Soul Count

“Theliel, honey. Could you go get me a coffee with a splash of lamb’s blood and some butterfly wings sprinkled over the top? And make it quick, would you.” Theliel rushed across the busy, circular lobby to the coffee stand.

The barista behind the stand had a horse head that day, along with jaguar feet and six lobster hands. The barista didn’t care for Theliel because she ordered something different every day, making his job more difficult. He liked having the orders ready before customers got their coffee. Thelial found this hypocritical because the barista changed form every day. “What will it be today, Theliel?” The barista said will a low toned grown.

“Black coffee with lamb’s blood and butterfly wings.”

The barista did another slow grown. “No one else wants butterfly wings. Why do you have to be so weird?” Theliel took offense to this because she considered herself the most normal person in the building. She held her tongue, worried that the barista would take longer if she argued. The barista reached under the counter to grab the butterfly wings and set them aside as he started brewing the coffee. Theliel tapped her foot impatiently as she watched the barista use the most inefficient method to make the coffee, doing everything one step at a time instead of using his abundance of lobster claws to multitask. When the brew was done, Theliel swiped the coffee and threw the fairy dust on the counter as she walked away. “No tip?” The barista said to Theliel’s back. “Okay,” he said with one final groan.

Theliel made it back to the conference room and handed the brew to her boss, Asteraoth. She was lounging in her chair, feet propped up on the conference table, chatting with the other higher-ups in the room. Asteraoth held out her hand and a pocket watch made of flame appeared. “Eighty-eight seconds. You seem to go slower every day.” The higher-ups got a laugh listening to Asteraoth make fun of Theliel and she could do nothing to defend herself. “Anyways, back on topic.”

A loud gust of wind caught the attention of everyone in the room. They went outside to the lobby and braced for the black cloud of smoke that flooded the space. As the cloud settled, dark figures with ghostly opaque skin and dusty, full-body armor approached. One of the figures pulled out a worn, tattered scroll that looked to be aging for centuries and read it monotone like. “The current overseers of the earth have failed their duty in supplying the Dark Ones with the agreed-upon human soul count. Failure to meet that agreed count by the end of the century will result in the eradication of your kind. That is all.” Then the smoke receded, and the Dark Ones vanished.

A silent panic overcame everyone in the crowded room. “We haven’t met the count,” one voice said. “How?”

“Who’s in charge of human souls,” Another voice asked.

“Where’s Grim?”

“Yeah, where is he?”

“His office is this way, come on.”

The crowd moved across the room in unison, making their way to Grim’s office. “He’s barred the door!” the crowd was slamming against the doorway in an attempt to break it down, but it would not budge.

“Out of my way!” Asteraoth demanded, clearing a path to the door with Theliel following her. When Asteraoth made it to the door, she held out her hand and her eyes flared up in flames. The door caught fire and burned to ash in seconds. Asteraoth took one more sip of her coffee and walked through the door. Grim was nothing but bones. His perfectly un-decayed pieces rattled as Asteroth approached him. Asteraoth grabbed Grim’s baggy, dark robes but Grim shed his clothing and fled in the corner of the room. “What have you been doing,” Asteraoth asked, tossing the robes aside.

“Nothing,” Grim pleaded. “Just my job as instructed.”

“Have you forgotten your job,” Asteraoth asked. “Allow me to remind you. When humans are close to death, their files come here to be marked by you. Once you have marked them, their body dies, and their soul is retrieved so it can be sent to the Dark Ones. If you don’t mark enough souls, the humans survive, and we fall behind on our soul count. How behind are we?”

“They didn’t say,” Theliel told Asteraoth.

“What have you been doing with the files we send you?” Asteraoth asked Grim as she walked to a closet on the opposite end of the room.

“Wait!” Grim’s outburst nearly caused him to fall apart. “Don’t open that door.” Asteraoth flung open the closet to reveal millions upon millions of files stacked high and far as the eye could see. The closet was designed to get bigger to fit the number of items placed inside. There were literal mountains of filing cabinets inside.

“You’ve been hoarding files,” Asteraoth realized. “Keeping humans alive past their time. No wonder our soul count has fallen behind.”

Grim slipped past Asteraoth into the closet to block her path. “Hear me out,” Grim grabbed a small stack of files and read the contents “Jimmy is going to school for music. He wants to become the next Beethoven Allie owns a vegetable garden and has three little kitties. Karen wants to buy a boat and sail the world. These people don’t deserve to die this early. They deserve to live their lives and grow old. The Dark Ones can take their souls after they’ve achieved their dreams.”

“And how long will that take?” Asteraoth asked

“Does it matter?” Grim argued.

“Theliel, judging by the number of files in here, how far behind would you say we are?”

“Over a hundred million.” Silence overtook the room. “Can we not just mark the files now?”

“The files can only be marked during a period of danger. If the human is not in danger, marking the file does nothing.”

“Oh, thank us,” Grim said, scratching his head.

“Enough from you, take him to purgatory. We need to isolate him while we figure this out.” Two members of the crowd grabbed the rattling bones and took Grim away. “We’re going to need an expert to fix this mess.”

“You can’t possibly suggest one of them,” Theliel said.

“We don’t have a choice. They’re the only ones who know how to handle these situations.”

“We could try to fix it ourselves.”

“And risk running out of time? Theliel, we only have a century.”

“Fine, which horsemen do you want?”

“Bring me War. I find him the most tolerable.”

Theliel struggled to cut back through the crowd and make her way to the stairs. She was officially outside her element. The first floor was home to the lower-class workers. Theliel hoped to find War without getting anyone else’s attention. Just on the next floor, she ran into a half-drowned employee struggling to operate a printer. He was half drowned in the sense that half his face, cut right down the middle, was soaking wet to the point that it was soggy. “Excuse me, sir,” Theliel whispered. “I was wondering if you could point me to War’s office.”

The half-drowned turned around and let out a gurgled scream without warning. “War!” Thelial’s face grew red of embarrassment, but no one else seemed surprised by the outburst. One man stood from his cubicle with a grin and a spring in his step.

“Is someone calling for me?” He had a thick, plummy voice that went with his entitled, stiff, posture. His hair was a mess of red curls while his body was built like a bulldozer. He brushed cubicles as he walked by them with his nose up. He dressed ready for battle with a sword on his waist. “And what do the first-floor flunks require help with this time?”

Theliel hoped to spend as little time as possible with such a pretentious asshole. “Asteraoth will fill you in.”