was hiding out there? It could only be something magnificent – something that could tell us more about our history. All we knew was that we were alive, the water we lived in was the key to life, and every day we would need to work hard for a better future – or any future at all. Every day just repeated itself; nothing new ever happened. I was bored. I wanted more. I always wanted more. As it turned out, I should get way more than I ever asked for – maybe even too much.

I watched my mother brush my little sister’s dark hair. Asina always looked much younger when she was sitting on my mother’s lap, holding one arm around my mother’s neck and the other one resting on her chest. Their two bodies almost looked like one because their skin colors melted together as a big, green ball of love. I looked down at my fingers. They seemed too pale compared to my mother’s dark green shades and her long hair that was even darker. I looked down at my bare feet. They looked even paler than my fingers. I had always been standing out among my own. My skin and hair looked as if all the water around us had mixed with my colors and made them look thinner and less powerful. My mother said it was caused by allergies. My father had had the same kind of disease, she said. However, I couldn’t remember much about my father so I didn’t have any memories to compare with. I was very young when he disappeared. It wasn’t unusual that people got lost in the sea. It happened more often than we’d like to think about. The usual explanation was unfortunate encounters with sharks or other predators, though the cause was never actually determined as people disappeared without a trace. Maybe they just ran off to explore the world. I liked to imagine my pale father sitting in a crystal castle somewhere, eating the rarest fish of a forgotten ocean.

I looked at my little sister as she smiled and touched my mother’s face. She was still just a child, but I had recently noticed how she was beginning to have an opinion of her own. She was growing up. I wondered if she would remember her years as a child when she got older. I then looked at my sharp knife as I was writing on our thin blocks made of stone cut into thin sheets. It was quite interesting how some types of stone could be so soft that I could cut the words into it without using much force. I found a lot of things extraordinary about our little underwater world. We didn’t have to swim unless we wanted to get closer to the surface, but people wouldn’t dare to get close to the burning sun above us. Thanks to gravity, we could easily stay at the bottom of the ocean and freely walk around the streets in our land. Of course, swimming was necessary if we wanted to catch fish, but we would still try to stay as close to the ground as possible – far away from the sun. Gravity made swimming a demanding task, and you had to be strong to go hunting for fish. The fish didn’t seem to be affected by gravity in the same way as we were since they could freely swim around the ocean.

We had also adapted quite well; the way we used seaweed to capture the light from the burning sun above the water and then used the seaweed as lights, or the way we made use of all the resources like fish leather and scales, stone, wood, and shells around us to make clothes and build houses, furniture, and wagons for transportation. I found our small village impressive considering that we weren’t rich. My people had always put an honor in decorating the small houses with carvings and spires, but you could also see how old and worn down most of the designs were. Reconstruction of your house cost a lot of money, and most people could rarely afford it. Only a minor part of the people in my land was rich enough to hire construction workers and crafters to rebuild their houses. They all lived in the same area to the east which was also home to the finest markets, museums, and schools in my land. The rest of my land, on the other hand, was struggling to provide everyone with food, clothing, shelter, and schooling. The difference between the rich east-area and the rest of my land was like day and night.

Considering the everyday battles my people had to fight, I found it interesting how we had created this culture with such a great passion for art. I would like to know where it all originated, but no one knew anything about our history. My mother could remember her grandparents, but they had lived the same way as we did. It was as if the first people were randomly placed into this small village and told what to do and how to live, and these rules were all that had been passed down through who knows how many generations.

My mother always said that I was thinking too much, and I should just be happy about our little world here. She said I should not think about the sun that was shining above our heads. It was beyond our reach and beyond our world, and it was dangerous. There would be no oxygen for us to breathe in up there. Stories told us that the sun was so hot that everything outside our world would be burning. It was only the water that kept us alive.

“Melerina,” my mother’s calm voice interrupted my daydreaming.

“You will be late again. Dr. Fermo has already complained several times over the past weeks. You’re almost full-grown now, and I need all the help I can get so we can have a decent life,” my mother continued, and her voice was stricter this time.

I was thinking about how right she was as I looked around our living room. Our shiny pearl table was completely worn down by age, and the spires on the matching marble chairs had broken off long ago. Marble was a very common material in my land; there were huge marble caves within our borders where the supply of this beautiful material was infinite. Wood wasn’t uncommon, either. The ocean contained many underwater forests, and some of these were also placed within our borders. Families would often make day trips to these. The children would play in the trees, and the parents would bring home the wood or plants they needed.

It was easy to see that our home wasn’t new at all. At least our clothes looked decent. My mother always worked hard to keep me and my sister clean and neat so she neglected the looks of our home. That was the only purpose we had in this life: surviving. No one ever questioned our odds.

I left the house with my small knives in my leather bag. My feet touched the rough edges of the rainbow-colored stones covering the narrow streets that ran along all the spired corals on the stone buildings. Just around the corner, I saw a well-known face.

“Tahika,” I gave my best and only friend a hug.

“Rina, you’re late again,” she complained.

It was only my mother who called me by my given name. I had known Tahika for most of my life. She had been a nervous kid as well as she was now an anxious young woman. Her anxiety had made her stutter when she was younger, and my given name had been difficult for her to pronounce. Therefore, she gave me a short nickname, and it didn’t take long before everyone in school would call me Rina as they had called me ever since.

“I know. My mother gave me the usual you-need-to-learn-something-so-you-can help the family-talk.”

I laughed at the way I tried to imitate my mother’s calm but strict voice.

“Dr. Fermo won’t be happy,” Tahika said.

“He’s never happy,” I tried to smile at her.

But Tahika did not see the fun in it. She was scared to death by Dr. Fermo. He was tall, bald, and slightly fat, and his eyes were so dark that you could barely see any green color in them. You could barely see any green in my eyes, either, but that was just because they were so light that they were almost transparent – just like the rest of me. When Dr. Fermo and I were standing next to each other, we looked like day and night. His strange, dark appearance made him one of the least popular teachers in our land. People were frightened of this mysterious man, and that’s the only reason why my mother and Tahika’s family could afford to send us to school; Dr. Fermo’s school was affordable since most people were too scared to learn from him. The low price attracted the students who couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. He was a skilled teacher, though, and Tahika and I would hopefully end up with some art and crafting skills that could secure us a place in the society in the future. Stone art was valued quite highly when it came to designing new buildings. Rich people would hire crafters to design and craft their precious artworks. People from the middle class or below couldn’t afford to pay for such luxurious services as the crafters provided. Most people traded goods or services with each other as they didn’t have any of the small, green gems we used as a currency in my land. Only rich people would own a significant amount of gems. Unfortunately, there were too many poor crafters and too few rich people to hire them, so the rich people would set the price of the work very low with the result that the crafters stayed poor. I had never had many dreams of my own apart from my daydreaming about the world outside. My future was already set, and it would be a hard and boring emptiness.

Dr. Fermo’s house was isolated from the other houses, and you had to pass through a long, dark alley to get to the entrance. The house was brown and looked like a box because of the flat roof with no spires. It was quite peculiar that an art school looked so demotivating and uninspiring. Apart from that, this depressing look of the house was also outstanding in our colorful land. Many people said that his house was haunted and he knew how to tame the ghosts, but my mother said it was just stories made up by ignorant people. I could see Tahika shaking a bit when she saw the house, but she always did that. The other students were already sitting patiently at the grey stone desks. Their green fingers were holding the small knives and cutting out flowers in the colored stones on their desks. Dr. Fermo was demonstrating something at his desk and only lifted one green eyebrow as we quietly walked in and sat down. You could never tell what kind of mood he was in. His face looked numb, and his voice was always slow and deep. He didn’t even look at us when we sat down at our tables, and we tried not to make too much noise when finding our small knives in our bags. Dr. Fermo suddenly looked up, his gaze froze at me for a second, and I instantly felt cold as ice.

“Rina, since you were late, would you mind helping me prepare the knives?” he asked in his distant voice.

Why did he ask me? He used to have an assistant who did that, and that assistant was his mother. She always seemed as a much happier and more easy going person than him. What had happened to her? I looked around at my classmates. I could see in their faces that they were thinking the same thing, but no one dared asking.

“Yes, sir,” I said quietly while I got up from my chair.

I carefully sharpened the knives using the stone blocks on Dr. Fermo’s table. At the same time, I wondered about his mother. I looked at Tahika. Her small eyes looked both scared and curious at the same time.
 

“Where do you think his mother is?” Tahika asked two hours later when we walked through the dark alley to get to the main road that would lead us home.

“Maybe she’s just sick,” I said and shook my head.

“She’s never been sick before, and we’ve been going to Dr. Fermo’s school for many full moons now…” Tahika looked worried as she kept talking about what could have happened to the old Mrs. Fermo, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.

In my world, we counted the years in moons – each year consisting of several full moons. Even though we used terms like days and weeks when referring to time, I didn’t learn what a year was until way later.

“Do you think she could be dead?” Tahika said and caught my attention again.

“Don’t you think he would have said so if she had died?” I asked her.

“What if he killed her… He has always been a very unpredictable type of person.”

“Come on, just because he is not easy to get through to, it doesn’t mean he’s a murderer. We are talking about his own mother here,” I rolled my eyes.

It was typical Tahika. She always anticipated the worst and was suspicious of everything. She called it survival instinct, but I would just call it fear.

“I know that, but this house gives me the creeps. It’s like some dark spell is lying upon it. I can feel it every time we pass by within a radius of 2 miles. I know you don’t believe in magic, but my grandmother was a psychic, and there’s more to this world than you think…”

Now Tahika was getting started again. No wonder why she was my only friend. No one ever wanted to play with the girl with the transparent skin or with the girl who believed she could see ghosts. We really had no other choice than to stick together.

“So what do you want us to do? To break into the house in the middle of the night and check if his mother’s body is hidden in the closet?”

I laughed as I said it. There was no way I was ever going to break into that creepy, old house. Tahika would also be too scared to do it anyway. But as I looked back at Dr. Fermo’s home that was beginning to look blurry in the dark water of the coming night, I could feel that I would be too scared, too. I might have been adventurous, but I had never been brave enough to do anything about it. I sighed loudly and continued walking home with Tahika at my heels.

At night, I was sitting in my room, reading in my secret books. They were heavy since the sheets were made of the same thin blocks of stone that I used whenever I should write something down. My mother could never find out that I was hiding books in a hole under the flat, grey wood in my floor. I had found them in Dr. Fermo’s library in a small box behind an old curtain. Dr. Fermo had said that we could bring home any book we wanted because the more you know about the world, the easier it would be to construct it in stone. But Dr. Fermo’s books said almost nothing about our world. They only described beautiful shapes, structures of our houses, and stone materials. When he talked about the world, I didn’t think he meant this kind of world that I was reading about in the secret books. I didn’t know who had left the books there, but it was quite carelessly if they thought that no one would look in the box. These books were definitely not meant to be found in the library. The stories in the books seemed like fairytales about a whole different world where the sun brought light, joy, and life to people. Yet the books claimed that the stories where based on experiences from the real world. But what real world could that be? It was even more puzzling that these books were hundreds of years old. It said nothing about a world hiding from the sun in the books; they never mentioned my world. This wasn’t the history of my people. Whatever this world had been like, it probably didn’t exist anymore as the history in the books suddenly stopped as if no one had lived to tell the tale. I liked lying in my bed and dreaming about what this majestic world would have been like. I knew I probably never would have the courage to search for this place but I liked to fantasize about it. Suddenly, it knocked on my window, and I woke up from my daydreaming. When I peeked out the window, I could see Tahika’s small eyes looking right back at me.

“What are you doing here?” I whispered as I opened the window.

“What are you doing since you’re not sleeping?” she whispered back in a challenging voice.

“Nothing,” I said quickly as I yanked my blanket with my foot until it covered the old books.

Tahika didn’t know about the treasure I had found, and I wasn’t going to tell her because then she would begin talking about her strange beliefs in magic again.

“I have a bad feeling. I can’t sleep. We need to go back to Dr. Fermo’s house tonight,” she said in a scared voice and had a distant look in her eyes.

What had gotten into her?

“Well, it won’t make you sleep any better if we go there, and besides, I can’t leave the house. What if my mother finds out? You should go home, too. It’s late, and you shouldn’t walk around in the darkness on your own!” I tried to sound reasonable though Tahika wouldn’t care.

She would keep obsessing about her ideas until I gave in. I knew her way too well. It was unusual, though. She would usually obsess about things she found dangerous and try to avoid them. This time, she was obsessing because she wanted to do something risky for once.

I was known for wandering off and for sneaking out at night. That was as far as my courage would take me, though. I often wanted to cross the border, and I had sometimes gone as far as just a few meters from it, staring at the narrow road leading from my land into the emptiness. It looked harmless and not much different from my side of the line separating my land from the unknown. But something inside of me had always told me to stop walking any further, not to take another step.

Everyone in our land knew that I often wandered off. I was that weird girl with the pale, greenish color who would always be drawn to small and silly adventures or get lost while daydreaming and not pay attention to where she was going. Tahika knew that, too, and though I refused to sneak out, she knew perfectly well that I would end up doing it anyway. Still, it was a bad idea. It hadn’t been long since my mother had caught me wandering off at night, and she had been furious for weeks. I had no idea why I had to go my own way from time to time. It was like an instinct telling me that there was something out there that I had to see. Something was calling me with a silent voice. But tonight, I felt exceptionally alert. The same instinct, which told me not to cross the border, was now telling me that I should stay at home, but that just seemed ridiculous. There was nothing dangerous or frightening out there in the night.

“I can’t go home until I know what’s going on. Something inside me tells me that I need to go back. Maybe it’s my grandmother trying to communicate with me from the other side… I won’t leave your window until you go with me!” Tahika insisted.

“Seriously, Tahika, I’ve soon had enough of your talk about your dead grandmother. Even if she could reach out to you, you’re not a psychic, so you wouldn’t be able to hear her anyway. But to give you some peace of mind, and to have you leave my window, I will go with you. But only for 10 minutes, and then we are going straight home!” I sighed.

Tahika flashed me a big smile. She knew I wasn’t angry even though I tried to sound annoyed. It obviously meant a lot to her that we went back, and I was also quite curious myself to see if we could find out what happened to old Mrs. Fermo. The streets were quiet and all the glowing seaweed, which people usually hung on their houses during the day, were brought indoors for the night. It was like walking in blindness. I could hear Tahika trying to control her breathing to make it as quiet as possible. I smiled to myself; she really did expect someone to sneak up on us and attack. We got closer to Dr. Fermo’s house, and now we only had to pass through the creepy, narrow alley leading to his home.

“You go first,” Tahika said and gave me a little push.

Her reaction didn’t surprise me at all; Tahika was the one who wanted to do this, but still, she was too scared. We walked carefully on our tiptoes through the alley. I held my breath all the way and got a sudden feeling of relief when we reached Dr. Fermo’s house. There was still light in the window. That was strange because it was already late at night. Maybe Dr. Fermo was the type of person who stayed up until late. What were we even making a fuss about? We snuck over to the window of Dr. Fermo’s living room. We had never been allowed to enter any part of Dr. Fermo’s private estate, and what we saw through the window was breathtaking. The walls were covered in long, black patterns carved directly into the stone walls. The patterns looked like arms that were reaching out to grab you. The furniture was red like blood with silver engravings. On a bed at the end of the room, we could see someone sleeping, but this mysterious person was sleeping with the face against the wall so we couldn’t tell who it was.

“Do you think it’s Dr. Fermo?” Tahika asked.

“I don’t know. It could be Mrs. Fermo. I can’t see it,” I replied.

Suddenly, we heard footsteps behind us. I felt the panic spreading from my fingertips to every part of my body and kept as close to the walls of the house as possible, trying to hide in the shadows. Tahika did the same and she had that strange, distant look in her eyes again. I tried to wave my hand in front of her face, but she wasn’t responding. I had no time to try and wake her up. Our hiding place was no use, and we were exposed in the middle of the street with no place to run.

The heavy footsteps stopped in front of us.

 

Chapter 2 – Shadows

I couldn’t breathe normally. I had closed my eyes and refused to open them. I didn’t want to see who was in front of me, but I could feel the hot stream from his breath on my face. I knew I was trapped as I clung to the wall of the house in hopes of finding some sort of protection that did not exist. It seemed like forever before the stranger finally said something and revealed his identity.

“What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” he said angrily.

I could recognize the voice; it was only Dr. Fermo. I started breathing again and opened my eyes as my heart rate lowered. Though I had never heard Dr. Fermo angry before, I was relieved that the breath I felt on my face belonged to him. He was always calm and didn’t express his feelings. Our presence here seemed like it had surprised him as he was suddenly raising his voice.

“We just…we…,” Tahika was stuttering.

“We were just worried about Mrs. Fermo,” I said quickly.

Dr. Fermo took a step back, and I could no longer feel his body heat. I instantly relaxed a bit and let go of some of the tension in my body. Tahika was looking like a frozen statue by my side.

“Why were you worried about her?” he asked, not less angry.

“We didn’t see her in class today…” Tahika mumbled.

“Is she not allowed to take a day off? How old are you girls? You’re almost fully grown now. You should be smarter than this. I should discuss this matter with your parents. Sneaking out in the middle of the night and spying on people, disturbing their privacy! Now go, and I’ll consider what will be a suitable punishment for you! Hurry back, though, it’s not safe this late at night.”

Dr. Fermo had raised his voice to a loud thunder. We had never heard him yell at anyone before, not ever. I quickly stepped away from the cold wall I had been clinging to and dragged Tahika along with me. We ran as fast as we could, away from the house and through the alley. I could only think of what my mother would say if she found out about this. Suddenly, I noticed that I was no longer holding Tahika’s hand. I looked back, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. It was too dark. Could she have passed me without me noticing it? It wasn’t possible as I was much taller than her; my legs were much longer, and I was a faster runner. I had to go back and find her. I would never leave her behind. She was so tiny, scared, and fragile like a beautiful flower. I didn’t hesitate for a second before turning around and running back toward Dr. Fermo’s house. I had never imagined this action would change my whole world.

When I got to the alley, everything suddenly seemed blurry and I felt dizzy. I needed to sit down for a little bit, and before I knew it, I had forgotten why I was there and whom I was looking for. I leaned against a wall and fell to the dark ground in the alley. I felt something in my hand, but I was too sleepy to pay attention to it.