Soulbinder: Episode 1
Source: collected/026-soulbinder-episode-1.mp3
SHA-256: acb2c5cb654b8f84f63f60410da61a9a33e6044c617d57411ede86654ff5f912
Model: scribe_v2 | Transcribed: 2026-10-10T18:13:30.664871+00:00
Machine transcript — uncorrected. Speaker labels are local to this recording and do not identify people.

[00:00:00.920] Speaker 1: Before we started this week's episode, I just wanted to give a special thanks to Katie at Summation Fifty-Two for her poems and inspiration, which I integrated into this episode. You can see more of her poems at summationfiftytwo.com. Thanks, Katie

[00:00:15.500] Speaker 1: [haunting music]

[00:01:05.720] Speaker 1: . Soul Binder. Strength from within. Learning trust from where you've been. A truth that is withstanding. A reminder that inner peace becomes built in. Trust in where you are going. Belief. Belief in wha-- I can't, I can't do this anymore, Marcus.

[00:01:41.300] Speaker 1: I'm not strong enough. It should be you finishing these poems [paper rustles]. One. Die tomorrow [wind blows]. Stand. Estus Darkwater watched the snow blow into the lean-to. Her breath billowed in great white clouds of steam, a cold so deep that she couldn't feel her face,

[00:02:16.520] Speaker 1: her hands. A numbing cold. A gentle death awaited her, and soon, if she did not rise now. Stand up. Her limbs rattled, then fell limp again. She couldn't. She couldn't rise. An unbearable weight had pressed her to the ground, a weight that dominated every waking moment. It would be so easy to lay down. It would be so easy to just stop.

[00:02:51.920] Speaker 1: Just stop doing anything. But the voice in her head demanded more, always demanding more. Get up. Die tomorrow. Die tomorrow. Why couldn't she die today? It would be so nice to die today. No. The inner voice offered no explanation, no comfort, only an implacable will.

[00:03:26.900] Speaker 1: That will was all that drove her now. She was not human. A human had depth, richness. Estus had only rage left. And when she blinked open her eyes, she found that rage was enough. Perhaps she could die tomorrow instead. And with the weight of a mountain on her shoulders, she began to rise from the floor. She raged against that weight, gritted her teeth against the pain. No. No tears.

[00:04:02.520] Speaker 1: Not again. She'd cried so often that it wasn't even meaningful anymore. It wasn't cathartic. It was just something that happened when you bore a mountain on your back. Estus got a hand under her. She stared at the rotting floor of the lean-to. The canvas flapped noisily in the wind next to her, taunting her. Her arm shook from the effort, even though the weight wasn't physical. There was nothing wrong with her body. She stared at the floor six inches from her face, smelled the musty

[00:04:37.660] Speaker 1: boards, the clean, icy scent of fresh snow outside. Her face was a mask of rage. She fed that rage, the only animating force she had. You don't have to do the whole day now. You don't have to do anything except stand. You just have to stand, damn it. And with a heroic effort, she stood. A shadow of a shadow of a woman, but still,

[00:05:12.940] Speaker 1: she stood. That first burden of the day was always the heaviest. From there, she would have the willpower to start a campfire and cook herself a simple breakfast. There was no denying that a hot meal had a magic of its own. Maybe just enough magic to get her through this day. After this day would be another, though, and then another. The days would keep coming. How could she bear that? She couldn't. No. Stop thinking. Thinking is death.

[00:05:48.660] Speaker 1: You can't die. Not yet. Estus let out another billowing cloud of breath and parted the tattered canvas to look out of her shelter at the towering pine forest [wind blows]. Thin, dark pillars that spread into a tangle of bony branches set against the lightning morning sky. Snow had piled in around the little shelter. It would take any other person an hour to clear enough space on the ground for

[00:06:23.692] Speaker 1: a proper fire. Estis, however, was blessed with power. Power enough not to be bothered with many of life's little unpleasantries. But, she remarked, not enough power to actually change the events that truly mattered. Dark thoughts simmered under the surface. She shoved them back into the depths, lest she get dragged down with them again. There was work to be done. Estis felt around in the cloth pouch at her right hip. There were little pockets sewn into the pouch to organize the glyphs she carried.

[00:06:59.192] Speaker 1: Most of the pockets were empty. Some part of her mind screamed at her for that. She shoved that down too. She ran her hands across the glyph in the far left pocket. It had the right shape, but was there really only one left? She pulled out the heat glyph, a small, red, glass-like object about the size of a marble. It was cut like a gemstone, but warped and twisted, with the tip like a flame frozen in time. Estis tore the canvas drape off the wall with her left hand and held the heat

[00:07:34.012] Speaker 1: glyph out in front of her with the right hand. She thrust her right hand into the hill of snow and connected her mind to it. She imagined the boundaries of the snow hill, imagined it as a single object. Then she bound the heat glyph to it. The glyph flashed out of existence with a little red pulse, and at the same time, the snow hill simply washed away in a wave of steam. She had to shield her eyes from the thick, hot cloud. When the steam dissipated, there was a wide circle of moist, dead grass where the snow hill had been.

[00:08:09.032] Speaker 1: She stumbled out of her makeshift shelter onto the still warm ground, though the chill was already creeping back in. Perhaps she should have bound the heat to her clothes instead. Or, she realized, saved the last heat glyph to actually start a fire. Stupid. Impulsive. When had she grown so short-sighted? I suppose I'll have to do it the old-fashioned way after all. So she spent the next hour gathering fallen limbs in the early dawn

[00:08:43.972] Speaker 1: for a fire. The pine forest was deathly still, making her own movements seem loud and intrusive by comparison. Hopefully, the sound would not attract danger. She kicked herself again for her low stock of glyphs. At last, she assembled a small clutch of sticks into a nest for the fire. Estis rifled with clumsy, frozen hands through her pack of dwindling supplies for the flint and steel to start the fire. It wasn't in there. She ignored the

[00:09:18.952] Speaker 1: little spark of panic in her chest, so she checked the side pockets. Empty. Except for a single glyph. A composite glyph of some kind. A reflective gray rectangle with little streaks of orange running through it like veins of fire. She rubbed it between her numbed forefinger and thumb and closed her eyes, trying to discern what it had been. Steel. Steel and something else. She couldn't be sure, though. It looked familiar somehow, even though she couldn't remember making it.

[00:09:54.092] Speaker 1: She put it in her coat pocket to investigate later. Assuming there would be a later. Estis was shaking from the cold. This was such a stupid way to die. That implacable voice in the back of her mind told her that this was exactly how most people died. From mundane causes. An illness. An infection. A bad heart. Exposure. So she stumbled back out of the lean-to and into the pine forest. She leaned against a tree. Her shivering was actually

[00:10:29.012] Speaker 1: beginning to slow. The cold was almost beginning to feel warm now. She was sure that this was not a good sign. Give me your heat. And now she was talking to a tree. Not a good sign either. Estis placed one hand on the massive pine tree and looked up. How did anything survive this far north? This thing was alive. Somehow. It must have some heat.

[00:11:04.152] Speaker 1: She traced the branches with her eyes, looked at where it intermingled with its neighbors to form a skeletal canopy. She imagined the tree's roots where they must penetrate the frozen ground beneath her. The tree was cold, just like everything else, but not quite as cold as everything else. When she was sure she held the entire tree in her mind, she focused on what little warmth it had, and she took it, drawing all of it to a single point in her right hand. There was a tiny flash of red

[00:11:38.992] Speaker 1: light, and the tree creaked and groaned as the heat was removed. Estis looked down at her right hand. A tiny red heat glyph lay on her palm. It was barely larger than a grain of sand. So small it might blow away. She closed her numbed hand tightly around it and trudged to the next tree and repeated the same process. Finding the edges of the tree, holding the object in her mind, then consciously drawing only the heat from it. Ten minutes later, her mind swam with the

[00:12:13.788] Speaker 1: effort. Her thoughts were getting stupid, sluggish, her movements dreamlike. When she looked down at her hand, she had a dozen or so red specks of heat glyphs. She moved step by frigid step back to the circle of grass and the pile of sticks there. Estis held the tiny heat glyphs to her chest, knowing that she would be unable to bind more if she dropped them. There was a popping sound in the forest directly behind her, not unlike the sound of the trees giving their life's heat to her. But it was far

[00:12:48.708] Speaker 1: off. She kept walking, then knelt before the sticks to start her fire. Then she heard the sound again, much closer. And was that the sound of snow crunching? Estis turned to peer into the gloomy dawn forest. The evergreen canopy blocked out most of the fledgling sunlight. There was barely any color to the world. Something long and dark moved through the brush. Some of her training kicked back in, and she turned back to the sticks. Fire. She

[00:13:23.688] Speaker 1: needed fire. She bound the dozen or so heat glyphs up into a single large one. There was that same flash of weak red light as some of the energy was lost in the transfer. She isolated a single fat stick at the bottom of the pile and held it in her mind, calming herself, forcing herself to ignore the sounds of an approaching creature behind her. Then she applied all of the heat glyph to her stick. The stick burst into flame immediately. Within a few seconds, the rest of the clutch had caught. The radiating heat of the

[00:13:58.548] Speaker 1: small fire turned some switch in her brain back on. There was something right behind her. She rose and turned to face it, but saw nothing in the gloom. She tried to slow her speeding heart with deliberate breaths. Estis reached towards the pouch on her right hip without taking her eyes off the spot where she'd last seen movement, some thirty feet away. She felt that composite rectangular glyph again. It was complicated, expertly made. Steel and intellect. Yes,

[00:14:33.588] Speaker 1: that was an intellect glyph woven in there. Interesting. Had she created that? If so, it had been a more thoughtful, more prepared version of her. Perhaps she had made it before. Before There was a creaking, popping sound like the sound of rapidly spreading ice. A nearby tree she'd tapped for heat began to go inert. A chalk-white circle formed on the trunk where she'd touched it. It rapidly expanded to wrap around the trunk and sped up and down the bark like a

[00:15:08.348] Speaker 1: growing cancer. The transition to a chalk-white material happened quickly once it began. A moment later, the earthy gray-brown of the bark and the soft green of the pine needles had all turned a sterile matte white. The needles no longer moved in the weak breeze. The great white statue of a tree smashed to the ground and shattered into countless tiny pieces, spraying shards of inert material in every direction. Estis shielded her eyes from the shrapnel. As soon as she lowered her arms, the next tree went inert, and then

[00:15:43.268] Speaker 1: the next, and then the next. Estis dove into the tiny wooden lean-to, realizing only once she'd looked up from the ground that it would do her absolutely no good if a tree fell on it. The forest around her groaned, snapped, and shattered with rage. She closed her eyes and clutched her life with a pure, primal longing for survival. The storm of noise around her finally stopped and she looked up from the dirt where she lay. Estis got up and looked around the camp's surroundings. The

[00:16:18.168] Speaker 1: mounds of snow concealed the destruction on the forest floor. Only the ugly white bases of the inert trees remained, sticking up out of the snow like ragged snapped-off bones. Obviously, the trees had gone unstable after she'd removed the heat from them. They hadn't just lost their heat. They'd lost their ability to hold heat as well. It had punched a tiny hole in their identity, their place in reality. That hole had caused them to go unstable. And when things became

[00:16:53.148] Speaker 1: unstable, they eventually went inert. Binding was such a terrific art. You could mix and combine the very rules of the universe under the watchful eye of the Judge. With binding, you could cheat reality for a while. How long depended on what you were doing, on what scale, and, obviously, how skilled the cheater was. Big overt cheats in the form of dangerously impossible bindings called paradoxes were caught immediately. More mundane

[00:17:28.048] Speaker 1: bindings might last years. Eventually, though, the Judge caught every cheat, no matter how small. When that happened, it behaved like the Judge of a sporting game. It threw out everyone and everything involved, not by removing them from reality, but by turning them into the most mundane and useless of materials, by turning them inert. There was the sound of something moving again, far in the distance. The creature that had stalked her had been scared off. For now.

[00:18:04.248] Speaker 1: Which was good. Though, if she could still hear it at this distance, it must have been big. Very big. Which was not good. It might simply come back when she was sleeping. Yes, that's what she needed, another pursuer. It seemed unfair that she could be so relentlessly pursued while failing so miserably in her own quest. She looked to the south, close to the direction where the beast had fled, and was increasingly certain that she was being followed. And they were getting closer.

[00:18:39.464] Speaker 1: Perhaps these two would run into each other. That would solve a number of problems. Speaking of which The piles of burning sticks had been scattered across the campsite by the falling trees, their life-giving fire now little more than smoke and dying embers. Estis sighed and put her face in her hands. Problems come in threes, she remembered her mother saying. It seemed that her problems came by the dozen. She lowered her shivering arms and found that the brush

[00:19:14.484] Speaker 1: with death had given her a weak but growing will to live. She did have a little more left in her, enough to bind the heat from a dozen more trees, far away from camp this time. Enough to live another day. Enough, perhaps, to die tomorrow. It took her the better part of an hour to gather enough heat to light another fire. Between the warmth of movement and the rising sun, Estis was merely miserable instead

[00:19:49.424] Speaker 1: of endangered now. Hopefully she wouldn't lose any toes to frostbite. She dropped another piece of firewood onto the growing bonfire. It would need to be big, very big. Once her brain had warmed enough to reason, she'd found a fallen rotten tree and bound the moisture out of it. The result was an easy-to-move, highly flammable wood. It would burn away long before it had time to go inert. While the fire grew, she pulled the map out of her pack. Seventeen red X's marked every failure so far,

[00:20:24.404] Speaker 1: every dead end. Each one had turned up no useful information, or worse, false trails that had wasted weeks of her time. Whoever it was she was following, if she was following them, they had known how not to leave a trail. Instead of evidence, now she only followed a vague intuition. They were going north. She was sure of that. Estis examined the map for the ten thousandth time. Trouble was, she was running out of north. In

[00:20:59.464] Speaker 1: all the Empire, only one town had the misfortune of being farther north than she was now. A town called Dire. She rolled up the map and put it away. Such a fitting name. If there were no clues in Dire, what would she do? Estis stared into the raging fire, now a towering inferno with flames reaching as high as her shoulders. It was not even a candle next to her own rage. She knew what she would do if the murderer's trail finally

[00:21:34.444] Speaker 1: went cold. Estis reached a hand into the bonfire, just before it could truly burn her. She bound the heat, then the smoke, then the light. Without the light, the forest fell back into gloom. She dropped the light and smoke glyphs back into her pouch, but kept the large heat glyph in her hand. She stared at the unnatural fire. A fire with no light, no heat, no smoke. A strange flickering image in the dark.

[00:22:09.544] Speaker 1: As she watched, it turned chalk white, then collapsed into a plume of dust at her feet, leaving her standing alone in the dark forest. Estis Darkwater stared at the heat glyph still in her open hand. If the trail didn't go cold, if she found the person or people she pursued, she knew what she would do then, too. Her hands shook, but not from the cold. She would give them this fire. That,

[00:22:44.444] Speaker 1: and much, much

[00:22:46.864] Speaker 1: more.