The Awakening of a Soul Reaper

Chapter 24. Scythe

The next day on their way to school, they can see Tyler making his way towards them. Once he joins them, he asks Clarise to excuse his dad for his behavior the previous day. Willow and James are stomped they didn’t know that she went to see him, but it’s something that she should have done, she still blames herself partially for what happened, if she just waited a couple of seconds then all of this could have been averted. Or what if she told her friends the truth?

There is so many things that she feels guilty of and it feels to her that Tyler is carrying all of the punishment. After a couple of minutes, she breaks the silence and asks him if he managed to talk to his dad about the training.

“No after you left it was just one big argument that led to a big outburst, my step mom even though we don’t really get along actually stood up for me yesterday.” He replies with a big frown on his face. “Emrys didn’t by any change tell you what can cause me change, I’m not like a werewolf or something like that, that can change if its full moon?” he asks.

The other three look at each other but all three nods their heads, Clarise pulls her lip to the one side and replies, “No sorry unfortunately he didn’t say anything, but that is a good question. I think this afternoon after school I will go to him and ask him, if that is alright with you” she asks with her head bowed and looking through her eyebrows.

He first walked between James and Willow but he moved and pushed Willow Slightly to James’s side to come and walk next to her, he still doesn’t behave like he used to, in the past he would take her hand and they would walk like that but now his hands are tucked away in his pants pockets.

He nods at her, and replies softly, “if you don’t mind, I would really appreciate it, in fact any information you can gather.”

For Clarise the school day passes very slowly but at the end of the day when she arrives home, she quickly puts on some comfortable clothes, a dark hoody with a pair of black jeans and a backpack where she puts a couple of water bottles in. She starts to make her way to Old Town making sure she puts the hoody over her head.

When she reached the last block, she goes and stand with her back against the wall and checks out her surrounding she doesn’t want to make the same mistake again. After waiting for about fifteen minutes, she hastened makes her way to the fence and goes rough it.

Once in old town se tales a quick jog but as soon as she is around the first corner, she starts to increase the phase, she starts to inject power into her steps pushes herself forward quickly. Once she reaches the hole in the fence, she slides through feet first pushing herself of the ground with her power. She is starting to get used to it and controls her flow of essence carefully, well practice makes perfect she thought to herself on the other side, quite impressed with herself. Once inside the zoo she decides she wants to mix it up a bit, at the first fork in the path she takes a left where she usually takes a right and she moves quickly down the path, on the left side of there are big gages and, on the right, there are smaller enclosures with a drop of about six feet. Everything is overgrown and plants and trees have grown through most of the zoo.

At one point she can see the enclosure with the mountain she climbed and she jumps and infuses her power, it almost looks like she is doing par coir jumping and sliding through the vegetation and enclosures.

She reached the wall that leads into forest in no time and she doesn’t hesitate she jumps up on top of it and pushes herself with force into the forest. She flies through the air with big leaps, only touching the ground here and there. She reaches Emrys’s home in couple of mere minutes, she takes a seat before doing anything else moving like that really took its toll on her stamina.

A shadow falls over her and as she opens her eyes, she can see Emrys standing in front of her, I must say I’m impressed with the way you moved through the forest. He takes a seat next to her, “Did you came for some training?” She takes out her phone to have a look at the time, “Yea, but also some information if you don’t mind?”

He leans forward with his elbows resting on his legs, “And what kind of information are you looking for?”

“Information about draconian, is there something that triggers their transformation or does it come forth willingly?”

He stands up and show her to enter the keep with his hand and arm extended. “Wait for me here in the courtyard we can talk while we practice, I want to see what you have learned thus far” he says disappearing into the building.

She stands there and wait for him, taking a sip of ice-cold water. He comes out a couple of minutes later with some sort of padded Armour on, “well you never know what might strike you” he laughs.

While he drawing a big square on the dirt with a staff, he starts to talk to her, “Well it seems, that you are more interested in your friends' powers than your own, or do you think you have it all figured out?”

“N-no, sir, the thing is, he will only be able to come for training next week since his dad have punished him for not saying where he was, and we just wanted to make sure that he doesn’t shifts again” she tries to explain.

He stops and rubs his chin “Oh, I see. Well, he will shift if the beast inside of him thinks that he is endanger but else he is fine, you don’t have to worry” he smiles and divides the square into three sections with the middle part bigger than the other two. He tells her to stand inside the one block. In the furthest block from her he rolls an old barrel and makes it stand upright. I want you to conjure your scythe. Within a couple of seconds, she holds her scythe in her hand. He walks over to her and looks at it, “I guess it would do but next time what I want you to do is to imagine a small blade at the top and one small one at the back of it” he points to where he wants her to make changes “you see sometimes you need to stab something and other times you would want to reverse hook something, its good practice to enhance your weapon so it can for full all of the duties that you want.” He looks at her grip on the weapon, “I also want you to increase the size of where you grip your weapon by a little bit so it fits better into your hands also at the bottom, I want you to imagine knob, we call it a pommel, it’s just to ensure that your hand does not slide of, of the weapon while wielding it. Now try again.” He orders her.

The scythe in her hand disappears, she imagines a new weapon customizing it, it appears in her hands just like she imagined it with all of the changes that Emrys suggested.

“Remember you are using the elements of fire and earth infused with your essence to conjure this weapon” he looks at the weapon once more, “it will do for now.”

He stands beside her and points over to the barrel that he moved into the block “Now what I want you to do is to hit that barrel, just hit it not destroy it without leaving your block.” She looks at him with a confused look on her face “but how it’s too far for me to hit it from where I’m standing.”

“The soul essence that runs through you are part of you but it’s not linked or forced on you, if you drop this weapon on the ground, it will still be infused with your essence even though you are not holding it in your hands. Concentrate your essence to your blade.” He takes his hand and pulls down her scythe so that the new point on tip of the scythe is facing towards the barrel, “Now concentrate on this tip let your essence run to this tip and store it here, when you are ready release it. It will shoot like a bolt out of a bow and strike the barrel, but remember only use a little bit, we just want you to hit it over not destroy it.

She tries it but he stops her again, as the tip of the scythe started to shimmer with her power, “not so much only inject a small amount of essence into the tip. She tries to do it again, as soon as she feels a small amount of essence escaping her, she releases it, it shoots like a bullet from the scythe the force, forcing the tip of it to lift up. She misses the barrel by a foot or so hitting the dirt behind it and let it shoot up in the air like a fountain.

Emrys stands back and looks at her, he could see that she only used a little bit of essence but the amount she used was still too much, she would have obliterated the barrel with that small amount and taken into consideration the amount of essence she used when she travelled to him. “Well done, however you are still using too much essence you will need to cut it in half. Remember you don’t always want to destroy something, sometimes you just want to use enough power to nock something or someone back without hurting or destroying them. You have a very high and pure concentrate of essence so you only need to use a little bit.

He forces her to try again and again, after a couple of times she manage to hit the barrel on the side and she makes it spin around. “Practice makes perfect” he explains smiling at her.

“Why do we use a scythe as a weapon” she asks him while taking a sip of water.

“Well, you see in the old days, people thought that reapers where the callers of death or even that they themselves brought on the death of loved ones. The word reap means to gather crops on a field by cutting them down. Reapers do gather souls but just like with crops that goes to a silo where they need to be reapers go and send the souls to where they need to be. Let me guess you send souls to their place or rest or turmoil using your hand infused with essence?” he asks her.

“Yes why?” she replies.

“While you are still training, that is the correct way to do it to ensure that you don’t crack the core, however when you are more confident you will start to learn to use your scythe to do it, it will be faster and you won’t stand a chance to contaminate your own essence or that of core you want to send.” He says while he takes a seat on an old tree trunk that he use to cut firewood on.

“What do you mean contaminate my essence” she says with a worried voice.

“Well, you see the manifestation of a spirit or ghost whatever you want to call it is its essence driven by its essence core, so what you see is pure essence. When a person in their live was good or bad, that influences their essence, and it can cause essence to be foul and contaminated with bad thinks. When you put your essence in there, that essence entwines with your essence and when you take out your hand its not to say that you only bring back your own essence. There is always a possibility that you can bring with a part of the essence that you just touched. Then also there is the Vanus if you would fight them with a weapon like a sward you will need to get much closer to them which is much riskier, if you would fight them with a pike or a spear that is mid-range you will not be able to do so much damage and it would be hard to break the core, so the next logical thing to do is to use a scythe. A scythe is the best mid-range weapon that there is for you to use”.

She sits there and she talks to him about her dad that he was also a reaper and then she tells him about the pendant and that first encounter, she asks him “Why do you think that when I grabbed Ignus the first time that I turned him into a scythe why not a broom or a sward or something else; did I know in my subconscious that I was a reaper?” she asks him.

“Well, you are born from a reaper, so I guess it is possible; I have learned in all these hundreds of years that nothing in this world is impossible”