It was Friday late afternoon by the time I got back to my apartment. I sat down in front of my computer to game to take my mind off things, but realized I didn’t want to play any – certainly none that involved combat and death.
I was still shocked by my own elimination of over a hundred souls.
Instead I reached over and grabbed a pad of paper from my desk. If I’m going to have such crazy powerful abilities, I reasoned, then I had best start understanding them better, and track what I learned. I spent the next few hours trying to recall in detail all the different ways I had used my abilities, to understand what it meant.
So, what did I now know I could do with these powers?
Well, I couldn’t die – I mean my body could, but all that did was eject my astral form, my soul, out of my body. And unlike others, my soul didn’t fall apart when free of a host. I wrote that down – that I was effectively immortal.
And once in my astral form, my soul was both invisible and intangible – meaning that the physical world could not affect me and vice versa. Instead, I simply passed right through solid objects. I wrote that down too. I also noted that in my astral form my motion was under my full control, and I could hover, maneuver, or fly at any speed – even faster than light. I could even skip the space in between and astrally teleport directly to any location I could picture or that I had an image for.
I noted, too, that I could assume astral form any time I liked – though doing so invariably killed my body.
Another power I had was astral sight – the ability to see souls, whether someone else’s or my own. When I saw souls they appeared as a dim, silver duplicate of that person’s own body. Using this ability, I had witnessed what happened when someone dies – their soul left their dead body and immediately fell apart.
I had been thinking of it as a disintegration, but I realized now that was not accurate. Disintegration implied a lack of cohesion, but what I saw was more like a lack of coherence, as if the elements of the soul lost the unifying factor when not in a corporeal host – when outside of a body, in other words. So instead of disintegration, what I really had witnessed was better described as decoherence.
Either way, the fragility of the soul and the fact that all souls apart from my empowered one fall apart almost instantly when separated from their bodies, made an undeniable case for the non-existence of an afterlife.
Speaking of souls outside of bodies, I also had the ability to eject people’s souls from their bodies just by willing it, immediately killing their body in the process.
I could also stabilize their free soul to prevent it from decohering – but if I did not, it was curtains for them. And if I did stabilize their soul, I could hear them speak, whether I was in astral form myself or back inside my body. In fact, all of my powers so far worked equally well regardless of whether I was in my body or in astral form.
I stopped scribbling to ponder anything I may have left out, then started writing again.
Upon stabilizing a soul, I could then control it’s movement and position the same way I moved my own. And also just like with my own soul, I could take any free soul and enflesh it with a new body duplicating the owner’s old one. When I did that, the corpse of the old one simultaneously vanished.
Furthermore, my experience with Glory showed me that empowered people like me and her seemed not to be able to apply our abilities directly to each other – meaning that if I were to come into conflict with another person with powers, it would probably be unlikely I could pluck their soul or in any way affect them. Happily, the reverse also seemed to be true – if one of them had a mind-control power for instance, I didn’t have to worry about it working on me.
The only power that left unwritten on my pad was my ability to kill dozens and dozens of targets simultaneously, without knowing even who or where they were, by specifying some criteria. Somehow I had grown a multitude of shards from my soul that had detached into dark sparrow-like wisps of astral energy, which found the desired targets and killed them, and returned to merge back into my soul.
I put down the pen and pad, frowning and thinking.
I made up my mind and abruptly held out my hand. Looking down I saw my astral hand within my physical one, a dim, textured grey form that I could still see after I shut my eyes. Keeping my eyes closed, I tried to will a single sparrow-form soul-shard to grow from my soul and detach.
Effortlessly it did, and hovered there wisp-like, as if awaiting my command. It sort of made sense it would obey me, having been made from me. I opened my eyes.
“Move over to the window.” I directed, and it did. “Go over to the counter and bring me a spoon.”, I tried next.
It went to the counter and dipped toward the spoon I wanted, but passed right through it. It hovered uncertainly near it. I had another idea.
“Wait one minute and then kill me.” I told it.
It flew back to me and hovered, and about a minute later I was looking down at my dead body from my astral form. “Huh” I thought.
So these sparrow-wisps could probably only do what I could do – which again made sense. I popped back into a new body, vanishing the old one. “Now, return” I told the wisp.
It dove toward my soul, melted into it, and was gone.
I looked at the clock, it was winding towards early evening by this point. One more test, I thought.
Throwing on a light jacket, I left my apartment and the building. I walked into a large field behind my apartment complex. Standing in the center, I took a deep breath, and tried to create as many sparrow-wisp things as I could, as fast as a could.
Mere seconds later, with seemingly no effort on my part, the sky was filled with a countless number of them, from horizon to horizon. Far beyond thousands, there were as many wisps in the sky and air as there were grains of sand on any beach – and yet, I felt utterly undiminished.
Overwhelmed yet again, I recalled them all back into me – taking less than a second – and called it a night. Minutes later, I took my bed and claimed the sweet release of sleep.