Brandon Sanderson - Edgedancer 

THE hungry sky rumbled above, dark and angry. Lift knew that feeling. Too much time between meals, and looking to eat whatever it could find, never mind the cost.

The storm hadn’t fully arrived yet, but from the distant lightning, it seemed that this new storm didn’t have a stormwall. Its onset wouldn’t be a sudden, majestic event, but instead a creeping advance. It loomed like a thug in an alley, knife out, waiting for prey to wander past.

Lift stepped up to the mouth of the alleyway beside the orphanage, then crept in, passing between shanties that looked far too flimsy to survive highstorms. Even if the city had been built to absolutely minimize winds, there was just so much junk in here. A particularly vigorous sneeze could leave half the people in the alley homeless.

They realized it too, as almost everyone here had gone to the storm bunkers. She did catch the odd face peeking suspiciously between rags draped on windows, anticipationspren growing up from the floor beside them like red streamers. They were people too stubborn, or perhaps too crazy, to be bothered. She didn’t completely blame them. The government giving sudden, random orders and expecting everyone to hop? That was the sort of thing she usually ignored.

Except they should have seen the sky, heard the thunder. A flash of red lightning lit her surroundings. Today, these people should have listened.

She inched farther into the alleyway, entering a place of undefined shadows. With the clouds overhead—and everyone having taken their spheres away—the place was nearly impenetrable. So silent, the only sound that of the sky. Storms, was the old man actually in here? Maybe he was safe in a bunker somewhere. That scream from earlier could have been something unrelated, right?

No, she thought. No, it wasn’t. She felt another chill run through her. Well, even if the old man was here, how would she find his body?

“Mistress,” Wyndle whispered. “Oh, I don’t like this place, mistress. Something’s wrong.”

Everything was wrong; it had been since Darkness had first stalked her. Lift continued on, past shadows that were probably laundry draped along strings between shanties. They looked like twisted, broken bodies in the gloom. Another flash of lightning from the approaching storm didn’t help; the red light it cast made the walls and shanties seem painted with blood.

How long was this alleyway? She was relieved when, at last, she stumbled over something on the ground. She reached down, feeling at a clothed arm. A body.

I will remember you, Lift thought, leaning over and squinting, trying to make out the old man’s shape.

“Mistress…” Wyndle whimpered. She felt him wrap around her leg and tighten there, like a child clinging to his mother.

What was that? She listened as the silence of the alley gave way to a clicking, scraping sound. It encircled her. And for the first time she noticed that the figure she was poking at didn’t seem to be wrapped in a shiqua. The cloth on the arm was too stiff, too thick.

Mother, Lift thought, terrified. What is happening?

Lightning flashed, granting her a glimpse of the corpse. A woman’s face stared upward with sightless eyes. A black and white uniform, painted crimson by the lightning and covered in some kind of silky substance.

Lift gasped and jumped backward, bumping into something behind her—another body. She spun, and the skittering, clicking sounds grew agitated. The next flash of lightning was bright enough for her to make out a body pressed against the wall of the alleyway, tied to part of a shanty, the head rolling to the side. She knew him, just as she knew the woman on the ground.

Darkness’s two minions, Lift thought. They’re dead.

“I heard an interesting idea once, while traveling in a land you will never visit.”

Lift froze. It was the old man’s voice.

“There are a group of people who believe that each day, when they sleep, they die,” the old man continued. “They believe that consciousness doesn’t continue—that if it is interrupted, a new soul is born when the body awakes.”

Storms, storms, STORMS, Lift thought, spinning around. The walls seemed to be moving, shifting, sliding like they were covered in oil. She tried shying away from the corpses, but … she’d lost where they were. Was that the direction she’d come from, or did that lead deeper into this nightmare of an alleyway?

“This philosophy,” the old man’s voice said, “certainly has its problems, at least to an outside observer. What of memory, and continuity of culture, family, society? Well, the Omnithi teach that each are things you inherit in the morning from the previous soul that inhabited your body. Certain brain structures imprint memories, to help you live your single day of life as best you can.”

“What are you?” Lift whispered, looking around frantically, trying to make sense of the darkness.

“What I find most interesting about these people is how they continue to exist at all,” he said. “One would assume chaos would follow if each human sincerely believed that they had only one day to live. I wonder often what it says about you that these people with such dramatic beliefs live lives that are—basically—the same as the rest of you.”

There, Lift thought, picking him out in the shadows. The shape of a man, though as lightning lit him she could see that he wasn’t all there. Chunks were missing from his flesh. His right shoulder ended in a stump, and storms, he was naked, with strange holes in his stomach and thighs. Even one of his eyes was missing. There was no blood though, and in a quick succession of flashes she picked up something climbing his legs. Cremlings.

That was the skittering sound. Thousands upon thousands of cremlings coated the walls, each the size of a finger. Little beasts of chitin and legs clicking away and making that awful buzz.

“The thing about this philosophy is how difficult it is to disprove,” the old man said. “How do you know that you are the same you as yesterday? You would never know if a new soul came to inhabit your body, so long as it had the same memories. But then … if it acts the same, and thinks it is you, why would it matter? What is it to be you, little Radiant?”

In the flashes of lightning—they were growing more common—she watched one of the cremlings crawl across his face, a bulbous protrusion hanging off its back. The thing crawled into the eye hole, and she realized that bulbous part was an eye. Other cremlings swarmed up and began filling in holes, forming the missing arm. Each had a portion on the back that resembled skin. It presented this outward, using its legs to interlock with the many others holding together on the inside of the body.

“To me,” he said, “this is all no more than idle theory, as unlike you I do not sleep. At least, not all of me at once.”

“What are you?” Lift said.

“Just another refugee.”

Lift backed away. She didn’t care anymore about going back in the direction she had come—so long as she got away from this thing.

“You needn’t fear me,” the old man said. “Your war is my war, and has been for millennia. Ancient Radiants named me friend and ally before everything went wrong. What wonderful days those were, before the Last Desolation. Days of … honor. Now gone, long gone.”

“You killed these two people!” Lift hissed.

“In defense of myself.” He chuckled. “I suppose that is a lie. They were not capable of killing me, so I can’t plead self-defense, any more than a soldier could plead it in murdering a child. But they did ask, in not so many words, for a contest—and I gave it to them.”