Short (long?) story excerpt/brief outline I’m working on.

In Sir Alistair Gavell’s Book of Told and Untold Secrets, souls are described as being, and I quote, ‘…the patterns to unique quiddities which have been left behind—lost, as it were, to the infinite and unkind hands of indomitable time.  They are pieces of existence, the unfinished pearls lacking a shell to rest in, the dark remains from fallen light.  They are, in essence, the undulating memory of someone or something which used to be, but is no more, and never shall be again.’

Souls are not so mysterious–nor enchanting–as Sir Alistair makes them out to be.  They are far more rugged, more jagged and torn along the edges.  Some are beautiful, though all have their scars; while some can be quite ugly and nasty. 

Others…others are almost terrifying.

There are light souls, as light as a feather and the color of melted gold and silver.

There are heavy souls, heavy as a millstone and the color of crimson blood and spilled ink.

There are in-between souls, which don’t know whether to be light or heavy, gold or red, silver or black.  We call them Neithers, because they are neither one nor the other, neither light nor dark.  These are the most common, the most ordinary.  

But there is also a certain breed of soul which is so white it burns your eyes and weighs nearly nothing in your palm, shimmering with all the light of eternity, and there is its opposite: a soul that is so black it consumes all light and weighs more than a handful of mountains.  These are the most rare.  They are also the most dangerous.           

I would know.  I have spent the past seven centuries searching for them.

Dark sunlight filtered through the many-layered stained glass windows, casting wraithlike, three-dimensional shapes throughout the hall.  Colorful memories lost to the fading depths of time, roaming the empty marble halls day after day, night after night, a mirror image of what used to be.  Of what was no more.

Living people—brilliant people, scintillating people—used to mix with these shimmering reflections, laughing together and crossing worlds side by side, but now the ghosts had the great hallway all to themselves.  Phantoms of a long-lost age.  Four hundred years ago we knew their names.  We knew their intricacies and their complexities.  We knew their voices, their laughter, their tangled labyrinth of emotion.  We knew their souls.

But it was just us now.

Just Vell and I.

The last two left.

Long had we lived in this castle of untamed memories, centuries upon centuries.  The first three hundred years had been good.  Beautiful.  Until it was not.  Now we had spent more time alone than we had together, with the rest of them.  For four hundred years it had been just us and the colorful shadows roaming the endless halls of a place once called Home by thousands.

Four hundred years is a long time.  Long enough to forget.

Long enough to begin to drown in the emptiness of it all.

It took us that long.  Four centuries.  Four centuries of standing together in that eternal hallway, empty, to realize something.  Four centuries of searching for lost souls that could never be recovered, never be found.  It took us that long to realize…

It was time we sought our own souls.