The Herald of the Million Souls is a hooded skull-figure woken from a statue in the citadel of the Knights of the Scar of the Sun, claiming 1,200,000 souls from the Empire.
| Type | Character |
| Chronicle | AV |
| Spanish entry | El Heraldo del Millón de Almas |
History
The first ceremonial chamber holds a six-meter loyalty mosaic and a new statue: a knight kneeling before a hooded figure with a huge bag on a pole. The test: two merchants of one voyage, one successful; how should the one with the full bag act? The Seekers saw that the statue’s bag equals all the mosaic’s bags together, voted for no scene, set the three orbs at its feet, and woke it.
Its skull firmed as it spoke: “One million two hundred thousand souls… we shall collect from the Empire. Our votes bring mutilation, as in Zenobia. You will be my horsemen of the apocalypse.” It said the master was an unwilling vampire who founded a horde to escape the chambers of destruction, and that the Empire meant to guard the place is corrupt, then demanded an oath as the orbs circled it. Each saw another face: a three-meter, six-winged figure with a black sword; an enemy being evaded; for the inquisitor, a lord. Some saw Malachite; it is not fully distinct from RAJ-750, bearer of the master’s skull. It was the sum of their fears, the mercenary power of a trading place: souls are the price of corruption.
It found the invisible companion (“swear loyalty to me and they live”). Behind the statue it had engraved the conscience-devouring eagle; when light was cast, it read the rune of death (“We were born first; you die first too”) and one companion fell for good. The hollow statue-golem struck “with the weight of the world’s souls” while a dragonfly-drone filmed. Felled, it left stones and gold.
The number
1,200,000 is exactly the souls sheltered in the gem-ark of Eilidh, kept in Vala Cristalis. The towers repeat it, as do the technomage threatening the second bomb and the archmage who calls his college’s fall “the ominous figure”: cycle after cycle that million is fought over, always in transit, never at peace, and its keeper will not free it, his only way to regain strength. Cosmarca is the thread’s other end.