Chapter 8: The Unscheduled Reaping

Chapter 8: The Unscheduled Reaping

The Soul Ledger’s timer for Elias Vance blinked a final, impartial zero. His sickly purple life-thread went slack. Morrigan stood in the shadows of the cultist’s apartment, her own trauma a roaring fire in her chest. This wasn't a job. This was an execution she was contractually obligated to attend.

Ignoring the memory of Thanatos’s cold instructions, she stepped forward. The two remaining cultists didn't see her, their attention fixed on the final breath leaving their companion's body. Morrigan raised her scythe, the obsidian blade humming with a malevolent energy that felt disturbingly like her own. She swung, not with the gentle precision she’d used for Eleanor, nor the desperate fury she’d unleashed on Marco. This was a cold, sharp, and deeply personal act.

SNAP.

The tainted thread severed. As Elias’s phantom began to coalesce, a form twisted with fanaticism, Morrigan didn't wait for it to speak. She reached out with her will, not her hand, and seized the last vestiges of his dying thoughts. It was a violation, a psychic mugging, but she didn't care. She needed to know.

An image flooded her mind: stained-glass windows, shattered and boarded. A collapsed steeple silhouetted against a bruised twilight sky. The old, abandoned St. Giles Cathedral, a place known for ghost stories and teenage dares. And on the altar, a new face—a young man with terrified eyes.

The spirit of Elias Vance was ripped away into the cosmic flow before it could even register its own damnation. The energy that lashed out and struck Morrigan was vile, a spiritual poison of obsession and servitude. It felt like swallowing rancid oil, but she absorbed it, forcing it down, converting the filth into fuel for the fire now consuming her. She had a location. She had a ticking clock.

Your function is to witness the conclusion, not to alter the narrative. Thanatos’s voice was a chilling whisper of reason in her mind. The threads are woven. You are merely the shears at the end.

"My thread was woven too," she hissed, her spectral form already dissolving, pushing through the material world towards St. Giles. "And they used a goddamn butcher's knife."

The cathedral was a skeleton of its former glory. As she phased through its stone walls, the scene that greeted her was a sickeningly perfect echo of her own murder. The air was cold, heavy with the stench of incense and something metallic and sharp. Six cultists, including the two from the apartment, formed a circle around a wide, flat slab of granite that had replaced the original altar.

And lying on the altar, bound with thick leather straps, was a young man. He couldn't have been more than nineteen. His face was pale with terror, but beneath the fear was a spark of defiance in his eyes that Morrigan recognized with a gut-wrenching lurch. It was the same impotent rage she had felt. He wasn't a willing sacrifice; he was a victim, snatched from the edges of society, another soul nobody would miss.

His life-thread was a healthy, vibrant silver, pulsing with youthful energy. It wasn't frayed or fading. According to the laws of the universe, according to her Ledger, this man had decades left to live.

The High Priest, a tall, imposing figure whose face was hidden by a deep hood, raised a cruel, curved dagger—a twin to the one that had ended her own life. He began to chant, the words a guttural assault on the fabric of reality. The other cultists joined in, their voices weaving a cage of dark energy around the altar.

Interference is the cardinal sin, apprentice. The consequences are absolute. Thanatos’s warning was no longer a whisper; it was a roar in her consciousness, a wall of cosmic law she was about to smash through. Let this happen. It is not your concern.

Morrigan looked at the young man on the altar. She saw his terror, his silent plea to a world that couldn't see or hear him. She saw her own reflection in his hopeless struggle. She remembered the cold stone against her back, the searing pain, the final, terrifying darkness. Her own life had been stolen, and she had been powerless to stop it.

But she wasn't powerless now.

"Not my concern?" she whispered, the words smoking with a power that was part reaper, part demon. "I'm making it my concern."

In that instant, she made her choice. The debate was over. The rules were broken. She was no longer an apprentice Reaper following a cosmic contract. She was the monster that haunted the people who create ghosts.

She let go of the control she’d been taught to maintain. She opened the floodgates to the chaotic, demonic energy branded on her soul, the power the cult themselves had given her. The grimy, aggressive residue from Marco Santoro’s soul surged, merging with it, sharpening it into a weapon.

The obsidian scythe in her hand transformed. It was no longer a sleek, clean tool. Jagged, shadow-wreathed thorns erupted along its haft. The blade elongated, the curve deepening into a wicked, predatory crescent. A cloak of pure, light-absorbing shadow materialized around her, not ethereal and ghostly, but solid and terrifying.

One of the cultists faltered in his chant, his head snapping up as the temperature in the cathedral plummeted. "What was that? Did you feel—"

He never finished the sentence.

Morrigan exploded from the shadows. She moved with a speed that was not just reaper-fast; it was a violent, vengeful blur. She was no longer intangible. She was terrifyingly solid. The first cultist only had time for his eyes to widen in shock as the point of her scythe, now a spear of solidified night, punched straight through his chest. He was dead before his body hit the floor.

Panic shattered the ritual. The chanting devolved into screams.

"It's here! The vessel!" the woman with the blank eyes shrieked, a mad glee mixing with her terror. "The Master's power has returned to us!"

"I'm not a vessel," Morrigan’s voice echoed through the cavernous space, low and chilling. "I'm the receipt."

She spun, the massive blade of her scythe a black crescent of death. It scythed through the air, catching two more cultists in its arc. It wasn’t a clean severing of souls; it was a brutal, physical reaping of flesh and bone. Blood sprayed across the stone floor, a stark, wet crimson against the gray.

The High Priest recoiled, holding the ritual dagger up as if to ward her off. "Demon! You dare defy the will of the Master who marked you?"

"He marked me," Morrigan snarled, stalking forward, her silver eyes glowing with cold fire in the gloom. "Big mistake."

She didn't give him a chance to rally. She lunged, the scythe a blur. He parried with the enchanted dagger, and the clash of reaper obsidian and demonic steel sent a shockwave of screaming energy through the cathedral. The remaining stained-glass windows shattered, imploding into a shower of colorful shards.

The dagger was powerful, but she was fury incarnate. She put the raw, untamed power of her new existence into her next blow. The scythe shattered the ritual dagger, the shards of metal dissolving into black smoke. Before the High Priest could even scream, the butt of the scythe slammed into his chest, cracking ribs and sending him flying backward into a stone pillar.

She was on him in an instant, the point of her scythe pressed against his throat. He stared up at her, his hood falling back to reveal a face contorted by disbelief and terror.

"This is not how it was foretold," he choked out.

"Then your prophet was an idiot," Morrigan said, her voice utterly devoid of emotion. She ended it.

Silence.

The sudden, absolute quiet was more deafening than the screams had been. The dark energy of the ritual dissipated, leaving only the smell of blood and snuffed-out candles. Four cultists lay dead. The High Priest was a crumpled heap against the pillar. The two who had been in the apartment had fled in the chaos.

Morrigan stood panting in the center of the carnage, her shadowy cloak receding, the scythe shrinking back to its simple, sleek form. The adrenaline of her rage began to fade, replaced by the heavy, cold certainty of what she had just done.

She had not reaped. She had murdered. She had intervened. She had broken the single most important rule of her existence.

Her gaze fell upon the altar. The young man was staring at her, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and awe. He was safe. She had prevented history from repeating itself.

But as she stood there, amidst the bodies of mortals whose time had not been on any ledger, she felt a profound and terrifying shift in the universe. She had torn a hole in the great tapestry. And she knew, with a certainty that chilled her more than any Hollow, that the weaver himself was coming to see what she had done.