Logan remembered. He remembered the moment of his death. Since his arrival in this plane of darkness, he had avoided the thing he was most curious about. Why was he here? How did he get here?
He knew the answer but was unwilling to delve deeper, to unravel his incomplete memories.
It was at the moment right before losing consciousness that he saw it. The massive crack in his living room. A crack, like one, would have been able to see on a piece of glass, covering reality. And it was within that crack that he saw the darkness, overflowing.
Within this darkness, there were stars of grey, dull lights in the emptiness of the dark. The crack instantly grew to the size of an entire building and crushed it with the power of the dark realm.
The memory ended abruptly. Logan found what he was looking for. The souls he had been absorbing were not souls without life or empty husks, nor were souls of the randomly deceased.
'They were the souls of those trapped within the building during the incident. Our souls were never supposed to be here, and were in the process of being purified, before being absorbed and becoming part of the dark.'
Logan felt sick in his imaginary stomach. It is one thing to assume the souls you have been devouring were real people, it is another to confirm they were people you may have talked to before all this happened.
He could not wallow in self-pity, however, as he knows that every second more and more souls will be devoured by the place he found himself trapped in, wasting the power he could have potentially used to get out of here.
Praying for forgiveness from the two souls and suppressing his guilt, he analyzed the way the memory is spread from within the pure soul. Suddenly, Logan had an epiphany. He had always been trying to be versatile in his usage of his body yet only now did he understand that he still had much to learn.
Trying to take the piece of memory inside of his soul, a small thread of dark grey, then using his Soulforce to compress it. By pouring in his Soulforce he would be able to knot the thread into a small ball of dark inside his soul. Replicating the small soul on the side, he weaved his Soulforce into the smallest threads he could create.
Ignoring a dull ache growing inside of his mind, he let the threads surround the memory, before creating a small, vicious circle of Soulforce, constantly draining his reserves until he felt, to his surprise, that his mind was about to snap into two, then with a final push, released his hold over his Soulforce and watched as the memory propelled the circle, now coloured grey from the memory contained within the dark ball, out of his soul, enlarging around him as it disappeared into the dark.
'It seems that it is impossible to put in any more Soulforce, I can only hope the distance the wave creates is enough to attract other souls back to me.'
After resting for about 15 minutes Logan gathered his Soul once more and sent out another wave of Soulforce. He reasoned that if his theory was correct, every single one of the souls gathered in this space should belong to the same building he lived in.
He knew about 150 people living in that apartment and with the event happening after work hours on a weekday, most of them would have been at home. It would be unrealistic to go after all of them and would take up months of his time if the souls would have even survived up until that point.
Even though he felt guilty about his greed, and he knows he is being hypocritical, nothing could stop Logan from taking the souls for himself, even if he will have no consciousness left. It would be better to suit his own needs, rather than feeding the husks of souls to this endless abyss.
Fortunately, it seemed Logan was at least partially correct in his theory, as he could feel the twin souls reach out to him. He also had to begrudgingly admit that these purified souls were much quicker in moving through this space than he was, even though he was much more massive in size, with dozens of times more Soulforce than both of them.
He could only attribute this to his memories. The dark seemed much more amicable to empty husks, ready for devouring, thought Logan drearily.
'I have taken the first step,' Logan reasoned absentmindedly, 'the only thing I can do now is to wait and see as to whether or not my theory is on the ball.'
Practising the stability and flexibility of his Soulforce, Logan waited. He knew that most of the remaining souls should have experienced the feeling of the crack and that if his theory was correct, he could get out of here sooner than he had imagined.
Yes, indeed. Just when he was about to give up on his theory, a small, pure white soul entered his awareness, going at a pace that Logan could never have matched up to. It kept growing closer and closer, stopping right before the massive ball of grey that was Logan.
It seemed it was content on staying this way, until its inevitable demise by the dark. Exhilarated, Logan quickly latched on to the soul and dragged it into his body, absorbing it in a matter of minutes. Regaining confidence in his theory, he once again started to send out waves of memory with greater vigour as compared to before.
The work of a man's hands shall be rewarded to him. After waiting a couple more minutes, Logan detected more souls coming into his Soulsense domain. Suppressing his greed, he gave a small apology and asked for forgiveness from them, before devouring them completely.