Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium Read online

  Another night, she went to find Kreiger’s killer, The Blind One.

  She found him in the cemetery, weeping from his slit eyes, the weary tears of a man who weeps every night, but knows no cure for them. She watched him for a while, while he wept and ate the dead. Then she left him to his suffering.

  It was cruel, of course, to let him live, when she could have put him out of his misery with a well-placed blow. But why should she dispense mercy, when no one had ever been merciful to her? Besides, it pleased her to know that there were three monsters in Primordium. The Mongroid (whom she’d also gone to view in his excremental kingdom) in the sewers, Venal Anatomica in the charnel houses, she in her father’s mansion. It had a certain neatness.

  Sometimes, when she became lonely, she thought about going out into the desert, and lying down beside Kreiger’s mummified corpse; letting the sand smother her. But something stopped her from doing it. Perhaps she’d have to watch the city of Primordium burn down first; or feel insanity creeping up her spine.

  Until then, she would live out her destiny, in blood and tears and loneliness; in the knowledge that she was named in the prayers of tens of thousands of God-fearing citizens every night, who begged the Lord to keep them and their faces safe from her.

  It was a land of immortality.