Sunday Short: Spiritwalker - The Body Taken
- Faiz Faisal
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
This is Part 2 of the Spiritwalker Short Story Series. Read Part 1 Here.
She learned quickly that panic was useless without lungs.
Floating above the city, she searched for herself the way a lost soul might search for a grave. Hospitals first. Police stations. Alleys. Anywhere a body might end up when something went wrong. Nothing. Her spirit felt thinner each time she drifted too far from where she last slept, like a thread stretching, fraying.
It took three nights before she sensed it.
Her body.
It was faint, distant—but undeniably hers. She followed the pull to an abandoned warehouse at the edge of town, the kind of place no one noticed until something terrible happened there. Through the cracked roof, she slipped inside.
That was when she saw them.
Four men. Faces hidden beneath hoodies. Her body lay strapped to a metal gurney, unmoving, breathing shallowly. Tubes ran from her arms into humming machines. Symbols were carved into the concrete floor—old symbols, wrong symbols—drawn with chalk, ash, and something darker.
Blood.
Rage surged through her. She slammed into a nearby chair, knocking it over. One of the men jumped.
“What was that?” he muttered.
She smiled. This was the fun part.
She possessed the lights, flickering them violently. Then the machines, making them shriek with sudden alarms. One man ran screaming when a shadow detached itself from the wall and grabbed his ankle—her doing, twisting the darkness around him until he collapsed sobbing.
But as she tormented them, she overheard their panicked shouts.
“Calm down!” one yelled. “She’s still breathing—we can’t lose her!”
Lose her?
They weren’t here to kill her.
She drifted closer, listening.
“She’s perfect,” another whispered. “A body that empties itself every night. No resistance. No memory.”
Her spirit froze.
They weren’t kidnappers.
They were collectors.
She watched in horror as one of them flipped through a notebook filled with dates, names, photos of other bodies—people whose souls had been “away” when they were taken. People who never came back.
“They call it hollow harvesting,” a man said reverently. “Bodies without souls don’t fight back when you… prepare them.”
Prepare them for what?
She didn’t want the answer—but she got it anyway.
A freezer door opened.
Inside were organs.
Fresh.
Labeled.
Her body wasn’t meant to be rescued.
It was meant to be used.
Fury swallowed her fear. She possessed one of the men fully this time, forcing his hands to claw at his own face, his screams echoing through the warehouse. The others fled, tripping over each other in their terror.
But when she tried to return to her body—
she couldn’t.
Something had changed.
The pull was weaker now. Sluggish. As if her body no longer recognized her.
She hovered above herself, screaming without sound as a machine injected something dark into her veins.
Sedation.
Or something worse.
As dawn crept through the broken windows, she felt herself fading, dragged away by the rising light.
Before she vanished, she heard one last thing:
“Don’t worry,” a man whispered to her unconscious body.
“She won’t be coming back for long.”
And for the first time since she learned to spiritwalk, she wondered—
What happens when the body learns to live without its soul?
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