Excerpt

Vanth often fell in love with the dead. She read their lives as she sucked their souls out of their useless bodies. Drinking in the memories, preparing them to be passed on into the liquid swirling mass of light that lived in the well of stone, hidden in a courtyard where it was always day, the perpetual time just after the dawn or right before the dusk where the skies are golden. The memories kept the balance between the living and dead.

All life had a price. Sometimes Vanth found other humans, hovering over the dead as she went about her work. On occasion, she found the one who had taken the life. Renegades from the underworld and humans who had turned from life. The ones who had turned from life, Vanth kept an eye on.

Charon often marked them for the shadows, the alternate place of death where the soul became trapped and the body a tool for the darkness ever creeping towards the surface. If they had taken a life, then they were prey for a cause that embodied the denizens of the shadows. Reeking a smiling kind of havoc upon the places where humans tread. Charon was a trickster, always keeping Vanth on her toes, laughing at her frustrations when he foiled one of her collections or killed a random person with the shadow breathers.

‘With life so becomes death, sweet Vanth,’ she would hear him say.