Soulless / Madeline Brown (ePub)

Eris Rayne knows why she is on this train. She has a Soul. With it, she will kill a monster. Connected with the brain, Souls are driven by fear, protecting their living vessels with their paranormal power. Eris's Soul surfaced, erupted from her body, when she was attacked in the street outside her home, by a hound with black skin. The same could be said for Kai Hughes, the vacant stranger standing across the compartment. He, too, would be dead, if not for such an uncanny coincidence. Her country has not partaken in a war for a century, but the fact remains: those with Souls make vicious weapons.

The train is headed beyond the towering Wall, into the capital city. The military centre has long disintegrated, but a handful of individuals linger in its halls. They will help her, that is, help her to kill the beast. She understands why Hughes is here. He is fierce, bent on revenge, and his Soul summoned flames at his feet. He need not fight, if he could simply burn. Her, on the other hand, she sat with a book in her lap, smelling of a musty building and paperwork. She struggles for control of her Soul, which lashes out uncontrollably. And yet she has chosen to offer up her body to strangers. Eris cannot shake the feeling that, somehow, she has been manipulated.

When the reluctant companions arrive in Central, they discover the city in a state of emergency, and soldiers waiting on the platform; an eldritch creature has entered with them. The pair are escorted, where they are to witness the rampaging giant, cornered and cut to pieces. The beast is reduced to a heap of dust but, Eris finds herself unable to speak. She is unsure how to explain, to the leader of the soldiers, a woman called General, that the stricken pile before her was not the hound she remembered so vividly. The only trait they have in common-their glassy yellow eyes.

More creatures, named the Soulless, find their way through the Wall, called from somewhere-someone-on the outside. They unearth fears and tensions among the soldiers, as well as deeper secrets, buried beneath a century. Eris will find her, the creator of the Soulless, and destroy her.

SOULLESS enters multiple perspectives, using the lens of fantasy to explore ideas of mental health, fear, identity, and both the love and brutality necessary to survive.