On the Nature of the Soul

“But isn’t that what killing is, anyway?” Sedrana asked, as she slid a filet knife into the salmon’s gut. “Taking a soul? Eating it? Adding it to yours?”

Rabbit’s long ears twitched back, in somewhat discomforted thought. In a reading nook a short distance from the kitchen counter, she leaned forward in her chair. “I think that’s more of a philosophy than an agreed upon truth. But… go on.”

“This fish’s soul is gone.” She scooped out strings of organ tissue with gentle fingers, beholding them for a moment in her cupped hand before they went in the offal pot. “We took it. And it adds to us. Keeps us going.”

“Do you mean to say the body is the soul?”

“No!” the heavier butcher knife thwacked through the spinal cord, just behind the gills. The salmon jerked, but its eyes remained lifeless. Thin reddish liquid saturated the waxed wood counter. Sedrana, her hands coated in it, was unbothered. “That’s stupid. The soul is the difference between a dead fish and a live one. We take it when we kill it, not when we eat it.” The head and glassy eyes went into the pot. She wiped her hands on her ratty canvas apron, and brushed loose hair out of her face, tying it back more securely. “But it’s always something tangible, killing. Maybe not when you don’t notice it, like stepping on a bug. But the decision, or the - the -” she made a gesture with her hands, shaking clawed fingers in the air. “The action. It puts something in you. There’s a change, a feeling. Haven’t you felt that?”

Rabbit’s ears pinned back and she shifted uncomfortably, finally setting her book down. She had been researching the dragonborn, trying to understand the nature of it, of them, of the… soul eating. And she reflected, hesitantly, back on the few times she had taken a life. The dull thud of her blood, the sharpness in her mind. The sense of stepping outside herself to become, for a moment (or perhaps forever), something else. Capable of more. “I… maybe.”

“I think it’s natural. It’s intrinsic.” She opened the fish, its red insides raw and vulnerable, the spine scores in the flesh. “We’re just… I dunno. The only ones who can digest dragons. If that makes sense.”

“…It’s a theory.” Rabbit rested her hand on the open book, running soft fingers over the delicately inked visage of a dragon rampant. “Of course, dragons can do it too.”

“Right, the only mortals who can digest dragons.” Sedrana dug the bones out carefully with the thin knife, littering the wet counter with slender, near-transparent spikes. “Or whatever. Non-dragons.”

“But we are dragons.”

“See, that’s what I don’t get.” She shifted focus from the fish, motioning from herself to Rabbit with the knife. “Do we look like dragons? Do we act like them?”

A scene brought itself to Rabbit’s mind - glinting teeth, shining blood on dark flesh, and Sedrana’s shape dominant atop a mountainous, ruined corpse.

“We’re mortal,” Sedrana continued, collecting the bones into the bucket. “‘Dragon soul’, sure, I don’t know. Do we have to be them just because we can speak their language? And kill them?” She gazed into the bucket of bones, fins, and guts. “This is going to make a great stock.”

A moment of silence passed between them. A few bars of birdsong fluttered in from the open bottle-glass windows, mellow and lilting.

Sedrana raised her eyes, worried, to Rabbit, who had her hands crossed in her lap and her eyes on the book, though she was not reading it.

“Do you wish we were normal?” she said.

Rabbit had a very familiar sort of pause that Sedrana saw, same head tilt and all, whenever she was thinking faster than she could hear her own thoughts. “I… don’t spend much time wishing for unreachable things. But I don’t see much good in this.”

“Well, we’re protecting people. Who else if not us? And - and the thu’um!” she saw Rabbit’s ears perk slightly, and she smiled, bolstered. “All that power, just in our voices. Gods, you’ve seen what it can do - this whole war, just because -” she broke off with a giddy laugh.

“The thu’um is interesting,” Rabbit said, half listening. “It’s - it’s a language, and it’s magic. It’s truth.”

“It’s a bit like music, isn’t it?” Seeing Rabbit relax slightly, Sedrana was satisfied, and shot a look over at the blood-strewn counter. “Hey, come help me chop vegetables for this. You’re eating it too, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Rabbit sighed, standing and straightening her skirts. “You’re just better at cleaning the fish.”