Split Ends & Soul Debts

In the Realm of Veridian Spite, accounting was a blood sport.

High Actuary Thaddeus Gilt sat at his desk, which was carved from the single, petrified scapula of a long-extinct leviathan. He was sweating, which was dangerous. In the Spire of the Sunken Rib, bodily fluids were considered contraband if not properly tithed. He dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief that smelled faintly of formaldehyde and went back to the abacus.

The abacus was not made of wood and beads. It was a ribcage, strung with the knuckle-bones of tax evaders.

Click. Clack. Crack.

"It doesn't balance," Thaddeus whispered, the words dying in the dry, recycled air of his office. "It never balances, but this… this is obscene."

He was looking at the Daily Rot Report for the City of Ooze-and-Awe.

The laws of the universe were immutable, written in the very marrow of existence: The Humour-Tax. To create energy, one must destroy matter. To cast a spark, one must burn a calorie. To weave a curse, one must rot an organ. It was a zero-sum game of cosmic misery. When a witch in the lower districts cast a heating charm to warm their soup, the ambient decay in the atmosphere should rise by exactly 0.004%.

Thaddeus ran a finger down the ledger.

Yesterday, at 4:00 PM, a massive surge of telekinetic energy had been registered in the artisan district. It was enough power to crush a steam-locomotive into a paperweight. By the laws of Equivalent Rot, the caster should have instantly liquefied. At the very least, a city block should have withered into grey dust to pay the cost.

But the decay meter read: 0.00%.

"Impossible," he hissed. He reached for his quill. The tip was dull. Without thinking, he muttered a tiny sharpening cantrip.

The universe immediately collected its due. The pinky fingernail on his left hand turned black, curled up like a dead spider, and detached with a wet plip onto the parchment.

Thaddeus didn't even flinch. He flicked the dead nail into a waste bin already filled with hair clumps and molars. The cost of doing business. He dipped the newly sharpened quill into a pot of ink—harvested from squids bred in depression-tanks—and circled the anomaly.

The Singularity.

The door to his office didn't open. It dissolved.

One moment, the heavy oak slab was there; the next, it was a cloud of termites and sawdust, swirling away to reveal the silhouette standing in the hallway.

Thaddeus fell out of his chair. He scrambled to his knees, pressing his face into the cold, bone floor. "Matriarch Oraya. I—I wasn't expecting an audit."

Matriarch Oraya floated into the room. She did not walk; walking was for people who hadn't mastered the art of gravity-suppression. She looked like a grandmother who had been preserved in salt. Her skin was parchment-thin, stretched over a skull that seemed too large for her body. She wore robes woven from spider-silk and silence.

"We do not audit, Thaddeus," she said. Her voice sounded like grinding stones. "We collect. You sent a distress signal via the pneumatic tubes. You marked it 'Catastrophic'."

"I did, Exalted One," Thaddeus stammered, risking a glance upward. Oraya’s eyes were entirely white, cataracts weaponized into a fashion statement. "It is the ledger for Sector 4."

Oraya drifted closer. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. The potted fern in the corner shriveled and died instantly, purely from the proximity of her aura.

"Show me."

Thaddeus held up the ledger with trembling hands. "Here. Look at the energy spike. Class-5 Telekinesis. Controlled. Precise. Violent."

"A heavy tax," Oraya mused. "Did the caster survive?"

"That is the problem, Matriarch. There was no tax."

Oraya stopped. The air in the room grew heavy, pressurized, as if the ceiling were lowering. "Explain."

"The Rot-Meter didn't move," Thaddeus whispered, terrified that speaking the words would make them false. "Someone used enough power to tear a hole in reality, and the universe… the universe comped them. It was free. Pure profit."

Oraya stared at the ledger. A slow, terrible smile stretched across her face, cracking the heavy makeup she wore to hide the necrosis on her cheeks.

"A Full-Source," she breathed. "The myths were true."

"It… it must be a glitch," Thaddeus tried. "Perhaps a sensor malfunction in the sewers? The rats sometimes chew the cables."

Oraya turned to him. She raised one withered hand.

"Thaddeus," she said softly. "Do you know why we rule?"

"Because… because you are the strongest?"

"No. Because we are the richest," she corrected. "We hoard the Humour. We buy the lives of the poor to fuel our immortality. But we still pay. Every breath I take costs a peasant their soul. It is inefficient. It is tedious."

She closed her hand into a fist.

Thaddeus gasped as the air left his lungs. He felt his ribs tightening, bending, not breaking, just… dissolving.

"But a Full-Source," Oraya continued, staring at the ceiling, "a witch who generates magic without Rot? That is not just a threat, Thaddeus. That is a battery. If I were to crack them open and drink the marrow… I would never have to pay a tax again."

She released her grip. Thaddeus collapsed, gasping, checking to make sure his sternum was still solid.

"Find them," Oraya commanded.

"Matriarch?"

"Tear Sector 4 apart. Burn the shops. Boil the canals. I want the source of this energy. If it is a person, bring them to me alive. If it is an object, bring it to me unbroken."

"But… Sector 4 is the slums. There are thousands of unregistered witches there. How will we know which one it is?"

Oraya glided toward the dissolved door. She paused, looking back over her shoulder.

"Look for the anomaly, Thaddeus. The universe hates debt. If someone isn't paying their share of the misery, it means the misery is accumulating somewhere else." She gestured to the window, overlooking the smog-choked city below. "Look for the chaos. Look for the thing that doesn't fit."

She vanished into the hallway shadows.

Thaddeus sat alone in his office, clutching his bleeding finger. He looked at the ledger, at the impossible zero.

He picked up his quill and began to draft a warrant. He didn't know who this witch was, but he almost pitied them. The Coven didn't just want them dead. They wanted them liquidated.

He signed the death warrant with a flourish, and as he did, his other pinky nail turned black and fell off.

Plip.

"I really need a raise," Thaddeus sighed.