A/N: Hey all, sorry about how long this took to put up, The first week of classes combined with my new job threw me into a loop. Good news is that I spent a lot of my time in those boring syllabus classes planning the story so I should be able to release quite a few chapters quickly.

- Chit

Chapter Five - Death

For the vast majority of spirits, death isn’t actually death. It’s just an exhaustion of energy; the soul lingers on and is slowly pulled towards a nexus of the elements where it is replenished. The only way to actually kill a spirit is to destroy his/her soul. For the vast majority of spirits…

One second I was burning up in a fire of glory; my body destroying itself. The next, I was floating above the fire in my soul form…

‘WHAT?!?!?!?!?!’

My soul felt… different, it’d changed. I’m sure you shamans out there who’ve traveled the spirit realm in their souls understand what happened. For those who haven’t, the spirit form and the soul form are linked. Before, I was just a big blob of purple… a massive slime you might say. But now, my soul form was changed forever, I was now a mutant-wolf.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement. The greatest change of all was that I was actually able to not just see using my soul sense, but also through my eye’s. I could even move my soul by walking with my legs! I couldn’t touch the actual ground, but I could sense the very essences and walk on top of those. I was afraid that I’d go back to the elemental sea for thousands of years without even having a body when I died! I was so excited, I ran around in circles chasing my tail and yelping.

That was when it happened, I began to feel the tugging. The parts of my soul where the memories I had long forgotten, the memories of my past lives hid, started to scream at me… Somehow, I just knew that that tugging would only bring me back to the Elemental Sea for good this time.

I fought. I used everything I could think of, even using the small amount of essence I managed to gather in my soul form, flinging it in the direction of the suction.

Nothing worked. The suction just kept going, and my soul was sucked into the air and on a journey. The last I saw of the place I died was the fire-lady crying as she cradled my ashes while the mutant-wolf howled in anger.

Dimly, I could could hear the mutant-wolf screaming as I was sucked further and further away. “You will pay for killing our son!”

‘Huh?’

Shit! No!!! I started to fight again; I really didn’t want to leave my parents now that I knew I had a family.

Of course, it didn’t matter. I only managed to exhaust the small amount of essence I had remaining to no avail.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For a long time, I just lay with my head on my paws, staring in the direction of where I died. The howls of my parents had long since died away, and my journey still continued. Months passed in the spirit plane as my soul was pulled inextricably towards the elemental sea.

My slow journey continued on. The never-ending pull only giving me glimpses of empire after empire. If I was to say what my greatest regret of my time in the spirit plane was; it would be that I died before I had the opportunity to explore the empires. instead, I was forced to observe from afar as I was pulled through the main territories of every Spirit Emperor and Empress. Apparently, I had died not far from the main gates of the Earth Empire’s capital and my parents were extremely upset at them, because by the time I flew over it, it was aflame and my mother was screaming at some massive giant about killing her son. I remember thinking, ‘Ouch!’ and ‘Way to go Mom!’ as I watched her bathe the whole city in flames while fighting the giant.

All in all, it took a year in the spirit plane, judging by the position of the sun, before I finally reached my destination. I travelled through the great city in the skies, the dungeons of hell, the fiery chaos of the plains of the phoenix, the nomadic wind currents, before I finally came back to where I was born. At the top of a massive mountain, a purple cloud of energy crackling with azure lightning. Everywhere the lightning struck the ground, a massive plume of smoke would erupt and a terrible white fire would burn. To me, it was the most wondrous sight I’d ever seen as I floated through the cloud. Inside the cloud was a massive fortress city on top of the highest peak of the mountain range. In my heart, I knew that was where I was born and I wanted nothing more than to stop, to stay there.

The density of Lightning Essence was overwhelming, my previously drained soul drew deeply from that massive well, so deeply that currents of essence were actually created in the sky. The melancholy and depression that’d been my constant companions for months lifted as I felt alive again. Of course, that didn’t stop the pulling no matter what I tried; it was a futile effort as I always knew it would be and I soon gave it up. Instead, I played with my constant companion for millennia; Lightning Essence.

It wasn’t until after I had passed through the kingdoms of every major element that I felt a change in the suction. No longer was it just endlessly sucking me in a single direction, now I was going up at a steep angle leaving the spirit plane behind.

Thankfully, at this point the suction sped up going nearly ten times as fast. The journey upwards towards the limits of the sky was much longer than the one that had previously taken me a year to complete. I think I would’ve gone into hibernation and lost all of my memories again if it hadn’t sped up. Of course, now I had no way to tell time again as I was once again without a sun, the suction pulling me upwards into nothingness it seemed like for centuries. This time, I was much smarter. I was able to think far more clearly in my soul form. Maybe because I had a brain in this form unlike when I was a blob?

I spent my time on the journey trying to understand what had happened during my time in the spirit plane. I had starved. The miserable feeling of a distended gut; weak, wobbly legs; my stomach eating itself. A mantra was formed in my brain during that journey.

‘Never Again! Never Again! Never Again!’

For a long time, that was all I thought as the memories paraded through my soul. For most, it would’ve ended like that. But, without any external stimuli other than the endless sucking, the only thing I could do was play with the little essence my soul had absorbed and replay those few memories over and over again. Finally, I realized that just saying never again to myself wasn’t enough. I started an internal dialogue, my soul protecting itself from the insanity caused from sensory deprivation and loneliness by doing an inherently insane act…

I needed someone to talk to, someone to bounce ideas off of. So, I took the parts of my soul that had affinities with elements other than lightning and split them from my main body. The main body, the mutant-wolf stared at the other bodies, a miniature bird of flame, a wind-sprite, and slimes of light, darkness, and water. Of course, I was really all of these things at once, but it helped. It was a coping mechanism.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some time later ....

“Why did we starve?” Asked the miniature bird.

“Because there wasn’t enough Lightning Essence to eat.” The mutant-wolf responded

“No, it was because we couldn’t absorb enough wind!” responded the wind sprite as it happily played, bouncing on the various slimes.

The slimes made gurgling sounds that I interpreted as, “We wanted to eat too!”

Then the bird responded, “We need to absorb other elemental essences as easily as lightning if we are to survive in that world. Never Again!”

To which we all responded, “Never Again!” While the slimes gurgled in time with us.

“But why can we absorb lightning so easily?” Asked the mutant-wolf

The answer may seem obvious to everyone now, even to me, but I wasn’t tracking so well at the time. I rehashed the argument with myself over and over again, trying to find an answer. It wasn’t until much later, as we were nearing the Elemental Sea that the bird of flame thought outloud. “It has to be because of how long we spent on the Elemental Sea of Lightning. We spent millennia there, playing with lightning essence, learning about it, infusing it into our very soul. Perhaps, we should visit the other Sea’s.”

“But how? I can feel it, we are nearing the Lightning Sea. How are we supposed to travel to another sea?” Asked the mutant-wolf.

No one had an answer to that, but we were running out of time. The elemental sea was approaching and the various pieces of my soul that’d split off had to rejoin me because they couldn’t survive on the Lightning Sea by themselves. First, the slimes hopped over, oozing into my body. Followed by the sprite, who flew around my head dizzyingly a few times before laughing happily and disintegrating into essence in my mouth. Finally, the flaming bird flew slowly around my head and rested itself on my shoulders. It was looking in a certain direction, as if listening carefully. Just before our soul were completely reunited it spoke into my ear. “Go that way. I can feel it; the Sea of Fire.”