The gateway opened a foot above the ground, which had been the plan from the start. Standing on the other side was a very well dressed man in his 40’s and a younger man with vacant eyes. The vacant man was in a purple robe with yellow markings and symbols covering the whole front. The well dressed man carried a burlap sack over his shoulder with something terribly heavy in it.

Carefully looking around through the gateway, he saw nothing immediately dangerous. He stepped through and landed lightly in the springy kudzu. The man in the robe followed. The vacant man was to keep the gateway open during this task but the well dressed man still wasn’t sure how much he trusted a magic user. Even trusting one under control was asking a bit much of him. That’s why he always made sure the magic user came with him, even when they weren't needed in the field. Insurance that they would, in fact, get home.

But, he’d been given his task by Conti himself and he would do the job as requested. Right now, several others were in different locations around the globe carrying out similar tasks. He supposed he had lucked out. Many of those locations were nearly inhospitable. He’d been given this location in North America. Even the summer humidity wasn't as bad as a desert or the arctic tundra. He shook his head. He was becoming distracted. He refocused.

He carefully set down the sack and reached inside with both hands. He held up a copper ball with intricate designs, runes, and text pressed into the surface. On top there was a large circular area with a hand print in it. He’d heard this had come from the Everywhen and the idea of holding onto this thing for long nearly gave him a screaming fit. He looked at his vacant eyed companion.

“You! Come here and place your hand on this orb.”

The man nodded but his eyes never moved. He placed his hand on the orb as instructed and then stood there waiting. Good. The last thing he needed was initiative.

“All right,” he continued, “Listen to my instructions before you do anything. I need you to feed mana into the sphere until the mana pump inside activates. DO NOT try to feed the pump itself or you’ll be devoured. Do you understand these instructions?”

The vacant man nodded again. The well dressed man hated these things, these magic users, but if they left them able to think they could rebel.

He waited and the only sign that anything was happening at first was the faint purple glow around the man’s hand that seemed to get sucked into the hand print. After a moment the lines, runes, and text on the sphere started to glow. The well dressed man watched as they started to move around the surface of their own accord. They seemed to move away from his own hands.

He realized they hadn’t told him when to drop the thing or when to set it down or what to do exactly after this. He felt something shift on the surface of the sphere. He panicked as he felt his hands sink slightly into the copper as if two more hand prints had formed. He felt a pulse. He felt something inside him get tugged toward the sphere.

Fear shot through him. The magic user was doing something wrong and he needed to stop him. The well dressed man knew that a knock to the head would drop him like anyone else so he let go of the sphere to do so.

He tried to let go of the sphere. His hands wouldn’t separate. He tried jerking his hands and the sphere back from the vacant man, to try and break the flow of mana somehow but in terror he realized they were both attached.

He felt the tug again. This time it was stronger and he could feel a tearing inside him. Something important had begun to come loose. It hurt so badly he nearly fell. If it happened again the something was going to get pulled into the copper sphere and he was afraid he knew what it was. He dragged the magic user around in an awkward dance trying to shake himself loose. He hadn’t even noticed their gateway had closed. The well dressed man started screaming.

When the pull came again, he felt himself ripped free from his senses and pulled. He felt himself intertwined with the magic user as they fell into a blinding nothing that never seemed to end. They spiraled each other until finally they were one screaming thing, infinitely long, and fed to the Soul Engine.

It would feed on its own now. It knew to feed on its own, now that it was awake. It felt mana surrounding it. Different mana than it was used to. More diluted, but food none the less. It began to feed itself slowly as it and two empty husks tumbled into a crater shape in the ground filled with leafy kudzu. It would take time to grow and make its body, but it would. It would feed, and grow, and then find more souls. . .